Blender Game Boy(TM)

In my third year of university I had a project for which I had to construct a textured 3D object using Blender. Having never tried this kind of 3D modelling before, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Blender is a highly complex piece of software, and most of its functionality is hidden in multi-tiered menus. However, I took pains to learn some of the many keyboard shortcuts. This let me use Blender with a reasonable efficiency. Once I had been working with it for about a week, I felt comfortable enough to pick an object to model.

A real Game Boy (image credit: Wikipedia). Click to visit the Wikipedia page.

The object I picked was one close to my heart: a 1989 Nintendo Game Boy(TM). I chose this because it wasn’t too difficult so as to be an impossible first project, but not so easy as to not provide any challenge. There are quite a few little nuances to the design. I was able to find a blueprint-style image to work from. I placed this in the Blender scene and traced the rough shape using simple polygons. Then I used the polygon splitting tools to refine these shapes into a better approximation of how the Game Boy looks. It took a surprisingly long time to get to somewhere I was happy with, but it didn’t feel like time wasted. I really enjoyed this project because I did something I probably would not have done outside of coursework, and something I thought was quite difficult.

For a demonstration of the model, we used an XNA project to load and display it. You can access that here. If you don’t have XNA, the model is also in that folder for you to open with Blender.

The model as seen through Blender.