Carrot Revolt / INTERACTIVE STUDIES
Small interactive labs to explore what happens when you change a material, a texture, a connection or a line of code. Open one, experiment, and see what you learn.
Explore the areasLEARNING AREAS
Explore a tool or a subject. Each area has its own labs, and the collection can grow with new specialties.
3D SOFTWARE · 14 LABS
Start with the interface, then follow a 3D production from modeling to animation. These labs use Blender tools and Blender-style workspaces.
The first hours in Blender: move around a scene, move objects, then edit a mesh.
Your first hour in Blender's 3D Viewport: orbit, pan and zoom, frame objects, use the axis views and Auto Perspective, select with click, Shift, B and A, and move, rotate and scale with G, R and S, axis constraints, typed values, cancel and undo.
Press Tab and edit the mesh: vertex, edge and face select modes, X-ray, edge loops, moving parts of a mesh, Extrude, Inset, Loop Cut and Bevel, cleaning a broken mesh with Merge by Distance, Delete and Dissolve, and a stool as the final challenge.
Build clean meshes and unfold them for textures.
A Blender-style Edit Mode on small meshes: fix n-gons and triangles, find poles, keep shapes under Subdivision Surface with holding edges and creases, put edge loops where an elbow bends, and build a clean retopology cage on a sculpt.
Work in a Blender-style UV Editing workspace: select edges, press U to Mark Seam and Unwrap, and find the same face in the 3D Viewport and the UV map.
How a surface reacts to light, how the detail of a sculpt becomes images, and how one texture can dress a whole set.
Build PBR materials in a Blender-style Shader Editor with the full Principled BSDF: roughness, metal, colour spaces and masks, bump and real displacement, emission and Glare, glass in EEVEE and Cycles, coat, sheen, subsurface, thin film and brushed metal. Seven stages and a free Studio with presets.
Bake a high poly crate into a normal map, ambient occlusion and colour for a 12-triangle cube: watch the rays, fix Extrusion, Cage and overlapping UVs, read the colours of tangent space and take the maps to a game engine. Then bake it again in a Substance Painter-style Baking window.
Understand trim sheets with a medieval wood and stone sheet: read its strips, plan one by texel density and padding, put UV islands on the strips with G, S and R in a Blender-style UV Editor, round edges with a bevel strip and Weighted Normal, and texture many props with one material.
Use tileable textures in Blender with Repeat and the Mapping node, lay out UVs for them (outside 0–1, same size, round the corner), make one from a photo in a Photoshop-style workspace (crop, even light, Offset, Clone Stamp, Healing Brush, Pattern Preview), keep PBR maps tiling and aligned, project with Box and break the repetition.
Understand texel density, pixels of texture per metre: see it with a checker map, compute it in px/m, make every prop equally sharp with S, Average Islands Scale, Pack Islands and Set TD, choose the target from the camera and the texture budget, and give hero areas more on purpose.
Light the scene, then photograph it like a camera would.
Light a plaster bust with Point, Sun, Spot and Area lights, a bounce card and HDRIs. Measure it with a light meter: inverse square law, hard and soft light, three-point and portrait setups, colour temperature, Exposure, AgX and False Color.
A DSLR cut in half next to the photo it takes: the exposure triangle, depth of field, motion blur and noise, focal length and sensor size, and the same ideas in Blender's camera.
Bones, weights and controls, and then the movement.
Paint vertex weights in a Blender-style Weight Paint workspace, bend the bones to test them and fix the elbow, the zero weights and the symmetry. Finish with a game-ready checklist.
Pose an armature in a Blender-style Pose Mode: FK rotations along an arm, then an IK constraint with a pole target on a leg, Chain Length, Pole Angle and an IK/FK Influence switch.
Animate a rigged bouncing ball in 3D with a Blender-style Graph Editor and Timeline: timing and spacing, squash and stretch with the rig's two controls, weight shaped with F-curve handles, and a Rotation control to make it roll as it travels.
3D SOFTWARE · 2 LABS
Explore animation principles, then practice the Time Slider, Curve Editor and Dope Sheet.
Animate a bouncing ball through four stages: timing, squash and stretch, weight and rotation. Work with helpers, Auto Key, Set Keys, the Track Bar and Track View – Curve Editor in a 3ds Max 2027 workspace.
Practice keyframes, timing, tangents and animation tracks in a workspace laid out like 3ds Max 2027, with its hotkeys. Move and copy keys, compare tangent types, and make cycles and loops.
GAME DEVELOPMENT · 2 LABS
Optimize 3D assets and light real-time scenes in Unity.
Understand levels of detail: watch a LOD Group switch as a rock gets smaller on screen, set its thresholds from the error in pixels, make the LODs with Decimate, stop a floor from shimmering with mipmaps and filtering, and fit a field of rocks in a triangle budget.
Bake light for Unity 6 (URP): make a second UV map with a margin in Blender, export the FBX with the right settings, set Lightmap Resolution, Scale In Lightmap, bounces and the denoiser, choose Baked or Mixed lights and static objects, and light moving objects with Light Probes, Adaptive Probe Volumes and a Reflection Probe.
GAME DEVELOPMENT · 2 LABS
C# for Unity: from the first loop to objects and an Update loop.
Program a drone in C# that builds voxel sculptures. Run it line by line and watch variables, loops and conditions change the world.
Classes, objects and references with a heap you can see, lists, Vector3 structs and a Unity-like Update loop: from a drone's blueprints to bouncing balls simulated in code.
IMAGE & VIDEO · 1 LAB
Color correction and grading in a DaVinci Resolve-style workspace.
Grade video in a DaVinci Resolve-style Color page: read the Waveform, Parade and Vectorscope, set blacks, whites and white balance with Lift, Gamma and Gain, build a look with serial nodes, a LUT and Curves, key the sky with a Qualifier, light a face with a Power Window and match two cameras.
SCENOGRAPHY · 2 LABS
The theatre as a machine: where the scenery waits, how it flies and what the audience must never see.
An opera house stage cut in half, after the Teatro Real: find the parts of the stage house, balance a counterweight, share loads between bars, move platforms and wagons, mask the wings and the lights from the worst seats and plan a scene change.
A small stage and a lighting rig driven like Lightkey: profiles, Fresnels, PCs, LED PARs and a moving head, DMX channels and values, patch and DIP switches, a face lit in lux with key, fill and backlight, colour mixing, pan and tilt, and a cue list with fades and GO.
VISUAL DESIGN · 1 LAB
Colour and type for screens and print: what makes a page readable for everybody.
Design a festival website in a Figma-style editor: mix colours in HSL, pass WCAG contrast, check colour-blind vision, bring colours into the CMYK gamut and set rich black, learn the anatomy of type and readable text, then build a type scale, colour styles and a dark mode.