Lost Zeppelin concept art

[Jeff Zugale]

Story pitch hero image and concept art for a screenplay. Rough 3D model in Blender, painted over in Photoshop.

[kayness]

damn that looks good!
Is blender hard to use?

[Jeff Zugale]

Thanks! Well, all the 3D apps are complex and have idiosyncratic interfaces, so none of them are super-easy. Blender has gotten way easier to use, thankfully, since they deliberately tried to make the interface more Maya-like. One great thing about Blender (apart from it's free) is there is a huge series of video walk-thru tutorials that are really patient, "hand-holding" and step-by-step. There's links to them on the blender.org site.

Mind you I did this image back before I learned Maya and modo (and couldn't afford to buy them anyway). I think that if your budget is zero, you can't beat Blender for learning 3D from a very basic level.

Here's a couple shots of what the model render from Blender looked like. You can see I did a lot of paint over.

[kayness]

wow, that's super detailed! Did it take you long? Do you model by 'carving' it out, going from big simple shapes and refine it along the way?

I learned Maya a few years back but it's so...unintuitive, clunky and extremely difficult to use. I don't get why they have all the UI laid out and then you can also press space bar as a shortcut? I guess my brain overloaded and I was so put off by it
Though I heard that 3DSMax is a lot easier to use(???)

[drednorzt]

wow jeff thats killer! thanks for sharing your process to.