It's a Sloppy Sloop!

On occasion, whilst dabbling on zee ol' computer I enjoy sinking time into learning blender- an incredibly powerful 3D graphics modelling and animation application.

Did I mention that it's Free? One of the great things about blender, is the fact that it's open source.

The image above is my latest blender creation, a work-in-progress sloop. "You know... for slooping." The sloop design actually comes from a book I've been reading, "Blender 3D Basics" by Gordon C. Fisher (Packt Publishing).

Just like it says on the cover, it's geared to Blender Beginner's and so far I think it's an excellent resource for shiny new blender heads.

I'm most the way through chapter eight of twelve so I don't have a complete opinion, but based on the material I've digested up to this point, I'd definitely give the book a solid five stars. Examples are clear, and the information is accurate without overloading the reader.

When I started the book I primarily used blender on win 7, although around chapter seven or eight I switched to ubunto 12.10 exclusively. I quickly discovered I didn't know where blender saved render files after hitting f12. I thought I remembered doing the same on win 7 and finding the rendered image saved into my user home directory. This actually may be not true. Nevertheless, I attempted to find where the default save location is on ubuntu.

After poking around in my user directory and blender's install directory and finding nothing, I decided I needed a little more sleuthing power. Since my linux-ese is rusty I used google to locate a few good resources. Ubuntu community docs and Greg's wiki provided the know-how I was in search of.

sudo find / -name "*.png" -amin -1

sudo so I could snoop in every directory. '-amin -1'  so I'd only be looking for .png files accessed within the last minute. I then hit f12 on blender to create a new render and subsequently excuted the find command. Alas, nothing turned up. Apparently the rendered image isn't saved to disk by default after all.

A google search or two later and I arrived at the solution.  After hitting f12 and the image viewer pops open, click on the image menu and select 'Save as Image'. Rocket Science!