January Goal: Repurposing Mistakes that have no Undo Button

I’ve always been a little afraid of the Blender 3D modeling software. My early attempts at figuring out how to use it yielded masses of self-replicating windows. But the software has evolved into something a tiny bit more intuitive. It’s actually possible to turn out something reasonable in under a month. That was the goal I set myself at the start of this year: make a gingerbread boy and rig him to bring into a game engine. Which I did. But the result was not quite the AAA quality I imagined.

He was just awful enough to be awfully cute, so instead of trashing him I used him in another learning project I had going for January: Learning to make animated stories and launching a Next Dimension Tales YouTube Channel.

That probably wins the impossibly unrealistic New Year’s goal category. And yet, I’ve managed to create Both the channel (with help of other Nara’s Nook members: Shannan Albright, Siobhan Muir, and Dorena Bree) and some small video stories. While I still have a long way to go learning both Blender and animated Storytelling, I made a start and met some goals. That’s not a bad way to close out the first month of the year.