Looking back...

Wow...  I was looking over my Flickr Photostream just now and I got a bit of a Flashback moment - it felt weird.  Really weird.  Seriously.

This was the trigger-picture:

When I saw this picture, it was like my brain had pressed the "Play" button on a memory tape somewhere in my head and I remembered all the steps involved in the project - extruding out the gum tray, creating every single face on the bottom of the tray by hand because I didn't know how to do it properly back then, figuring out how to do Transparency, sketching out the letters with a multi-subdivided Plane and then repositioning the vertices to match the shape with absolutely no regard to proper topology, and the rendering :D  I also remembered how proud I was to have achieved this - it was my first project outside of the tutorials (the reason I chose an Excel gum pack is because I had one lying on my desk at the time, I can still remember it, it had a tear on the side and was pretty banged up, I had carried it around in my pocket for a while).

It's weird, isn't it?  And to think that exactly two years later, I'd have my most complex project yet underway, with only one piece of the not-yet-final mesh probably over 100 times more complex than this simple gum pack :D

Well, while I'm talking about this kind of stuff, I'm going to send out a message to all of the new Blender-heads out there :  May the Blend be with you!