Sintel

I haven't been doing a lot of Blender or animation lately, as I have discovered some very cool Blender work done by others. Watch this short movie called Sintel on Youtube, or download a hi-res version from the main Sintel site.

Apart from the technical excellence of the piece (cool hair effects, lighting, all sorts of stuff), it is a very moving story of a young girl and a wounded baby dragon.


Don't miss it! (Increase it to 720p and watch it full screen. And turn up the sound - the music is great, especially the Ziggurat scene, and the song during the credits at the end.)

PS Why is it taking me so long to watch a short movie? Because the whole thing is open source (from the Blender Foundation), free, and lots of material from the movie is available. Screenshots, the music, "making of" documentaries, even source 3D files I can load up and create my own scenes with. Its a real mother-load!

PSS The only bad side-effect is it makes my stumbling around in Blender look very poor in comparison. So don't compare, ok?

Scouting

Do you remember sitting around a campfire, poking marshmallows on the end of sticks into the fire, watching some of them come out totally burnt and charcoal, and the others perfectly brown on the outside and wonderfully gooey on the inside. Singing songs together and wondering if the birds in the trees are saying "Keep it down will you! We are trying to sleep up here!" Listening to scary stories, then going to bed and hearing strange noises outside the tent, imagining all sorts of creatures walking within fang distance. Waking up wondering where that stone came from that is digging into your back.

Blender has a particle system, and I am just starting to learn how to use it. The three logs in the following 8 second video are covered with a surface that emits random particles, colored red and yellow, that start off as nothing, flare into existence, then fade away. Its a very basic scene, with 5 rocky shapes surrounding the fire that you can imagine sitting on, a ground with bit of randomness to it, and a night sky with stars and comets drifting past. It took me a while to get even this far, and the whole effect looks very amateur, but its a start. Hopefully the next one will be better.

S'mores - they are about the same. One is never enough, and you usually think that each one will taste even better than the last. Until your stomach tells you that you had one s'more too many.

Click to see video

Liquid Glass

Did you ever see the movie The Abyss? It came out in 1989, was directed by James Cameron (of Avatar fame), and starred Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. It had a cool liquid effect of a creature that was pure water, and could form the water into any shape it desired, even mimicing Mary Elizabeth's face.

Blender has a very useful object called lattices. They are just a 3D array of points, in an empty cube. You can move any of the points around, which deforms the overall shape so its not a cube anymore. The tricky part is you can take any other object, and modify it with the lattice, which deforms the shape of that object in the same way the lattice is deformed. If you look at the animation below, you will see a sphere that changes shape, being deformed by the invisible lattice. The lattice is not actually changing shape, its just moving through and around the sphere.

Plus I was able to make the sphere semi-transparent. As it stretches, you can see the back of the sphere visible through the middle. It gives a really cool watery, glassy effect.

Click to see video

The animation took 37 minutes to render, but quite a bit longer to get just the right material. It has 3 textures on it, clouds, a blend, and marble. And of course I had to turn on ray-tracing to get the transparency. It can also be viewed as a looping video. James Cameron would be happy to see the progress I am making in my lessons.

Monkeying around

Blender comes with a built-in monkey. Well, just a head actually. Her name is Suzanne.

I finally made my first animation. Its a very short one, just 4 seconds. You take your fixed model, and move, rotate, and scale the objects in it at specific frames. You don't have to do every frame, just key frames, and Blender interpolates for you to do all the ones in between. You can have multiple objects moving simultaneously.

As the banana swings into view (on a very thin and invisible line), rotating as it does, Suzanne turns and moves towards it, and as she sees it, a smile breaks out on her face. The smile, and the crinkling of the eyes, is done with a different set of animations that involve deforming the original mesh.

All of this is controlled with a set of curves that define how the motion happens, how it speeds up and down, and even lets you create a special Time curve where you can make time itself speed up, slow down, even stop, and go in reverse. Which I use to make the banana swing away and Suzanne get sad again, without having to add specific animations to do that.

If you play this in a loop, it looks smoothly continuous, as if Suzanne has only a two second memory, and is repeatedly surprised and then saddened by the appearance and disappearance of her favorite food. Feeling sorry for her yet?

Animation is really cool. But of course it takes longer. Will be spacing my posts further apart as time goes on and my projects get more ambitious. The actual rendering of this animation only took a few minutes (which will grow as I add objects), but it takes longer to edit the animations themselves. Luckily Suzanne is a very patient monkey.

