At the very beginning of this course, I was honestly quite scared. Learning new softwares has always scared me, especially because some of my colleagues took classes where they had already learned softwares like Blender but I have not. I was also worried about not being in Paris and the difficulties of learning a software remotely. I felt like I would be very behind, but I was actually wrong.
We learned every software in this course from the very base of it. I was already familiar with the concept of 3D modeling and some 3D modeling softwares but some of the techniques that we learned came as a surprise to me. The scanning technique with Metashape and export into Blender that we learned was, for me, very impressive and surprisingly quite easy to do. A lot of techniques in QGIS were also very interesting, especially when we learned how to import a whole map into Blender, giving us a 3D model of the buildings and even the streets. I feel like the links between all of these softwares with each other will help me a lot in my creative practice. I feel like I’m now most comfortable with Blender and Metashape but not as much with QGIS. This is probably because all the softwares QGIS had many steps we had to follow, and especially since it was at the very beginning of the semester, it makes it harder to remember.
This semester really opened my eyes to the notion of urban from a very wide perspective then into smaller ones. We started with urban mapping of the whole city of Paris, working with 2D, then narrowed down to a portion of the city in 3D (Romainville), then finally into a 3D scan of a personal object of ours. I am certain that I will find use from all the techniques we have learned this semester in my future work. Finally, I really enjoyed learning all these new techniques in Core Lab and challenging my own expectations. Everything was taught from the very base, repeated many times, and wasn’t rushed at all, which really helped when I was behind on some steps. Overall, my learning experience was very positive and I hope to explore more things to do with each software separately and with each other.