20% Time 5/12/08

This week is a little different because of my hectic schedule.  During Tuesday, I had to take my AP Environmental Science test and wasn’t able to spend the normal amount of my time looking up new tutorials.  However, since I have been looking into several open source programs from the open disc.  The one in particular that I have been really interested in is a 3D animation program called Blender.

I have actually found plenty of very interesting tutorials on my usual haunt: tutorialized.  I was originally going to post an actual animation, but my video card can’t handle the game engine on blender (you use that for physics, like domino stuff).  Then, I tried an animation using key frames.  I just had a simple take off and landing of a rocket using a cone, cylinder, and particle emitting planes (particles are really fun with key frames).  In the modeling area (just the usual 3d editing screen without the actual render, just shapes) it looked ok, but it took to long to render and position the ‘camera’ to fit the whole thing in.  So I tried to take a screen-cast of the modeling animation itself, but my RAM gave out. 

Here I just rendered a specific frame, the default background is sky blue.

Finally, I gave up on the entire idea of being able to upload a video and switched over to jpegs.  I found another tutorial by super3boy that showed you how to make grass.  It was actually really easy.  Just start off with a plane, add particles, and change to static.  From there, just apply the amounts to determine the height, and direction of the blades.  Then by copying and rotating a couple times.  Finally, make one final plane and turn it brown, along with the previous to green.

The outcome is really cool for the amount of time it takes.

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