Click to see video

The quality of the video is not as good as I would like. The raw movie looks much better. Except for the banana - I didn't do a very good job on that.

Earth

Earth. Our one and only planet. At least for now.

Am learning about UV Mapping. Its a technique that lets you take a picture and define exactly how to wrap it around an object.

First you take the object and "unwrap" it. For a sphere for example, you first need to create a seam around the equator, then when you unwrap you get two circles full of triangles. You take the image and lay it over the triangles. Then you adjust them to completely cover the image. When you wrap it again, it places the image onto the same spots on the 3D where the triangles originally came from. Ok, so its hard to describe - you have to see it to understand it. Or get someone who is better at describing it.

I took Google Maps, satellite view, grabbed a partial screen shot, and brought that into Blender. I wrapped it around the sphere. Not entirely successfully, you can see Africa looks a bit distorted. The image I had to Photoshop a bit, to remove the Google text and stuff. Although in my case its not Photoshop but a similar program called Pixelmator.

I also took another left and right pic to get 3D view. Doesn't work so well with stars in the background - they look very 2D.


This technique can be applied to much more complex shapes than a sphere. The most common one it is applied to is the human body. You can buy whole male and female body skins to wrap around your models. The better ones can be upwards of several hundred dollars, available at websites like TurboSquid. With amazing skin details, up to things like fingerprints.

True 3D

Ok, all these 3D pics, are not really. They are just 2D pics. All pictures are 2D effectively, so I guess we can't blame them for not living up to their name. They are called 3D of course because they are designed and generated in 3D, and as you have seen before, you can take two pics (or as many as you want) from different angles. As opposed to being designed in 2D, or drawn, or painted or a 2D canvas.

I decided to jump ahead a bit, and make some actual, real, 3D pics. Since you don't have a 3D computer screen yet, I found another way to show it to you. Maybe. If you can hack your eyeballs a little.

I took the 12 pipey thingy from last time, and took 2 pics of it from very slightly different angles, and put them side by side. The left one is from a spot corresponding to your left eyeball, and the right one your right eyeball. If you look closely you can see the images are just very slightly different.

Now, all you have to do is look at the left image with your left eyeball, and the right one with your right eyeball. What's the matter, you can't do that? Yeah, its not immediately obvious how to, but it can be done. Try the following - if it doesn't work, just pretend you can see it anyway.

Start by making sure no-one is watching you. This is going to look pretty silly. Bring your face right up close to the screen. Put your nose just about touching a spot between the two images. It will be very blurry, since no-one can focus that close, but don't worry. Now, let your eyes relax. Each image is directly in front of each eye. They both will sort of blur together into one image, but nothing you can make out very well. Stare straight ahead, right through the screen to a point several feet behind. Tricky to do with a screen in your face. It is still burry. Just ignore that. Keep your head level.

Now, very slowly, I mean really slowly, move your face backwards. Or the screen forwards, your choice. Keep staring in the distance. If at any point the two images that are blurry in the middle together start to spread apart, stop, and go back a bit again until they remerge. Keep relaxing. Come back out again and repeat until you are about 10 inches away. Relax. The central image will slowly un-blur, and become clear. Suddenly you will see the object in full 3D. And the surprise will make your eyes revert back to focusing on the screen, and you will have to start all over again.

Once you get it it really does look quite cool. And with a bit of practice you will be able to do it more and more easily. I can do it now without even moving my head. Since you liked that pic, I created a second one for you to practice on, based on the first, a sort of clubby thing that you might knock people on the head with who look at you funny. With eyeballs staring right through you.

Pipes Redux

What is brown, lies on the ground, and is sticky? Answer at the end. Don't peek.

Three weeks ago I showed you four shiny pipes, each one actually a join of several pipes together. But all the joins were at right angles. And based off a cube (a pipe coming out of two or more faces of the cube). Ever since I have wanted to revisit them, and do a much better job.

Remember back in school when you learnt the five platonic solids. Everything from the simple cube to the complex icosahedron. And you probably thought you would never need them again. And you probably never did. Just like most of the stuff you learn in school. Well, I took each of them, and created pipes coming out of each face. You can see them below, 4 pipes for the tetrahedron, 6 for the cube, 8 for the octahedron, 12 for the dodecahedron, and 20 for the icosahedron. I know, I'm such a dork.

I smoothed them all, and then added some textures, and color blending, and various things so they didn't look so flat. The red cube based one is nice, looks like its very hot in the center and cooler toward the edges. But my favorite is the orangey dodecahedron one, the pipes are round and fat, with just the perfect amount of unevenness to the surface so you know it would feel nice under your fingertips. And something about it just looks nicer that all the ones based on triangles.

