100 Heads
For about 3 years I had been drawing little heads on doodle.zone. Eventually I decided that when I hit 100 heads, I was going to get a print made of all of them in a grid. Little did I know that this would turn into a months long odyssey to get a print made the way that I wanted it.
Hundreds of dollars wasted on some prints from bad vendors, weeks of trying to screen print this myself – and I still couldn’t get it right. For whatever reason, printing something at 18×18 on nice paper is a weirdly difficult thing to do. The print that I ended up making a frame for in these pictures is the best one I could muster by myself. There’s still some (minor) problems with it.
Update: Last week I decided to bite the bullet and just order a “fancy” giclée print from theprintspace. It was $60 for one print and shipped from the UK, but it’s perfect. Now I can stop thinking about it 😮💨
Dogburg
For a few months this summer I worked on this small city called Dogburg. It started with making a few pinball tables, and then slowly expanding outward from there.
This city always felt like the culmination of everything I had been working on for a while, but I had no idea where it was going. This was around the same time I was kind of over streaming every week to Twitch and really just ran out of steam.
Suzuki Carry 3D Print
This summer I realized that the Suzuki Carry kei truck I made years ago was blocky enough that it would probably work great 3D printed. So I went through the process of pulling it apart to optimize it for printing. This truck was one of the first things I made in Blender, so it took a long time to clean everything up.
Then I posted the truck to Printables and it took off – now over 3000 people have downloaded my little truck and I love it.
The coolest thing was seeing people take my truck and print their own versions of it. Some people even modified it to add a roof rack, or make a 6 wheel version. Amazing.
Restaurant
Ollie
Snowboard
2022 Recap
I got the idea to record a recap of everything I made in 2022 from the artist Sinix on YouTube. I liked how this recap turned out so much I did it again in 2023.
Resort
I spent a bunch of time working on a ski resort, with the idea that I could animate the Seagull guy snowboarding down it somewhere.
The full resort is far and away the biggest Blender project I ever tried to make and I’m still surprised it didn’t crash constantly.
Skatepark
Airport
The plan was to eventually animate this little luggage truck swerving and dodging stuff in this airport scene. I got pretty far along before hitting some technical snags that slowed everything down.
I do want to eventually figure out how the “correct” way to rig this truck to tilt up on two wheels like this. Seems like it should be possible!
Wasteland
Something I had a lot of fun figuring out on this was how to get those 2D smoke trails to work. I originally planned on using Blender’s Grease Pencil to do this, but it turns out they were limited in how they could behave (this might be changed soon?).
I ended up having to animate the dust separately, in 2D, and then bring in the clip as a plane that was rigged to the back of the car. Here’s what it looked like:
