Wizard’s workshop

I’ve been working on this a bit at a time since early July. It’s another course by Grant Abbitt – his Character Creator course gave us Steve the Orc, whose stand-up career hasn’t really taken off.

I’d done a dungeon build earlier in the year, with Grant, as part of the course that resulted in the two-legged mech, the dinosaur and Bob the Demon. We built walls and a floor then populated the dungeon with barrels, crates and torches. This project is a super-charged version.

The wizard’s workshop is an introduction to making scenes in Blender. Working with a 3D modelling system there is no issue of getting perspective wrong, but there is a need to get the proportions right in a scene. Your shelves and furniture, books, candles and other oddments need to be the correct size otherwise the scene won’t work.

I learned quite a few useful things during the course. Modelling glass and filling it with different coloured liquids, how to randomly assign colours to similar things (the books), and creating an atmosphere in a room using mist and moonlight.

Away from the bright colours of the final render there’s a lot of fiddly bits that will allow me to move stuff around if I get the urge. Each group of books is linked to a single ’empty’ so I can move and position several books at a time. It’s how I got the pile of books next to the cauldron. I could also animate flying books or potion bottles – it’s a wizard’s room, after all!

So finally I did an animation where the camera goes round in a circle while focussing on one item. This helps you to see more of the items in the scene.