Generally I think they all came out pretty well. The blue one looks like it has zillions of glass shards embedded in it. And the green one is sort of barky. Not that bark usually comes in green. And the cyan one's surface is like a whole tube of spearmint toothpaste was smeared all over it. So I guess you could say it is sticky.

Which reminds me of the sticky question I posed at the beginning. So what is it that is brown, lies on the ground, and is sticky? Did you think of the answer? Clever you. A stick of course. I hope you weren't thinking of something else.

Seawater

Not long ago I visited the Hamptons, and had a great day at the beach with some fun people. The water was a bit too rough on the sea itself, so we went to a beach on the other side in the bay. Much smaller waves, and not so windy. Charlotte had to chase the giant goose as it was blown down the beach (I didn't say not windy at all). You are probably wondering what a giant goose is doing on the beach - it was a blow up one, and we floated on it on the water. Not your first guess I imagine.

Everyone enjoyed themselves. Ari got a bit of a shock when he woke up and found himself nose to claw with a spider crab. He likes fish and turtles, but is not so fond of crabs. We had a nice lunch, got a little too much sun, and heard a fun story from Emily about her first visit to the States, how she was stranded, and how everyone in a strange town looked after her so well.

The water was perfect shades of blue, as you can see in the photo below. Perhaps though after looking at this you realize there is something wrong with this picture. Can't put your finger on exactly what it is? Or maybe you have guessed already.

Actually, its not a photo at all. It is of course another pic generated by Blender. It is 3 separate layers, each one perfectly flat, but transparent, and with procedural textures added to them to create the illusion of waves. Large waves, and medium and small waves. And affecting the way the light reflects off it. It is amazing what some random numbers and the right algorithm can do.

That evening we met a lovely couple that lived in the area, and went out to a seafood place that served the freshest fish I have had in a long time. It had probably just jumped out of the sea that afternoon. I could render some fish next, but they just won't be the same as the real thing.

Texture Maps

This is a perfectly flat square. In 2D. With a single flat color. It has a texture applied to modify the "normals", which means light falling on it will behave as if its not flat at all, but modified to the shape of the texture. A wonderful little trick that is used all the time to speed up rendering by keeping the number of vertices and faces low.

If you look carefully at the "stones" above any of the lights, you can see the highlights at the bottom of the stones, and shadows at the top. And if you look at the stones directly under the lights, you can see no shadows at all. Just as if the stones were actually protruding from the flat surface of the wall.

Blender also lets you apply the texture directly to make the vertices on the surface actually be displaced. Which you need if you are going to look at the texture side on, and see the actual silhouettes of the bumps, for example, a mountain range. But for this you need a lot of vertices. Thousands of them. Millions. And if you want to animate that you need a whole stack of computers, which is called a "render farm". All the CGI movies you see have large render farms working for months creating all the final frames. So there are definite limits to what you can do with just one computer. Once I push this computer to the limit it will be time to buy a newer, faster one. But that will not be for a while yet. At least I hope so, my wallet isn't very fat at the moment.

Stained Glass Windows

Imagine standing at an old wrought iron gate, rusted and partially open, beckoning you in. Beyond is a garden, winding around to the side and behind the massive ancient church to your left. Its stones look like they have been standing their patiently forever, watching the world as it passes them by. You step through the squeaky gate, along the garden, unkempt and overgrown, patches of thistles scattered amongst daffodils that looked like they flew in from the neighbor over the fence. The breeze softly rustles them, adding to the muted sounds of an organ coming from inside.

As you come around to the back corner, you see a small cemetery hiding behind, a few tilted tombstones fading in the sun. An angel with its wings covering its eyes leans over the largest of the stone slabs, protecting the inhabitant beneath from all who might defile it. The sun is diagonally opposite, on the other side of the church, and shines brightly right through two sets of stained glass windows, in the process dappling and refracting in a kaleidoscope of color. The gravestones take on a patchwork quilt appearance, each a collection of oddly shaped reds, greens and blues.

If only I could take that image in your mind, and visualize it for you, in a stunning panorama of each of the elements in perfect detail. Instead, all I have for you is a ghostly shadow of a play on words. Not the stained glass windows you were thinking of, but colored glass windows, soiled by splotches of dried mud thrown up by a virtual thunderstorm. The light shining from behind, illuminating the grubbiness as much as the windows, casting stained shadows on the ground, a tinge of their original colors projected horizontally.

