Kenneth Zapata is a Designer at Fat Pencil Studio
At Fat Pencil Studio, our workflow leans heavily on Trimble SketchUp—a tool that is typically used in architecture, urban design, woodworking, and other design practices. Over the years, we've pushed SketchUp to its limits and developed a long internal wishlist of features we wish it had...
Enter Blender: a powerful, open-source 3D software that's not only free but also backed by an incredibly active online community. What makes Blender compelling for us is its flexibility—it offers advanced features like dynamic lighting, animation tools, photorealistic renderings, character rigging, physics simulations, organic shapes, and node-based workflows that allow for a deeper level of control and automation. These are things SketchUp simply wasn't built to do.
Blender is also gaining traction in fields adjacent to architecture. Firms such as Forensic Architecture have demonstrated its potential in investigative storytelling and reconstruction, which aligns with some of the visual storytelling we strive for. To add, an independent film, Flow, recently won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature over bigger studios like Pixar; the film used Blender for it's primary storyboard, animations, texturizing, and rendering.
Process
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Torus with low amount of segments
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Subdivision Modifier
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Shade Smooth + Deforming the Shape
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Adding the Icing
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Manipulating the Icing Drip
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Round Sprinkles
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Long Sprinkles
To learn Blender, I turned to what’s become a rite of passage for beginners: the Blender Donut Tutorial by Andrew Price (a.k.a. Blender Guru). The tutorial is a 14-part YouTube series that covers the essentials—from modeling and lighting to rendering and camera animations. Note... there are plenty of other great tutorials that target specific tools and skills but this one in particular has a reputation for being fairly comprehensive while only scratching the surface of what the program can do.
It’s my third attempt, over the past couple of years at getting through the entire series. Each time, I've started with a good level of enthusiasm, but like many learning journeys, other things may have gotten in the way or putting some dedicated time became the main obstacle.
User Interface
Thoughts
Was it easy? Definitely not... even with my experience with other 3d programs. The learning curve is steep yet manageable, especially when juggling client work. I found myself constantly rewinding the same parts over and over, missing the command or fumbling through the menu. Like with many difficult things, starting may be the hardest part. But the donut—seemingly trivial at first—turned out to be a good medium for getting comfortable with Blender’s interface, hotkeys, and logic.
In the chart below, the views tapered down dramatically after the first few videos—but as I got stuck, I drifted down to the comments to get some help and commiserate. Surprisingly, as the videos got much more in-depth and difficult, the comments became increasingly more positive and encouraging!
Some of my colleagues already have a baseline knowledge of Blender, and have experimented with ways to enhance our 3d workflow. We still primarily use SketchUp to set up a base model since it's generally faster, but depending on the case or project, we can easily import our SketchUp file into Blender to combine the strengths of both tools.
In the end, Blender won’t replace SketchUp at Fat Pencil Studio. But it opens new doors—for storytelling, animation, experimentation, and pushing our visuals further than ever before.
