Hi everyone, I’m MrDeskj from Italy.
I wanted to take a moment to share my Blender journey, which started from scratch with Grant’s Udemy course “Complete Blender Creator: 3D Modelling (Compatible with 4.3)”.
Unfortunately, I don’t have much free time because of my full-time job, so I had to take it slowly between lectures.
I downloaded Blender on March 21, 2025, and started right away with the very first lecture.
On April 5, 2025, I moved on to the Modular Dungeon lecture.
Then came the Low Poly Dino Scene on April 10, 2025.
After that, the UV Mapping lecture on April 16, 2025.
Now, my main goal when learning Blender was to create my own Lara Croft model and make renders with her. I’ve been a huge Tomb Raider fan since childhood
So from this point, I paused the course because my stubborn self decided I already had all the basics I needed to start my own project (not really, but I was dying to try 
).
On April 18, 2025, based on what I’d learned so far, I drew a sketch and blocked out some basic topology with a diffuse map (painted in Photoshop). This is all I have left from that attempt.
The result was atrocious… for obvious reasons. So I took a break and tried again on May 1, 2025.
Over the following months, I worked really hard on her, especially on the face, which was a nightmare. I wanted her to feel 100% mine, so I modeled everything and created all the maps from scratch, learning by willpower, persistence and pure luck.
I finally considered her finished on September 2, 2025.
At that point, I realized I had no idea how to animate her.
So I took a deep breath and went back to finish the remaining lectures of the course. On September 12, 2025, I created the armature for Mr. Blob Man to understand the basics.
After a couple of YouTube tutorials on meta-rigs, I finally managed to make her fully rigged and animated on September 28, 2025.
Since my favorite Tomb Raider game is TR2 (1997), I wanted to pay homage to it by creating my first full scene.
After some tries and a lot of luck, I published my first render on September 30, 2025.
Then I created my second scene, again inspired by the Venice levels from TR2, published on October 3, 2025.
And finally, just yesterday (November 3, 2025), I published my third scene, this time depicting the Rome level from Tomb Raider Chronicles (2000).
This is just the beginning and even though I’ve learned so much already, there’s still a long road ahead; my Blender bucket list is still huge and my desire to improve grows every day.
And all of this is just to say thank you deeply, because your course is what started it all and made a long-time dream come true.
I literally learned Blender from scratch through your guidance, and I’m truly grateful to have landed in such good hands.
Thank you to Grant and to everyone and their passion for making all of this possible.
Francesco
I wanted to commend you on your freestyling with the floor of the dungeon section - and then the rest happened! 
Great work! Hope to see more of you - and how you do it - in the future.
I love the chunky grid look on the dungeon tiles too by the way, it looks like a tabletop game that was clever!
