Working for 20 years as a Manufacturing Engineer for various Aerospace companies the only 3D programs I had any interaction with were CATIA, Solidworks, AutoCad and NCAD so it is no surprise Blender is a new world. I love it!
I also enjoy most outdoor activities, fishing, hiking, camping etc. Most music and College Football (UW Huskies!). Favorite vacation spot: Hawaii.
I’m still working on my coffee cup and will keep this up to date as I work. I don’t have much time when I get home after dinner and before bed so completion will be in a few days but it is coming along. I was able to work through some strange geometry this afternoon and just about completed the lid.
On another note, I did have a look at the Precision Modeling tools for the BSOC and can say I am disappointed. There are in fact no ‘Precision Modeling’ tools, just an addition to some snapping tools. I am intruiged by his statement and I’ll paraphrase here, “I understand your concerns as I come from an Engineering background and my intent is to finish the tools with your requests”. I think this may be a good sign the Blender users wanting better precision will get their wish.
As my promise said, I will blender a little every single day. Here is a view of the CG Cookie coffee cups I started when I got home. I had some problems with a loop and scale near the end of today’s session but will solve that one tomorrow. I’m sure it is just a settings issue between 2.5 and 2.63
As a side note I had to change the settings on this blog so as to not allow posts and or comments unless you are a registered user. I found that as I stopped posting to this blog all the spam would stop and as soon as I would submit a new post 9 or 10 spam comments would show up the next day.
I finished a new tutorial this afternoon after taking a couple weeks off. Boy did I miss playing around with Blender and watching the new and exciting images that come forth when I make the slightest adjustment to the settings. I also downloaded a new Bible program and promise keep up to date with both my reading and learning new processes daily.
I have not been all that active as of late due to my attempts at limiting the ‘bot’ comments infecting my blog. With these efforts I seem to have found an effective solution to this annoying problem. I will not be posting my solution publicly as it will effectively give the enemy another avenue of attack 🙂
However as a side benefit, my solution also provides me with a bunch of data which I can evaluate daily, allowing me to more effectively battle this problem.
As I said yesterday, I completed a tutorial from Johnathan Williamson creating a battery in blender, rendering in Lux Render.
I have not had any experience with Lux Render so I elected to use the Cycles render engine within Blender 2.63. Cycles does not have the default materials Lux Render has but I was able to create a semi-realistic copper material for the top. I think the results are acceptable 🙂
I did this quick Soccer Ball tutorial this morning. It was a little tedious at some points but learned quite a bit about different selection techniques. Below is in image of my screen showing you the number of faces. The selection techniques used during this tutorial made the process a great learning tool.
Some final Renders Below
During this next weekend I will create another tutorial for placement on YouTube highlighting the various selection methods used in this tutorial.
If find creating tutorials such as those detailing different techniques to accomplish the same tasks allow me to better remember them. I create the video in my mind first, then record the actual video (sometime multiple times). When the recording is complete the editing of the final addition takes place requiring about 2-3 times the actual recording time. Then I watch the complete video 3 – 4 times listening for things I may have forgotten. The final video is then rendered and watched again for errors one last time and posted to YouTube. That is roughly 10 times the video runs through my head. Plenty of time for cementing the information into my memory.
I also completed another tutorial by Johnathan Williamson, ‘Creating a Battery’, from last year before Cycles was in trunk. He used Lux Render, a program I am not at all familiar with so I used Cycles and it turned out wonderful. I will post those pictures tomorrow.
I have completed recording and editing my first tutorial. Below is a render of the finished tutorial and the photo used in the opening shot.
The tutorial is based on one of the Mugs in the Tea set ‘Still Life’ tutorial I started and completed earlier this morning. I thought this would be a good start for the following reasons:
Use of many of the tools I am familiar with
Practice with Cycles and Materials within Cycles
Easy to complete
I felt the video turned out great for my first. The total time of the video is just over 12 minutes, a little more than 15 minutes prior to editing. Editing of this video itself took a couple of hours.
Completed a short tutorial this morning. The total time completing this tutorial was about 3hrs including render time. The final render was done using Cycles with 1000 samples.
The only changes made to this scene were the Teapot (off white) and the mugs. Original scene was rendered with all white ceramic Teapot and mugs.
Trying out a light colored wood texture for my Nick Knack Box.
The texture isn’t perfect yet, I still have to move some faces around and eliminate / reduce some of the seams. For a first shot it doesn’t look all that bad.
Edit: I had to change the post title due to the amount of spam picking up on the old one.
New site covering miscellaneous activities including my favorite activity: Blender
