Third year. This is what I ended up with after three weeks in Blender, coming in with zero 3D experience.

I picked Tesla as the subject because the geometry felt interesting: clean surfaces, deliberate proportions, good lighting potential. The project was whatever you made of it; I wanted to see how far I could push the render in three weeks. What followed was a crash course in everything simultaneously: modeling, materials, lighting setup, camera angles, render settings, compositing. All new, all at once.

Devine had trained me to figure things out without being told exactly how, which turns out to be genuinely useful when the software is as deep as Blender. You can't learn it linearly, you start making things, hit a wall, figure out what you're missing, and keep going. That's mostly how this went.

One thing that helped more than I expected: I had done some physical sculpting when I was younger. There's something about thinking in three dimensions that was already familiar even if the software wasn't. Getting geometry to sit right, understanding how light wraps around a curved surface, some of that translated in a way that surprised me.

The result isn't perfect. But it's a real result, made in three weeks, with a tool I'd never touched before. I'll take it.

What I learned

3D design requires a different mental model than flat design. You're not making something look right in one view, you're building something that exists in space and then choosing how to observe it. The lighting, the camera, the materials, the geometry all interact in ways you have to discover through experimentation. It's a good discipline to have and one I'd like to go deeper on.