So. Ten posts later. How did this actually go?
Let me start with the course itself. Patata School’s podcast-style teaching approach, where two people talk through the process together rather than one instructor delivering a clean structured lesson, is something I have mixed feelings about. It made me irrationally annoyed at times and I couldn’t fully explain why. Something about the pacing of it. That said, objectively it works. Especially in the earlier sessions, the lectures were genuinely detailed and thorough, and even coming in with only a basic knowledge of Blender I was able to follow along without constantly getting completely lost. The moments where I did get stuck were usually fixable with a quick search, which is about as much as you can ask for from a tutorial course.
What I’ll take away from Patata School specifically is the sheer density of useful things packed into each session. Shortcuts I didn’t know existed, workflows that made obvious sense once I saw them, features I’d walked past in the interface a hundred times without knowing what they did. That kind of practical knowledge is hard to pick up just from reading documentation or watching random YouTube videos. Having it delivered in context, at the moment you actually need it, makes it stick in a way it otherwise wouldn’t.
The later sessions were thinner. The compositing lecture in particular felt like it ran out of steam, covered less than I’d hoped, and caused more friction than it should have due to version differences between the tutorial and my Blender setup. But that’s one weak lecture out of seven, which isn’t a bad ratio.
Goals vs. Reality
The original goal, stated clearly back in blog post two, was to create a short animation of a custom character with facial animation and voice acting. Around ten seconds, nothing too cinematic, but something complete.
What I actually ended up with is a four second running animation of a character based on a provided reference, no facial animation, no voice acting.
Is that a gap? Yes. Am I embarrassed about it? Not really.
I said early on that the goal was optimistic, and it was. What I underestimated wasn’t the difficulty of any single part of the process so much as the cumulative time cost of learning something properly. Watching a tutorial is fast. Following along in real time, pausing, rewinding, googling the thing they glossed over, taking notes, applying it to a model that’s slightly different from the one in the video, fixing the things that broke because of that difference — that’s three or four times slower. Every session took longer than I expected, and by the time I got to compositing the scope had naturally narrowed down to something achievable rather than something ambitious.
That’s fine. The goal was always a rough target, not a contract.
What I Actually Got Out of This
More than I expected, honestly. I started this semester having never seriously touched 3D. I can now model a character, apply materials and cel shading, rig a humanoid figure, fix weight painting errors, set up a stage, create a looping background animation using the NLA editor, and put together a basic composite. That’s a real set of skills, not just theoretical familiarity. I could sit down tomorrow and do a similar project without needing to follow a tutorial step by step for most of it.
Facial animation is still on the list. It’s a big enough topic that squeezing it into these ten posts was never realistic, and I’d rather learn it properly than rush through it just to say I covered it. That’s a separate project for another time.
And the bigger picture hasn’t changed. The whole reason I started down this road was the idea that the framework I’ve been building for my master’s thesis — the one for analyzing morally complex characters — eventually deserves a practical output. A character built from the data. Something that embodies the patterns rather than just describing them. I’m closer to being able to do that now than I was at the start of the semester, which was the point all along.
See ya!
