(My new shoebox inbox! Who says you can’t be thrifty and organised)
So I’m trying out Getting Things Done again. Well, at least my own hacked together version. The basic idea is to turn all those wafty, hard to define knowledge work ideas and projects into solid actions that you know how to do, when [...]
This is the second part in my Blender tutorial series. The series index is here.
So, on to the fun part: 3d modeling! 3d modeling is of course a massive subject. I’m not going to try to teach it, since I’m really not an expert or even particularly skilled. I’m going to teach you the basic [...]
Not particularly fun. Using a physics engine like APE straight out of the box can slow down prototyping a little, when you can’t get the functionality you want without breaking the laws. But I don’t know how to program constraints!! It’s just a pity APE’s constraints are so soft, and there’s no real way around [...]
Did you know that TextMate, the plain text editor that I thought I was using to write the theme is super-clever? Did you know that I’m also using it to write this blog post, and all blog posts previous? Also, it’s hella better for writing actionscript than Flash’s crashy, slow and messy interface. Also, it [...]
Let’s be clear here. I don’t understand Hooting Yard on the Air, but I’m slowly getting closer to doing so. Although Frank Key’s stories are available in written form, the recorded format is perfect for them. In the written form, I simply cannot focus for long enough to trawl through the massive blocks of lengthy [...]
I’ve written a tutorial previously on setting up Blender’s UI, so if I miss something here, it may be in the other one.
Panels
So you start up Blender and it looks something like this. Now if we want to change some of the settings for Blender, get it working the way we want, the first [...]
Blender is a pretty handy piece of software to have around, if only because it’s free and works on every platform so you can always have it around. And unlike Maya, it’s small and fast. Like Maya though, it’s a horror show to learn initially. After you learn the twisted logic that is behind Blender’s [...]
Just playing with some of the new features in Papervision. It has a bunch of different shading methods (this is gouraud, but it has toon shading and flat shading as well), and bump mapping, which will be super handy since you’re still restricted to a low number of triangles.
Click to see.
Best five minute thing I’ve done today? download and play Passage.
It’s heartbreaking, and has wonderful design and presentation. It’s also interesting if you’re interested in abstract representations of complex ideas, rather than standard literal interpretations. I didn’t notice until the right towards the end the weird effect that’s going on isn’t just a weird effect, [...]
New version of the Papervision 3D engine for flash is out! Haven’t investigated much yet, but it has support for shading, custom shaders (bump mapping, etc.), and animation of 3d models through the new COLLADA classes. I’ll post more when I’ve experimented with.
Good stuff!