For the past couple of weeks I’ve had the itch to get back into 3D Animation. Its been a few years, since college, that I’ve done any animation. So I decided to download Blender and go through some of the tutorials I have. One of the things I have is a Blender 3D Design Course. I was happy when I fired Blender up and I still remembered some of the keyboard shortcuts. I also like some of the new features that have been added since I last used it.

To start off the course it went through a tutorial to model and animate a little submarine.

The next lesson was about basic modeling skills. The first tutorial from this lesson was modeling a sofa.

Then it had you apply a texture to it.

The 2nd tutorial was modeling a simple hand.

Then adding an odd texture to it.

The 3rd tutorial in the lesson was modeling a snowman scene. I went a little further than the tutorial did. First this is how they wanted it to look.

I decided the straight black arms, black nose, and circle mouth all looked kinda stupid, so I made mine better.

The next lesson has you animating the snowman scene and I’ve already been thinking about how I’ll make it better than what they show.

All in all I’m having a lot of fun and look forward to learning more about Blender than I have known in the past. I’ll have to dig up my stuff from school and post it.

-Dexter-

The following Sunday we sat down to carve them. My brother went with a pattern from the kit called AI Face. I used one I had found on the internet of the linux mascot tux.

Beginning to carve

Its slimy and gross in there

Yes the tongue helps

Me scraping my pumpkin

My brother doing some carving

My brother getting help from dad

My brother's pumpkin lit up

The way mine turned out

My brothers looked awesome when it was lit up. As you can see on mine I carved out the middle but then scrapped down the feet and beak areas. Scraping a pumpkin, just so you know, is insanely difficult. I ended up using an X-acto knife to help. I was hoping the effect would be something like a glow through the part of the pumpkin that was still there. It kinda worked but not as well as I had hoped. Oh well it still looked cool and was fun to do.

btw. Blogging pics with wordpress is kinda a pain. I need to get gallery2 setup and hooked into this thing.