BlendTuts! (Warm Ups Vol. 1.26)

I've been addicted to Blendtuts as of late. Between that, the MakingComics MOOC, taxes, sketching, assisting with a web site, and the typical family stuff.... the blog posting has been suffering. Bad blogger, bad! But on the bright side, I haven't skipped a day of drawing yet. Although I do admit to cutting my sketching time shorter on a couple occasions. Well something has to give! Anyway, I'll try to get caught up to posting in short order (no promises though).

Draw like you mean it!

03.23 Day 77 - Anatomy study from Drawing Dynamic Hands (I think)

03.24 Day 78 - Sans ref, or very much effort

03.25 Day 79 - Clothing study from Dynamic Wrinkles and Drapery

Palmipedarium

Superbly crafted.

My Kind of Sharpie

Another weapon I modeled (but obviously haven't textured yet). For this sword I used a workflow demonstrated in a tutorial by blenderalphahelix. In particular, I really like the use of 'bevel' vs trying to use a subsurf modifier to control the hilt edges. Also I used 'bridge' to join the pommel to the grip (picked that trick up in this cool video on cutting holes).
Now I just need to learn to texture paint like this

Knifey Spooney!

Behold! A simple creation: a knife model. I just finished chapt. 3 of Game Development with blender last night. I decided to take a quick break from learning the BGE and wanted to try modelling something simple. Walla! I made two slightly different variations. The textures and model could use some tweaking, but that's the point (nice pun!). This is all learning.

Pink Fish, Blue Fish, Monkey Stew Fish

Just a quick render I made of my monkeyshark (created for the Feed the Shark game exercise from Game Development with blender)

I Heart Blender Books

I had some amazon cash stuffed away that was just begging to be used, so I decided to grab a digital copy of Game Development with blender.

At this point I'm only in the beginning chapters of the book, going through the standard blender basics section.

I figure if these guys are personal pals of Martins Upitis then hopefully it'll prove to be a good purchase.

I'll toss a review up here, and hopefully on Amazon too once I get through the book in its entirety (which may require a miracle since I'm easily deterred from my hobbies by... my other hobbies).

How To Make a Tim

Tim - Tutorial Series

Have you ever wanted to create a Tim Burton style image or animation but don't know where to get started? Well look no further my friends, I have just the resource for you! Over nine hours of instructional goodness covering such topics as modelling, texturing, rigging, and animating, using the amazing open source majesty known as blender.

And how much would you be willing to pay to make your Tim Burtonesse dreams come true? Well you can hang on to your monies, since I'm here to tell you that thanks to the extremely copacetic David Ward you can watch and learn gratis. Such a good guy.

But seriously, Mr. Ward is a very generous soul distributing this series to the general public. For the novice to intermediate blender user this tutorial series is chock full of good information.

This Lagoon is Buh-Loo

I'm most the way through chapter ten of Blender 3D Basics and this is the little island scene I've crafted as I've completed the tutorials. The textures could use a massive amount of work, the waterline is extremely unrealistic and the water texture isn't very believable either. Having said all that, I still enjoy looking at that shoddy little shot and thinking, "I made that."

I'm looking forward to the next chapter: Improving your Camera and Lighting Work

It's Slooping!

Sloop update. I've made it to chapter ten of Blender 3D Basics. As far as I know, modeling the sloop is now complete. The tasks that lay ahead include creating an environment for the sloop to do it's slooping, and improving camera/lighting aspects.

I haven't been highly diligent in working my way through this book lately as I've been heavily distracted by trying to learn the jMonkey Engine. It's been a lot of fun but I still have a huge knowledge gap to traverse.

At some point,  blender and jMonkey are going to converge for me - I'll be using blender to create assets for whatever madness I cobble together using jMonkey. I'm not quite there yet, but I'm hoping a few more months down the road will prove fruitful.

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!

Dynamo

Ian Hubert has done it again. This kid is pretty amazing. He pumps out films like nobody's business.

His stories tend to have a quirky element to them, and "Dynamo" is no exception. Ian's character ('Gage') is the quintessential quagmire of quirk (again no surprise) but all that aside, Ian and his crew (karmapirates) manage to keep you curious enough to keep watching.

The production quality is extremely high and I found the sound track to be compelling (although I could have done without the old 20's ragtime or whatever it is in the opening scene - I personally would have preferred a high intensity track to really amp the tension). In fact, I believe there are mp3's from the shorts available for download on the karmapirates website which I'll be perusing shortly.

The acting from most the characters is a bit campy. After you adjust to it, I find it doesn't detract too badly from the story. For an unpaid outfit, there's really only so much you can do (and these guys do it all!!).

The effects are pretty fantastic when you consider how small this production team really is.  And of course, they use blender for most (if not all) of it! So bonus points right there. The closing scene in episode four when one of the characters leaves the apartment just blows me away. Soooo epic!

The trailer to episode five was recently released. I'm looking forward to the next chapter. Especially if it features more of Kavonaghan (Episode 2, my personal favorite).

The only thing that bothered me was even at the 1080p setting on youtube.com, the video seemed to suffer from a fair amount of compression noise (or whatever the technical term for that is).  I'm not entire sure it's not only on my end (watching via firefox on Ubunutu 12.04 - I'll have to do a little more testing)

Edit: It's my system. I tried watching the episodes on my nexus 7 and the video quality is beautiful. Now I get to troubleshoot why my desktop youtube experience is so lacklustre. Joy!

Anyway.. go. Partake!