After a tutorial or two, I'm quite comfortable using the program, I can insert shapes, assemble them to create a man, extrude surfaces to make them peak like mountains. As well as altering material properties, rendering smoother shapes and panning the camera during animation.
However, there's so much more than just that. There are a number of tutorials online: youtube and wikipedia, and these have proved quite successful, in the least, the visuals are very pleasing. Unsurprisingly, it took attempt, after attempt, after attempt to get it right.
I really like applying this glass effect known as Rayfray. This has a number of variants available- reflect more, refract more, be more opaque, have a colour tint.
In the second picture here, I used similar settings but tweaked them to be more 'mirror' fied and hence, the more metallic look.
The next attempts actually dealt with animating fluids, which again, took even more attempts to get the water to fall in the right place, not go straight through the 'obstacles', but eventually they've turned out quite good! I altered the properties from the tutorial for some variety, be it the colours, the shapes, the amount of water etc.
Lastly, another tutorial has shown me the ways of the world, and I now can make waves. Again, aesthetically pleasing and the animation is actually quite fluid despite using lower render settings - I tried the higher quality settings which looked sublime, but in reality would have taken 25 hours or something to render! So naturally, I had to compromise.
When looking at all this, it's surprising that Blender is actually free. It's a decent program with support from external pieces of kit (e.g. YaFray renderer), plenty of help/tutorials on the forum and further afield, and the stuff it can kick out is mighty fine!
I'll post more when I've made more. There's something addictive to this 3D modelling malarky!
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