I’ve learned to do a little with Blender in the past, but it’s easy to forget. (The other side is that being an infrequent user it’s always different from previous times I’ve used it.) I decided to make a jack o’ lantern for Halloween. Happy Halloween!
I’m reasonably happy with how it turned out. I enjoy sculpting in Blender, even if I don’t do it very much. Trying to learn all the really hardcore model stuff like maps and textures is too much for what I generally want to do with it, which is one-off blends every now and again. For my book I did the main image in Blender, and I like how that turned out, but for the other thing I published I stuck to Inkscape and GIMP.
I also looked into better image formats, since PNG is getting long in the tooth. I recompressed all the images in this post to webp, and they cut the total size from over 20MiB to under 0.4MiB. Nice! (It helps that the draft images all have gray backgrounds. The final image above is over half of the sum of the image sizes.) I tried again with AVIF, which is supposed to be the new hotness, but the files were slightly larger. Not sure if that’s because of settings, because I tried to convert webp→avif (rather than from the original PNGs), or just the luck of the draw. I stuck with webp.
Work in progress pictures follow.
Have a merry Halloween! May your costume be rad and your candy sweet!