Beach Pavilion with Blender

Hi! I’ve relased a new course over on Futurly which covers how to create an architectural design pavilion with Blender. Super excited about this course as it shows some advanced workflows that are actually very accessible to beginners.

This as a fantastically quick overview of my process for designing and rendering a beach pavillion that shows every step of the process of using Blender for Architectural Design.

Blender's tools are a perfect mixture between the freedom to create in Maya with the inherent and very easy-to-use parametricism that can achieve results like Grasshopper, while preserving some of the precision that people may be used to from Rhino and Sketchup. This course focuses on how to work with subdivision modeling with Blender's modifiers so we create a small part that is then radially aligned with the rest of the parts. The setup is parametric and very flexible. The same process can be used to generate larger forms and massings like buildings and towers.

This course is aimed for beginners and intermediate users alike. Also, if you happen to be experienced with Maya or Rhino subdiv tools, you may be interested in this course to learn how to apply those techniques within Blender.

We also touch briefly upon Geometry Nodes, which is closer to Houdini than Grasshopper, but can do a lot of the work that can be done in Grasshopper also, but due to working with meshes instead of nurbs, Blender handles large geometry sets much better than Rhino.

If you may be used to working with Maya, Blender offers a very similar subdiv (3 mode) modeling experience, with the added benefit of much more inherent parametricism offered by Modifiers, Geometry Nodes, and some super amazing addons from the community. The same polygonal and topological modeling concepts apply to Blender, so you already know the basics!

Also, Blender Cycles offers V-Ray quality renders without additional software and more fees. Blender can be used to model fluid, organic and parametric forms like Zaha Hadid Architects and MAD architects, and it can be used to model voxelated shapes like BIG Architects. It is quite good at doing many things.