Gned walks and talks

September 16, 2011

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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.

Them bones, them bones, them armature bones

September 15, 2011

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Gned - Upper Body Rigged

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.

In anticipation of pain

September 13, 2011

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Gned - Texture and Materials Render

 

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.

And I though blenders were just for drinks

September 12, 2011

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Gned - First Render with Blender

 

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.