u/Formozo_BTRK

A little context before everything else. About 10 years ago I did a year-long 3D course where I learned a little bit of Maya, Zbrush and Unreal Engine, and I was absolutely fascinated by 3D, even dreaming to joining the industry. I didn't have access to the softwares outside of the course, so I learned that blender was free and decided to give it a try, as a way to practice at home at my old PC, and... I didn't like it one bit. The UI was confusing, I couldn't navigate the viewport and even do simple things that I had learned at maya, so I hated Blender at first (I think it was around the time of 2.7, before the UI revamp), but I still did the original Donut tutorial and finished it (I might still have the original render saved somewhere).

However, after finishing the course I stopped learning 3D and move on to other things. I still loved to see BTS footage of digital art and game developing, but wasn't trying myself, until last month where out of a sudden I decided to try again, not as a professional, but just as a hobby.

So here I am now, finally completing the 5.0 tutorial. I was satisfied with the final results, although I wish I could improve some things. First, my notebook only have a Nvidia MX250, so using Cycles was out of question (I tried to do one render as a test, but it was a 3 hour estimate, so I gave up and went with Eevee instead), and it was very slow to experiment with lighting, having faced multiple crashes, so I decided to warp it up as it is, even without shadows on the sprinkles or better bounce lighting.

I already started Grant Abbit's series, and have some ideas of scenes of my own that I plan to attempt in the next weeks. It has been pretty fun so far, and I hope I don't give up this time. What do you guys recommend as next steps?

What a journey that was! I bought this games in january after a sale, and has been playing one after another in those 5 months and a half.

Before Mass Effect, my only contact with Bioware games was with KOTOR, and while I love that game, I was very eager to see how they would handle an original universe, and I was not disappointed. The world building was what immediately grabbed my attention, but it was the characters that made me fall in love with the trilogy, so much so that I literally faced a dilemma after finishing ME2 that made me create a previous post in this sub (thanks for all the answers and help btw).

ME3 in particular was very close to being my favorite of them, since I loved the more urgent and serious approach from the start. I just wish the side missions had a better structure, with more meaningful content like ME2. I didn't even dislike the ending, which I don't know if it was a matter of playing the trilogy in such a short period, not having the build up of years of hype on my back, or expecting a worse ending than what I got. I mean, you can clearly see that it was rushed, and I would have liked a little more substance to some of the characters post ending scenes, but it was nothing that hurted the experience, personally.

I plan on watching the results of different choices, since I don't want to do a second playthrough right away (this games are quite time consuming for my schedule lol), but it is honestly impressive how Bioware manage to branch the story to a lot of different outcomes. Just seeing quick shorts on youtube showed me a lot of content that I didn't get to experience.

To conclude, I do plan on playing Andromeda down the line, but will give the franchise a rest for now. Still, I will definitely miss my crew and the legend of Commander Shepard. Keelah Se'lai!