Well, I’ve finished the Blender Introductory Tutorial. You can see Gned’s pretty damned happy about it. I think he was tired of me poking at him. I followed the tutorial pretty closely, though there were places it differed wildly from my version of Blender. Thankfully, things are laid out in a pretty intuitive fashion, so finding what the tutorial author was talking about in any given portion only took a few minutes of head scratching. I also used my own sound file, in stead of the one linked in the tutorial.
All in all, I had a lot of fun doing this, and I feel pretty comfortable moving forward with my own projects in Blender. So, without further ado, here’s the finished animation sequence. Don’t blink. Remain calm.
Today, at lunch, I got into some basic rigging for Gned, in Blender. For those of you not familiar with 3D modeling and animation, rigging is the process of adding bones, that are linked to the mesh, to create an armature that will be used to make posing the 3D model easier for the purpose of animating the model. More than just adding bones, constraints and rules are set on bones in order to make the entire skeleton (armature) move in a way that makes sense when you move any one particular bone.
I started off by rigging just Gned’s upper body. I took a screen shot when I was done, showing Gned checking out his purple skin.
Gned - Full Body Rig
Because rigging legs is a little more complicated, I did it later, linking it back to the armature of the upper body. Then I took a second screen shot of Gned, fully rigged, attempting to take a step. (Yes, I realize I’m anthropomorphizing a computer model. Shoosh.)
Still left to do, before moving on to actual animation, is to fine tune the armature and then build a small library of poses and facial expressions. All of this leading up to animating a walk cycle and some lip synching to an audio file. So far I’m having a blast. Blender is really nicely laid out and easy to use.
Before I head off to the oral surgeon, to have two wisdom teeth extracted that should probably have been removed twenty years ago, I decided to play around with textures and materials in Blender. I kind of had an idea of how I wanted Gned to look and, surprisingly (and with the aid of the tutorial), I was able to locate everything I needed. So, above, is Gned with a first attempt at some texturing.
Oooo, lizardy.
Now, I’m off to have stuff removed from my head. Hopefully it won’t be anything important.
For one reason and another, which I won’t get into in this post, I’ve been looking to do some 3D modeling again. Years and years ago I learned to use 3D Studio Max, and later Maya, but it’s been a long long time and, frankly, those packages are prohibitively priced for just goofing around at home. Yes, I am aware that free, we splash our water mark all over your renders, versions of those packages are available, but that kind of hit-you-over-the-head ownership doesn’t appeal to me.
Enter Blender, the free, open-source, content creation suite. Not only is it free, but it’s also available, natively, for just about every major operating system. Free and will fun on my Mac? The answer to my prayer postscripts.
Because it’s been so many years since I did anything with 3D modeling software, I dug around on the Interwebs and found myself a really nice tutorial, specifically designed to introduce someone to the tools in Blender and how the UI works. The tutorial is a little behind, software version wise, so some things are in different places, but it’s been fantastic. Over the last couple of weeks, poking at it here and there, I’ve manage to complete a basic character model. I’m calling him Gned.
There’s much more to the tutorial, and I’m looking forward to spending the next several weeks playing with it. I’ll be posting progress here. If you’ve ever wanted to play around with a 3D modeler, I HIGHLY recommend Blender. You honestly can’t beat it.
This cover of Tenacious D’sDude (I Totally Miss You) goes out to all my mates in other states: California, Dallas, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina. You all know who you are.
Yes, it’s goofy, but it’s heart felt and it was fun to do. *sincere chest thump* Peace!
Almost two years ago, now, we decided that the goats and chickens (yes, we have several goats and chickens my wife keeps as pets) needed a barn, rather than the individual little houses they used now to keep out of the elements. Rather than build a barn from scratch, we went down to Home Depot and bought one of their prefabricated sheds. The idea was to convert the interior, by building stalls and a chicken coop inside, and turn the whole thing into a mini barn. Two weeks after we bought the pre-fab shed, it was delivered to our house on a flatbed truck, and plopped into a corner of my driveway.
Now, the shed wasn’t preassembled, just prefabricated. Basically, all the lumber is cut to size and stacked neatly on a tightly rapped pallet. The day it was delivered, I covered the pallet in a tarp and told myself I’d assemble it over the next several weeks. Two weeks shy of almost two years later, it was still sitting under that tarp.
The hows and whys of the delay in assembly as numerous; mostly it can be chalked up to my laziness, with some weather and logistical issues sprinkled in. Suffice to say, it’s nearly 100% my fault. In any case, I wasn’t too worried. The pallet was tightly wrapped in plastic, and I’d covered it in a tarp. At worst I figured there’d be a few pieces with some water damage that I would have to replace, come assembly time.
Yesterday, I finally got around to unpacking the pallet, and moving things into the garage. As I’d suspected, the very top board, a 4′ x 8′ 5/8″ particle board meant to be part of the floor, was pretty badly water damaged. Amazingly, everything else seemed fine until I got a little more than half-way through unpacking and discovered the termites.
The lowest corner of the pallet had suffered most of the water damage, and this wet wood attracted termites. This was an eventuality that I hadn’t even considered. We spent a good chunk of time separating out uninfected wood, killing termites, and spreading diatomaceous earth around to keep the termites from marching towards the house. We also doused every visible termite with dose of fuck-you-you-litte-wood-muncher poison; it’s a local brand. When all was said an done, about $50 worth of lumber will need to be replaced. I took measurements and made notes and I should be fine come assemble time next weekend.
I made a little time-lapsed film of the unpacking process, which you can enjoy below. I was going to edit out any boring parts, but then I noticed how cool the clouds looked and I didn’t want to mess that up with cuts. So, if you get bored, watch the sky. Enjoy.