Luckily your imaginations far exceed anything I could do, and you can even hear the chirp of the bright red cardinal as it sits on top of the angel's wingtip, searching for a juicy beetle or grasshopper in the long grass between the plots.

Total Eclipse of the Blender

Space. The Final Frontier. No, scratch that, Star Trek is too clinical and pristine. For all the inspiration it has given inventors the world over, it does not have the grittiness or real-life-ness to make it in any way believable as a possible future. Need something more like Firefly.

Blender provides an automatic star background, so that part was easy. And the planet is just a simple sphere with bit of a texture on it to look like it has land and sea. The fun part is the star. It has the ability to show a set of vertices as halos, spots of light. And each spot can have lots of additional features, such as flares, rings surrounding the spot, lines emanating from it, star shapes around it, and several other fancier things. Plus of course varying the size and brightness of the spot itself. In combination it gives a large space of different effects, from ghostly wisps of light through sun sized nuclear burn-outs like this one. Which look like its about to engulf this planet which is getting way too close. That water won't be there for much longer.

Once I learn how to do animation, I am going to see if I can get this sun spinning, and see whether I can actually make it look active and dynamic, and not just a static model. Twenty more chapters to get through before we get to animation, so don't hold your breath just yet. Not that you had any attention of doing so anyway.

Jelly

Imagine if you held this strange rock in your hand. Or perhaps its not a rock, but a wobbling blue blob of jelly. Or maybe its a freeze frame of a large drop of colored mercury floating in free space. We get a lot of information from sight, but the sense of touch can make all the difference in identifying something.

I learnt two things to make this unidentified non-flying object. The first was meta-balls, an old technology in the graphics world, where you place balls in 3D space that "bleed" into each other when they come close. And then you sculpt them by smoothing, inflating, and shrinking their vertices. And end up with really strange looking shapes.

Secondly, I am finally starting to learn how to do textures in Blender. This object has a cloud texture affecting the colors, and a ''stucci'' texture affecting the normals, which means that it creates fake shadows and highlights over its surface. They may be fake, but they convincingly fool the eye into seeing indentations and folds where none actually exist.

So pick up this blob, and feel the lovely wobbly jelly all over your fingers. Then taste it - its blueberry. Yum.

Curvy

What is it about curves that people are attracted to, so much more than straight lines. We live in a world of blocky buildings and flat surfaces. And yet we seem to be instinctively drawn to the exact opposite. The fluidity of long wavy hair, the curvaceousness of a SHB, the smooth streamlined flow on a Porsche Carrera.

Some things in Blender are surprisingly easy. You can make quite complex looking shapes sometimes very simply. Make a simple wavy curve, like a triangle but wobbly. Then make another simple closed curve, again a bit wobbly. Then apply the 2nd curve to the 1st curve as a Bevel Object, and you end up with the shape below. Even after applying it, you can continue to modify one or both curves to get just the shape you want.

You could use this for practical things like crown molding (the bits of wood between walls and ceilings), gutters, doorways, anywhere where the same cross-section applies along the whole length of the shape. Or just for strange looking shapes like this one.

Logo

What's your favorite logo? Think about it for a second and choose one. Now, I'm going to read your mind, and guess something about it? Ready? It's blue. Or at least, it's mostly blue. Am I psychic? Yes.

No, actually, its just that most logos are blue, or have a lot of blue in them. Someone made a single pic of the top one million logos on the internet, scaled by web traffic. It looks like the sea, with bits of other colors floating like flotsam and jetsam on the cool blue waters. Must be something deep in our psyches.

Am learning in Blender about Bezier Curves. You can basically trace any flat shape you like as a series of curves. A series of points actually, and controlling the points lets you control the curves. So the lesson today was to recreate a random logo they found on a piece of flotsam somewhere, washed up on the beach of internet culture.

The yellow bit I made with a Bezier curve, and added a little thickness to it. The red bit i made as a cylinder with 20 segments, then joined a couple from one side with a couple from the other to form the slash in the middle. Had to raise it up in the middle to go over the yellow bit, which is why it has some unusual highlights on it.

Not really happy with this one. The bezier curve is not smooth enough, you can still see the straight edges to it in places. And the slash doesn't quite look right.

And worst of all? It's not blue.

