I can spell Blender and Sculptris in Greek characters! Βλενδερ ανδ Σγυλπτρισ ιν Ηρεεκ γθαραγτερσ!

I noticed I haven't been blogging lately.  For Summer, it's been a busy time!  Keeping the blog up-to-date, I said earlier that I was working on an animation more serious than the others.  The primary difference here is that this movie will include sound , which was not in any of my previous ones.  This is harder than I thought, mostly because: a) only certain output settings show the "Encoding" section that handles sound, b) a lot of the encoding options say when you try to render, "Error initializing video stream" and then there's c) when the right combination is finally reached, there's either no audio or no visual.  Either way, then despite its also being 4 seconds long, I think once the problem's solved it'll be worth the (reeeeally long) wait. On another note, I've started helping to teach some of my family members about Sculptris!  Soon now,  I'll be able to show off show you their stuff as well as my own! On yet...

I’ve shown what Sculptris can do, but I haven’t really said how it does it.  Well, first of all:  Sculptris isn’t a computer animation program.  Really.  It’s an advanced computer modeling program, but at least as of my current knowledge it doesn’t make the objects you create move .  Nor, I believe, can you even save them as JPEGs (universal picture files, for those of you who don’t do technical computer stuff).  However, you can export the files as OBJs (universally compatible 3-D files) and import them to another program, say Blender, and save some files as JPEGs from there.  And you can modify your objects there, too. When you start Sculptris, you start out with a gray sphere made up of triangles.  With this preset you are given nine basic controls.  I will try to explain those which are not self-explanatory:  Crease, Rotate, Scale (which scales up or down anything within your circular selector), Draw (opposite of cr...

Sorry for the slow blogging! I noticed that I said earlier, "I use Blender and Sculptris for my animations".  I have done tons of posts on the former, though hardly one on the latter.  This is mostly because I use Blender far more often and hardly use Sculptris at all, though it most certainly needs at least one post to itself. First of all, Sculptris has a different interface than Blender and Maya and all that, so to speak.  It views itself as "clay" that you can sculpt to your leisure.  You can do a lot of cool stuff with it, but, being an amateur, I did this simple model first: Well, it's about as easy as modeling goes, but as least it's something.  After that, I decided to do Blinky and the gang! I did the background in Blender, but Pac-man and the ghosts are from Sculptris. http://www.newtek.com/lightwave/ , another animation program, is the link of the post.  I don't actually think there's anything else to say here.  However,...

Technical alert: this post explains how to do things in technical detail; you can skip this post if you're not interested in that kind of thing. Now, I am an amateur as you could see by some of my models, but nevertheless I also like teaching others about what little I know about Blender and other 3D software.  Today, the physics engine is my focus. There are seven different types of physics in Blender.  Force Field can make things like wind, tornadoes and, well, force fields.  Collision is necessary for projects that involve gravity--which would include clothing, floors, objects... basically anything in an advanced project.  Cloth makes your object turn into, well... cloth.  Fluids and Smoke also speak for themselves, and I have no idea what "Dynamic Paint" and "Soft Body" do. The physics engine is absolutely necessary for any advanced project; if you want snow to move around, that's a good time to use Force Field; Collision can help if yo...

I believe that I’ve told you about Modifiers in a previous post.  You also have the opportunity to change the sky color, as I did for this poor fellow, who was also made using the “Gus” formula.  I have yet to figure out what all those triangles are on his head; my guess is that it has something to do with the lighting, his angled head and a shadow?  But anyway, today’s link of the post is http://usa.autodesk.com/maya , the website of Autodesk Maya, which I don’t have with me at the time (hint: it costs more than zero bucks) but I hear that a lot of other animators have it, so it deserves a mention here.

I realize very few of you have Blender, but Photoshop is much more common in users.  Therefore, I have decided to tell about what the most useful tools are (or rather, what I tend to use most often--different users are free to do their 'shops in different ways). 1) The most basic of all, the brush allows for simple fun stuff-making.  Good for lightsabers, "glowing" effects, stuff like that. 2) Liquify, which one can use on on particular spot  (e.g. elf ears and completely messing up frowns and smiles) or on the whole thing (which I used for the background of my me-vs-three-evil-clones star wars picture). 3) The magnetic lasso tool.  Some just use lasso and leave it at that, but also available are the polygon lasso tool (selects using lines) and magnetic (my favorite--selects by "sticking" to similar colors to help select one particular person, object, etc).  Anyway, it helps you to select stuff so you can move it from a family photo to an anci...