Start: the first step

#What this club is about

This year we don’t learn one program. We learn to see simple shapes in any object, to break the complex into simple parts and to assemble our own models from them — characters, vehicles, weapons, buildings, game props. Once this skill is sharp, moving from one 3D editor to another is easy: the buttons change, the thinking doesn’t.

Three rules hold the year together:

• The idea is yours. Everyone works on their own idea, not the same task for everybody. The difficulty adapts to your level; the topic doesn’t.
• Every block ends with an artifact. Not an exercise for its own sake, but a thing you can show: from your first colored object to a model in augmented reality on your phone.
• No experience needed. If you have already tried modeling, every block has a “challenge” for you. The ceiling is open, the entry barrier is low.

#What to install

• Blender — free 3D software that runs on an ordinary computer. We use Blender 5.2 LTS: download it from blender.org.
• A phone (iOS or Android) is only needed in block 8, when your own model appears “on the table” in AR.

#Exercise 1. See the shapes (no computer)

This is the most important exercise of the year, and it needs neither software nor electricity. Its point is to train the eye.

1. Look around the room, or take a few photos: a human face, a game character, a car, a building, a cup.
2. For each object, say out loud which primitives it is made of: box, sphere, cylinder, cone, torus, plane.
3. Next to the original, draw a simplified “skeleton” shape.

Start simple: a cup is a cylinder plus a torus (the handle). Finish with something harder: a character is a cylinder or box torso, cylinder limbs, a sphere head.

Afterwards try the trainer See the shape: it checks whether you see the same shapes the author had in mind. There’s more about it on the See the shape page.

#Exercise 2. A first blockout of your own idea

Take your own idea — whatever you want to learn to make: a character, a vehicle, a weapon, a building, a creature. Using primitives and transforms (Move, Rotate, Scale), put together a rough silhouette of that idea — a “3D sketch” of your year-long project. This is a blockout.

The question we’ll keep asking each other all year: “What shapes is this made of, and what is still missing?” Check the silhouette: if you stopped work right now, would your idea read at a single glance?

#How the year works

• Ten blocks go in order: interface → tools → color → references → topology → flagship project → rigging → export → AR → portfolio.
• Save intermediate versions as separate files (_step1.blend, _step2.blend). If you miss a session, you continue from a checkpoint instead of from zero.
• Every block has a checkpoint and a challenge. A challenge is a harder version of the same task for those who are faster — not a separate track.
• Every two or three sessions there is a short show-and-tell with feedback: what worked and one piece of advice. The word “bad” is not part of the feedback.
• 3D printing stays — but as a final flourish for the best projects, not the goal of every session.

#What’s next

The first block gives you a colored, finished object in one or two sessions. Time to begin.