Pipe Organ

Have you seen those movies where they have an evil overlord villain, who spends much of his time directing his minions from his massive lair in some remote location. For some reason he nearly always seems to have a huge pipe organ, and loves playing scary dramatic music in a theatrical way. I'm not sure where he get minions with pipe organ building skills. Perhaps he outsources it.

Making pipes in Blender, and joining them together, is done simply, once you know how. The yellow one is a simple T-joint, although I haven't yet worked out how to get the edges round. The cyan one I did next, starting with a cube, and extruding in all 6 directions at the same time.The magenta one is the same, but just in 3 directions instead of 6. And the green one is a small tube coming out of a larger tube, nearly twice the diameter, using a totally different technique called retopology.

They looked pretty bland, so I made them all shiny. Who doesn't like shiny? No-one, that's who.

Notice how at the joins, some of them come together very sharply (the yellow one), some very smoothly (the magenta one), and some half way in-between (the cyan one). You can easily control the smoothness of the intersection edges to get the effect you want. Just like the smooth and handsome hero (or beautiful heroine) that always controls the evil villain in the end.

Jeep Redux

Ok, so I went back and added a spare tire and tail-lights. And a steering wheel. But they were pretty quick. And the jeep needed a view from the back anyways.

Unfortunately when I render the image, it displays on a black background (which is actually alpha, i.e. not there at all). So when you see it on a white background, it looks a bit strange, especially the glow from the tail-lights. Once I design a whole ground and road and bushes and things around the jeep, this problem will go away. For now it just looks weird. (Check out the wonky right-hand tail-light.)

In Blender you can make one object the parent of the other, so that if you move the parent, the child object moves too. But if you move the child, the parent does not move. And you can set the center or pivot point of any object. So I was easily able to spin the rocket launcher around on the tripod to point in a different direction. Much easier than spinning the whole jeep around to shoot at your enemy.

Jeep

Now its time to do something a little more complex. Something that has several parts to it, rather than just one. Start with some wheels (tires plus hubcaps), vaguely bucket seats, a chassis, and a windscreen. Add a somewhat unusual accessory for the average office worker, a rocket launcher, and you have the perfect start for a jeep. Don't forget some spare ammo. After shooting off one rocket launcher, the next thing you obviously want to do is to do it again. And a few more times. Boom baby!

The tire treads were interesting to make, the hubcaps pretty easy. The seats were again based on cubes, rounded around the edges, with some seams added in. And the body of course is cube-based, but took a lot of steps to make it into a full chassis. And added a small bevel on all the edges so it didn't look quite so blocky. The windscreen is probably a bit too reflective, way to glarey for actual driving in any sort of safe manner. Then again, with a rocket launcher on the back, safety is not exactly a high priority.

You could spend ages on something like this, adding all the details that would make it more realistic. A spare tire on the back, grill on the front, head-lights, tail-lights, steering wheel, rear-view mirrors, fenders, roll-cage, or sorts of stuff. But then who has that sort of time? I settled with adding sights on the launcher.

Chrome

Have you ever seen a car body shop, where they used to fix up those old cars that were in fender benders. They had huge vats of stuff they would dip the fender into, and it would come up looking all shiny. Was like liquid chrome. Bit like Terminator 2. Luckily cars don't often come into contact with liquid nitrogen, or all that shiny chrome would look rather messy shattered into a thousand pieces. Of course, cars don't come in chrome anymore, everything is plastic these days.

As you can see, this is exactly the same as the previous goblet. Except the material has had a single change made to it, adjusting the fresnel value, which varies how diffuse the reflection is. For this one, fresnel is set to zero, which gives it a mirror finish like the chrome on a brand new fender.

I haven't yet tried putting two mirrors facing each other to get that reflecting to infinity look. Or maybe several funhouse mirrors, curvy ones that distort your body to look like some weird clown with large feet and a huge 1-pack (only 5 short). Or maybe a spherical mirror to give that wide-angle lens look. Or sorts of fun ahead.

White Gold

You always see the rich kings and princess eating expensively and drinking wine out of fancy goblets made of gold. We rarely realize that nearly everyone in developed countries lives more lavishly than the richest nobility from hundreds of years ago. Will people living hundreds of years from now think the same way of us?

Instead of a cube, I used a cylinder to make this goblet, which is why it looks much rounder. Then widened and narrowed it up and down accordingly to get the goblety shape. Blender makes scaling sets of vertices very easy, in any of 6 directions (not the 6 you might think - ask me if you are interested).

The tutorials I am doing slowly introduce new concepts and techniques. This time it was spotlights and shadows. Only one shadow so far, maybe I will do more in later models. And more details for reflections, such as fresnel effects. On both the goblet and the table surface. The final product looks like a drinking glass fit for a prince.

