Tag: 3D

Blender Materials

Syllie

sharkI had some serious troubles to assign 2 materials to a single mesh of a shark in Blender. Frankly, it was driving me mad… it looked like the mesh was overlapping and the resulting render looked horrible.

Careful study of the model revealed that indeed some extra faces were created when I added the fins. Also a lot of vertices were doubled, which caused problems with smoothing. I cleaned up the mesh and got rewarded with a nice render. The shark is the last model in the TUFTS course on modelling in Blender by Neal Hirsig. The shark will be animated in the very last tutorial…. after that it is time to be on my own two feet.

Correct rendered shark
Correct rendered shark

Blender

Syllie
Beautiful Bugle
Beautiful Bugle

In my last post I wrote about the free course that TUFTS university hosts on Blender. Over the past 2 weeks I have steadily worked through all the lessons, and I feel I have basic control over the Blender interface now. It was a challenge at some points, as the course uses a slightly older version of Blender compared tomine, and Blender keeps changing and improving.

I can truely say that this course was everything I hoped for to get me started with Blender. I could have completed it quicker, but I was in no rush. I think that it is time for any 3D graphics designer to take this application very seriously, as it contains so much more features now. I have become a true fan of this software and I already made plans for items I would like to model using Blender. It will keep me busy for at least another few weeks, and if anything turns out to be good enough for sharing, I will surely share it.

I will also give Umbraco 4 a go. It is still in my plans and it would be good to get my site up and running using a full CMS. So that provides me with enough tasks at hand to prevent me turning into a couch potato. Updates follow soon…

I have been sleeping…

Syllie

… way too long. Too busy packing stuff and tying loose ends. Today I found out that one of the earliest 3D modelers I used, TrueSpace is now available for free, gratuit, gratis, for noppes, nada, nix. Caligari is the company that created TrueSpace and the company was acquired by Microsoft a few months ago.

I have used version 4 of this modeler for quite some time, and got accustomed to the somewhat non-standard but highly efficient user interface. Then as technology progressed and I did not want to spent money on upgrades.. I sort of abandoned it. But WOW.. it is there: version 7.6 for grabs and for keep! That got me all excited! The SDK is available too.. so development of plugins is possible.

Oh boy.. that will keep me stuck to the PC for days and days..