Okay, so check it, I messed around with some Fortnite Balenciaga stuff today and figured I’d share what I did. It was kinda wild, not gonna lie.
First off, I saw some pics online of the collab, and I thought, “Yo, I gotta try recreating some of this.” Started by grabbing some reference images. You know, the actual in-game outfits and the real-world clothes. Just Googled “Fortnite Balenciaga collab” and saved a bunch of pics to my desktop.
Then, fired up Blender. Yeah, I know, kinda overkill, but I wanted to get some decent renders. I’m no pro, but I can fumble my way around the basics. My goal wasn’t to make perfect 3D models, more like mockups.
Next, I went hunting for 3D models online. Found some decent Fortnite character models floating around on some forum, ripped ’em and imported the basic meshes into Blender. They weren’t perfect, but good enough for what I needed. Saved them as a new project, just to keep things organized, named it something like “Fortnite_Balenciaga_Project.”
Now the real fun began. I started messing with the textures. I imported some Balenciaga logos and patterns that I found online into GIMP, yeah I know, not Photoshop, whatever works. Then I started creating new materials in Blender and applying them to the characters. Think I made a white Tee with the Balenciaga logo front and center and made some basic digital camo pants from scratch. It was all trial and error, resizing textures, changing colors, tweaking the roughness and metallic values to try and get a realistic look. This was a slow process.
After that, I posed the characters. Blender has this rigging feature, which is a fancy way of saying you can move the character’s bones around. I tried to mimic some of the poses from the original Fortnite Balenciaga promotional images. Getting the poses right was harder than I thought. It just never quite looked right. After too much fiddling with rotations and joint angles, I just said screw it and moved on.
Finally, I added some lights and rendered the scene. Nothing fancy, just a couple of area lights and a basic background. Rendered out as PNGs, because I wanted to do some post-processing in GIMP later. Rendering took way longer than it should have, my computer is a potato.
Once the renders were done, I hopped over to GIMP. Added some color correction, messed with the contrast, and threw in a bit of sharpening. Just to make the images pop a little more. Added some text too, like “Fortnite x Balenciaga Inspired” or whatever.
- Step 1: Gathered reference images.
- Step 2: Downloaded 3D models.
- Step 3: Edited textures in GIMP.
- Step 4: Created materials in Blender.
- Step 5: Posed characters.
- Step 6: Set up lighting and rendered.
- Step 7: Post-processed in GIMP.
It’s far from perfect, but it was a fun little project. Definitely learned a few things about texturing and posing. Maybe I’ll try something more ambitious next time.