Glass Goblet

If a piglet is a small pig, and a droplet is a small drop, I guess a goblet is a small gob. Which is British and Australian slang for "mouth". So maybe you need a small mouth to drink from a goblet.

Amazingly, you can start with a cube in Blender, and end up with no straight lines anywhere. It has this thing called sub-surfaces. You give it a cube with 6 faces, tell it to sub-surface, and it turns each face into 4 faces. Which arrange themselves to halve the angles between the faces, so you end up with something rounder. Which sounds like the result after eating at McDonalds for too long.

If you sub-surface to level 2, you get each of the sub-surfaced faces sub-surfaced as well, so the 4 faces then becomes 16 faces. And you can sub-surface to level 3, 4, 5, etc. Each time the result is smoother than before.

Each part of this goblet was a cube, or something vaguely cubish (not cubist, that's those crazy painters from last century like Picaso). The stem and part you drink from was a very tall tube (or a "skinny" one if you don't mind being politically incorrect).

Ray-tracing comes in handy here again, not this time for reflections but for refractions. Like when you throw a spear into a lake to catch the fish but it misses by six inches cause the light has been bent. Until you adapt and aim 6 inches away from the fish. Clever human.

The base looks a bit too small, but I think that's an optical illusion from the perspective. In Blender you can view the scene in Orthogonal (straight-on) or Perspective mode, where things closer to you look bigger. Like that exam you haven't studied for tomorrow.

Rolling

Not stones. I wasn't thinking of moss, and neither were you. Although both of us are now I guess. Let's stop.

I took the die from yesterday, modified it a bit, duplicated it (Shift-D in Blender, nearly everything has a keyboard shortcut (designed for power users, remember?)), and rotated them all around a bit, in different directions, so they looked like they had just been rolled out on to a table. With some of them still falling, and spinning.

A very shiny table. In fact one that makes a good impersonation of a mirror. Without the "mirror, mirror on the wall" banter. To do this you have to turn on ray-tracing, which is trick for getting light to bounce of mirrors, and do other things that light does. And give somewhat realistic effects.

The modifications were making the single pip twice as large as the others, and pushing each of the six faces in a little to make the corners tighter. Better for rolling. Not that these virtual dice will ever touch a real table. Or moss for that matter. Sorry, I shouldn't have reminded you.

Die Another Day

James Bond is pretty cool. And it was a good movie. But I'm not really talking about that.

I promised a brighter (and hopefully better) version of the Die from yesterday. This one is a nice soothing red. The color of blood. Notice there is never much blood in Bond movies? Funny that, considering how much violence they have.

Anyways, this one has nice white pips. That are much rounder than the previous one (those were a bit squarish). Ok, not exactly white, more sort of a bluish tinge. Like the blue lips on a corpse. Very soothing.

Must be made of something very shiny, cause the light seems to bounce right off it. I forgot to mention, you can place one or more lamps anywhere you like in the scene, and get all sorts of light effects. Sunlight, spotlights, area lights, whatever. Intense, pale, colored, your preference. You can make that corpse look nice and shiny too, and show off those blue lips really well. Or not.

Die

No, I'm not being morbid. I'm not being nasty and telling you to commit suicide or anything.

My second Blender model is a die, you know, the singular of dice. Not just a cube with painted on dots, but a cube with nice rounded corners, and pips that are actually indentations in the face. This one looks a bit on the dark side, shades of dark purple and darker purple. Ok, perhaps a little on the morbid side, the color of rotting zombie flesh. Don't get too depressed, I'll do a brighter one next time.

Blender

Ok, its been 2 years since my last post. I've been busy. Sue me. I promise the next post won't take so long.

Have discovered 3D modeling. In a program called Blender. It is an awful lot of fun, creating objects from scratch, spinning them around in full 3D, then "rendering' them (creating an image from a specific camera position and angle, at any size you like).

The program has extensive tutorials, which anyone can follow. The interface seems somewhat overwhelming at first - its designed for power users not novices, so you just have to take your time and go through the tutorials and become a power user. Very powerful, has a ton of options, and lots of functionality, up to and including procedural textures, animation, and particle effects. But I am a long way from learning any of that yet, for now am just doing basic modeling.

Here is (nearly) my first model, that started as a sphere, and was pushed and pulled into something vaguely resembling a penguin. Not that he would fool any real aquatic flightless bird for a second.