Esther Immélé-Perez, a current student at e-artsup, aimed to explore Blender in a two-week workshop, delving into 3D software for the first time as primarily a 2D artist. In this article, she breaks down her process and shares her learnings from the project.
Esther Immélé-Perez is a current students at e-artsup, Strasbourg. The goal of Esther's latest project was to discover and learn as many aspects of Blender as possible in a two-week workshop. For most of the students in her class, this was their first contact with any 3D software, as they were primarily 2D artists. Therefore, they had to learn all about navigating the interface, while trying their hand at modeling, texturing, and animating. In this article, Esther breaks down her process for the project and shares her learnings along the way.
We were tasked to create a Room for a character of our choice, with a room template to allow all of our creations to be linked. I chose Jinx in her Arcane version, for her fun personality, colour palette made of bright neons, as well as the many items present in the show that I would include in the build and experiment with.
I made a few quick sketches on paper to prepare the layout of the room and decide on what I would model. The items I chose were iconic of the show and the character: the chomper grenade, the bunny plushie, the Jinx chair, the smoke bomb, etc.
Since the assignment was to create a bedroom, I decided to use the design of her Rocket Launcher for the bed’s headboard. This way, I could include the iconic shark in the build in a more subtle way. I also modeled an intricate stained glass window that would reference the Art Nouveau style present in Arcane.
I started out with the easiest shapes to learn the basics of modeling like the mugs, the round mirrors and the smoke bomb, before moving one to more complicated builds such as the bunny and the gramophone. For the wrought iron in the chair and the window, I used Bezier Curves that I solidified afterwards.
Once every item was modeled, it was time to start furnishing the base of the room. I first modified the walls with brick-shaped edges, carved the hole for the window, and then added the biggest pieces to check how the layout worked in 3D.
When I was satisfied, I added smaller pieces and iconic items, before finally giving some “Jinx” chaos to the room with a mess of papers, crayons and hand grenades scattered everywhere.
The next step was to get some colour in the scene by creating some materials for the items. I took the textures from Polyhaven and created appropriate shaders, adding emission to the parts that needed to glow.
With some tweaking in the alpha channels, I inlaid graffitis on the walls and created “God Rays” coming from the window.
The final step was lighting, for which I added lights coming from the neons attached in the room, and a soft turquoise ambiance from the sun filtering through the window.
The high contrast and flashy colours really perfected the Jinx-style that I was going for.
The last touch I added was a hand animated smoke effect coming from the smoke bomb, done using GreasePencil. It was the first time I tried hand-animated effects, and I absolutely loved the flow of it!
This exercise was extremely interesting and rewarding, allowing us to learn a lot about the base functionalities of Blender while creating a full Artwork.
In the end, we combined all of our rooms in a turning animation that showcased everyone's final result in a single video.
Check out more of Esther's work and reach out to her via her Rookies profile here.