Vertice Movement

I am beginning to understand the tiny steps that are involved in modeling a head with front and side view.  This is just the beginning.  Basic moves and the cutting tool seems to be the basis.

Here is the sketch the girl from our youth group made.  I am going to attempt to head model it, although I am realizing that as I went through a detailed head tutorial, I don’t have a side view or anything to go by to display this face in side view in blender.

hmmm……..

This might be a little tough as I will have to just come up with what the head shape probably looks like in side view….unless of course I google anime images and find a side view to work from.

There is a student in our youth ministry that is really good at drawing anime. I had her draw me a character so I can practice head and facial modeling. I plan on using this tutorial I found at blendernation. It looks thorough and detailed, something my 3rd grade level brain can understand.

I’ll post her anime sketch in the next day or so.

I did this banner tutorial in the Gimp. I have been wanting to learn how to make web 2.0/glassy looking buttons and icons. This wasn’t too hard to make and it was fun.

The tutorial can be found here.  I wonder how hard this would be to make in blender.

Okay, so I didn’t get my blog back up - but it is now!  Thanks to Lex, the co-author, we resolved some AT&T 3800 router issues.

I would share a little more but I really don’t want to talk about it - yeah, that’s how sore I am.

….so you can forget the troubleshooting stuff from part 1.

I switched my cable and internet carrier to att uverse.  It took me quite a while to get this blog back online.  The sad thing is I am not sure exactly what I did that finally got it to work.

I think it was  getting the right router numbers in the /etc/networking/interfaces file, which was kind of hard to decipher from the router, really interesting setup there.  Plus I ended up using non-default ports.

Then when FTP capabilities were back online but the blog wouldn’t show up I finally read a post where the att routers would not route packets internally using the public IP.  So then I just edited windows hosts file and it all came back up.  Thank you forums.

Wow, this blog got so stale!  It looks like it’s been like 3 months since we’ve posted here.  We’ll be taking care of that - for now enjoy an old render I made a while back for a series at my church on being “in chains.”

I was browsing through a tutorial that I read about on blendernation. It was about nodes. Shoot, I just tried to look for it but I cannot find it. But it finally dawned on me as I read through some of the work on nodes that they are a big reason why some renders and movies look like they do.

I have tried working with lighting many times but the power in node editing and compositing is more powerful than any scene you could ever setup! You can actually mess with materials and lighting through the node editor to the extent where you could never pull off the same look and effects in the 3D window.

I want to know how to do that!

At our blender class at the Home School Building we have been working on the arm rig from the blender book. We started with the pre-built mesh and then our students had to rig, assign the armature, assign vertex groups, and make IK solvers until they had a “clean” arm that moved how it was supposed to. Then they got to choose what they were going to make their arm do and then animate it. The process works much better when you break down the animation like this:

• lock all bones on beginning pose
• make general adjustments where you want the arm and hand to be - and lock in key frames
• go back and watch slowly so you know where the smaller finger or hand adjustments need to be - then lock those
• keep making passes over and over to fine tune animation
• lastly look for “realism” - does it seem too weird or unnatural? - make more passes to add more key frames to adjust the animation for smooth movement.

The basic thought is know where you want to start and know where you want to end up, then make as many passes as it takes watching the animation unfold to know where you want to add minute movements and detail.