I have been away for some time as work has been very busy. I have been in the process of training 11 new contract employees which has become quite the challenge. When I get home I have been going straight to bed without any blendering.
I have started again with a somewhat small project to get back into the swing of things before I finish up the Spaceship corridor. This project is one from Andrew Price and topic being an animated logo. I thought I would create one for my website BlenderTravels.com Here is a series of renders and screen shots of what I did yesterday.
Logo with a Pyramid as the image for Traveling
Logo with a gem stone as Andrew’s tutorial depicts
The volumetric lighting pass using Blender’s internal renderer
Logo using the gem stone, volumetric lighting and particles. Camera settings have depth of field for the particles / dust floating in space.
Started watching a new tutorial this morning, nothing I will be doing but information on texture painting etc.. I also downloaded a new theme shown on this tutorial. It is very similar to my theme I tweaked only better.
Spent a little time with the spaceship corridor last night and finished up on of the control panels and I have one left. This one should be easy, just a row of monitors and small control nobs for them.
Did a quick tutorial on using Greebles tonight. Greebles are items (normal maps) placed onto your model to break up the surface making it more interesting. It was an OK tutorial as there was no sound and minimal typed words describing what they were doing. All in all not a bad tutorial especially since they used the greeble pack provide to citizens on CGCookie, my favorite website.
Planning to going in to work on Sunday morning and then the lord changed my plans. Stormed like the dickens Saturday afternoon and into the evening with my bedroom window letting the rain leak in like it was not there. I spent the day Sunday and Monday sopping up water from the carpet with heater blowing trying to dry them out. Still damp this morning and hoping for them to be dry when I get home. Crossing fingers this was just an anomaly and it doesn’t happen again because we could not figure out where the water was coming from.
I added or rather duplicated (using array modifiers) the sphere and circle wire frame in the first small control module and thinking of adding wires etc. to the areas between them but I now believe simpler may be better.
Last night I started again on the Spaceship corridor using a new feature in Blender 2.64, ‘Wire Frame’. The new feature works only on faces so if you are starting with a wire frame create your faces, select everything (faces) you want in wire frame and, while in face select mode, <ctrl> + ‘F’, then select ‘Wire Frame’, this then turns all the selected face into a wire frame. You can then increase or decrease the size of the ‘wires’, apply subsurface, shade smooth etc.. Here is a screen shot of what I did last night with an icosphere and a mesh circle filled. This process took less than a minute and the majority of that time was looking at the settings I could change, deleting, start again and adjusting the look.
Please note: The screen shot below does not show the sphere and circle with shade smooth applied.
This release looks to have a great list of additions and improvements.
I tried working on the Spaceship corridor last night and could not insert a loop cut within my model. This maybe a bug or a problem with my model, probably the latter. I’ll start again from scratch (almost) and finish these control panels by Wednesday.
Couldn’t get my mouse to work with Blender at work this morning (IBM mouse, no three button) so I’ll try when I get home. I did get a chance to watch Johnathan Williamson’s video about the additions in the 2.64 release and will put some of those tools to use on the control panels.
I was a lazy butt this weekend and just relaxed after the move last weekend and a hectic week. Ordered a pizza like I normally do on Sunday and it was great! I ordered it from Andolini’s which I have been wanting to do but did not realize how freaking big their pies are. 20″ is huge and I will not be doing that again.
This weekend will be great, the first weekend in my new place. I will check out the sushi bar next door if the weather permits and relax the remainder of the time.
Just a quick post before my work begins today and again with Blender on Friday. I found my mice! I knew I had packed them, they were in a pocket of one of my many suitcases, a pocket I had not looked in :). Happy Days are back tomorrow with Blender.
When I get home today I will set up my AppleTV. I downloaded a couple of Brad Meltzers Decoded and the movie Avengers last night and would like to watch them on the big screen. I will not be able to watch all of them because bedtime will come upon me quickly so I will start with the Statue of Liberty episode of Decoded. I started watching on regular television when bedtime approached so I bought it on iTunes along with The Avengers and downloaded while I slept. It will be a good movie weekend
New site covering miscellaneous activities including my favorite activity: Blender
