For this project, I was reminded of a childhood memory of exchanging notes and small snacks with my desk buddy in elementary school, and I wanted to create a piece that would bring a bit of warmth and nostalgia.
When I was looking up 3D artwork for inspiration, I found a few pieces that had this cute cartoon-like style that I thought would fit really well with this concept.
I also noticed that warmth and lighting evoked a sense of nostalgia, so I wanted to try incorporating that into my piece as well.
For all the assets, I modeled just about everything in Blender, other than the origami crane, which I downloaded off of SketchFab. I had some experience with 3D modeling, but it took a bit of time to get back into familiarizing myself with the program and relearning how to handle materials and UV maps. Overall, the process of creating all the assets was actually quite fun, and relearning Blender was exciting.
I did at one point try to import everything into Unreal Engine to layout the desk and all the items in it, but it was pretty frustrating to work in Unreal because it was lagging a bit and my laptop was chugging quite a bit. Plus, at first, I didn't quite have a sense of what I wanted the color scheme to be, so doing everything in Blender was easier because I could handle UV unwrapping while also seeing the colors and materials together without it lagging too much. I also could not figure out how to do lighting in Unreal, and I found it much easier in Blender, so I decided to just do everything in Blender.
However, one struggle I had with Blender was rendering. At first I was using Cycles to render because I really liked how it rendered lighting, but after trying to render my animation overnight, I realized it really wasn't a feasible option because it took almost 6 hours to render 35 frames. So, I had to pivot to using Eevee, which rendered much faster, but also required changing a few materials and checking some boxes which took a bit of time to figure out. I'm not too satisfied with how the lighting looks in Eevee, but I can't really complain because it renders so much faster 😂