2007 Merry Christmas image courtesy of The Big Dave C
Blender Underground wishes its visitors the Merriest of Christmases for this 2007 Christmas season! (As a side note, the Panther Cannon Walker below apparently uses Christmas colors, red and green, for its detection eye of danger!)
The above model was created by Blender Underground Agent Coyabbit, and was impressive enough that I wanted to share it with the blog. We’ve been following its progress for some time on the forums. Coyabbit has been a BU regular for some time and he frequently shares his work, but this one I wanted to feature because its coolness rating is off the charts. I asked some questions about it and he was kind enough to answer…
I wanted to post an update on the upcoming Materials tutorial (Blender Basics Part 5). This has been a long time in coming, for a number of reasons. Firstly, I’ve been busy with miscellany, from work to family events. I know this is no excuse but…
Chapter seven bounces right into covering your first skeletal animation with the Action Editor: making Captain Blender jump. Building this animation involves developing key poses, then filling in the “tweens.” Key poses, or “key” frames, is a concept that carries over from traditional animation, when the lead animator would draw the primary action poses, and another animator would fill in the “in betweens.” This is how the term keyframes gets its name…
In this chapter of the book, Tony Mullen temporarily puts aside the ongoing project, and focuses on the basics of Ipo Curves, beginning with the perfunctory bouncing ball animation. This introductory project is simple, and not uncommon in texts that teach animation basics; however there’s a reason for this – it works very well, and makes for a more than adequate foray into Ipo curve animation…
A whole new world opens up with chapter 5 of Tony Mullen’s book. It begins with Shape Keys. For those not familiar with these, they are basically vertex animation key frames. The main difference between vertex animation and skeletal animation is, with vertex animation the positional data for each vertex is recorded for each key frame. With skeletal animation, only the bones are key framed, and “vertex weighting” tells an algorithm which vertices to move, corresponding to bones in the armature…
If you spent time with the first three chapters of Introducing Character Animation with Blender, then chapter 4 is what you’ve been waiting for. Tony Mullen takes the reader through building a complete character rig for Captain Blender, from building the armature to applying IK solvers and constraints. The most intriguing of these constraints is the Action constraint…
Not to be outdone by chapter 2, the third chapter of ICAWB squeezes a huge amount of instruction and knowledge into just 37 pages. According to the outline, chapter 3 begins with the Material Datablock, and progresses through Textures and UV Mapping, and Static Particles. Don’t let the brief outline fool you. There’s a whole lot of material in those three segments…
Blender Underground is hosting a friendly little challenge on our forums. There are at least two purposes for this: 1) to generate an owl model for Agent Darth to use as part of a business logo; 2) to assist those interested to build their modeling skills and their knowledge of Blender. You can read about it here on the forums. There are no prizes, but if you want to have a little fun, we’d love to have you.
If you would like to participate, you’ll need to register for the forums. This should be fun and will assist any interested parties in building their Blender skills! We anticipate lots of questions, and forum users helping each other to increase know-how. So if you want to take a shot at it, increase your skills along the way, and interact with others working on similar projects, come on in and join the fun.
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I want to extend special thanks to Agent Darth_Gimp and Damascus, who took the time to design Blender Underground’s forum theme. I have to say: they did an excellent job, far beyond expectation. Blender Underground considers itself fortunate to have members who take interest in making us look good. Agent Darth_Gimp personifies this concept. Come on in and have a look, and make sure to say thanks to Darth_Gimp and Damascus. |
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