Hello everyone! Today marks the last day of the first week into my challenge. It was a great week for blending! In this post, I will give a short update on the progress, a couple of decisions I made, and how I applied these to the initial challenge structure.

As I mentioned in my initial plan, the focus for Week 1 was on sculpting. I started off by sculpting a basic human head, which proved to be a great warm-up exercise for the rest of the week. I finished the sculpt in two days as planned, but the post-processing; rendering, lighting, and making it ready/presentable took one extra day. And all of this happened while I was spending much more time than I initially intended to. To give some perspective, I spent 3.5 hours sculpting the head (which is the upper bound of what we initially decided on) and 4 more hours on making it camera ready!

Realizing that the time spent on post-processing was quite substantial, I decided to adjust my plan for the following days. Instead of working on a new sculpt every two days, I allocated an additional day to each project to ensure I had enough time to polish and present my work without feeling overwhelmed.

With that out of the way, let’s continue with what happened during the rest of the week. My second project was a realistic hand sculpture. It was a great experience as it was the first time I worked on a hand. This project took 4 hours sculpting and a whopping 5 hours on post-processing. It was frustrating, but also fun. It made me realize that having spent every day sculpting might not be the best, so I decided to remove the 7th day (and since we already added a day for presentation, I had to remove the third item from the first week).

After completing the hand sculpture, I had a newfound appreciation for the intricacies of human anatomy. Although I didn’t get to sculpt a creature from my imagination this week, I felt that the extra time spent on honing my skills and polishing my work was well worth it. The process of adjusting my plan allowed me to focus on quality over quantity and provided valuable insights for the upcoming weeks.

For the last days of the week, I decided to remove the “combining weeks’ products into one scene” and replaced it with preparing for the next week’s work by finding inspiration, guidelines, etc., along with closing the week by preparing a progress report, writing down what I learned and realized, and sharing these experiences with you all. This change not only helped me reflect on my progress but also allowed me to set the stage for the upcoming week with a clear mindset and renewed motivation. I am eager to dive into Week 2, which will focus on modeling and geometry nodes, and I look forward to sharing my progress with you in my next update.

I thought about editing the original first post, but then all these explanations will be fore nothing :), so instead I decided to keep the original post as it is and add this one as a follow-up. I will do the same for the following weeks, and have an updated final version at the end of the challenge.

Thank you all for following my Blender challenge journey so far. Your support and feedback have been invaluable, and I appreciate the community’s encouragement as I continue to grow and learn. Stay tuned for more updates, and happy blending!