Sorry for the slow blogging–between my Blender classes on K12 (or k12?) and Japanese on the same system, I’ve hardly had much spare web time at all.  Now then, back to the namesake of the title of the post of the blog of the guy. As mentioned, I’ve animated my creature, “Jason the Jumper,” who is not jumping–merely walking.  I realized that I like to do a lot of background stuff, adding a soda drink, table and ground.  However, I did give Jason a path to follow.  I wanted to have him go up and down while running, but I decided it’d just be a lot of trouble for very little benefit. Second, my Assignment: Animate Suzanne.  This one I had a little too much fun with–it was more work.  However, this turned out as possibly my most difficult animation yet–I made the monkey flip.  I used both a path and manually moving it.  It’s hard to notice, but I also made a short path for the camera to follow–going down and then  zooming in (so...

Did you notice I have no idea if the “k” in K12 is capitalized or uncapitalized?  See, in the last sentence, k12 was capitalized.  Yet in that previous sentence, K12 was lowercase.  And yet, in that previous sentence… well, you get the idea.  Anyway, Project 3 introduces modeling , and taught me something new–using a bump map texture; which makes the object look, well, bumpy.  It’s interestingly called “normal” in the influence section of the Texture panel.  My special addition for this project was using “emit” (same section, same panel) to get some parts of the creature to seem to glow.  Upon noticing that it wasn’t a huge change (as well as my not being able to see its eyes), I also changed the camera angle and provided some more lighting.  I actually noticed then that it looked like he was jumping down, so… well, I suppose a picture’s worth a thousand words. “Jason the Jumper”, as I call him, uses particles for the crashing-glass...

I have now added Assignment 2!  Now, I’d like to clarify some details about my Blender classes.  There are actually two parts of each assignment.  The first one is something you must do aided by a walkthrough of each step (or “projects”–Suzanne was the last one) and part two is when you are told to do something and are shown the minimal requirements (which are just called assignments–the eggs).  Now here is my second project: build a house.  This involved constraining my camera to a path, which I believe is part of the parenting family. Paths are new to me; I just learned them during the class.  A path is a one-dimensional line that can’t be seen while being rendered (made into a picture/movie), and one can constrain any object to it to make the object follow it.  Anyway, my “special addition” to the house is: interior decoration! What, adding a table and a Minecraft-inspired bed isn’t enough for you??  *Sigh*. okay, whatever you...

This actually happened some time before this post.  As I said earlier, I’m taking classes of Blender using K12.com, and quite a few of my posts will from now on have to do with the assignments I have to do.  Starting with my first assignments: “Put a hat on a monkey” and “Put a dozen randomly sized and rotated eggs in a carton”.  First is Suzzane: I used my “assign multiple materials” trick from the previous post for the eyes and pupils, and I also used the “Mirror” setting on the Materials properties (no relation to the Mirror modifier) to make the ground reflective.  Interestingly though, I had to be careful about how reflective I made the plane, as too much would completely reflect the sky, which would make it seem like there was no plane at all: Quite interesting, but not the goal of my activity.  As a side note, the stars don’t seem able to be reflected. Second of all (some of you who read Zoom Times may already know this): Eggs. ...

Finally, more pictures of my real modeling!  This post will, as well as showing fun images, involve technical details.  Anyway, this picture uses particles.  I’ve toyed with them before, but I had no idea how to make it work.  It turned out all I had to do was render it!  Particles, among other things, are good for fires, explosions, etc.  Although it appears inconsequential, one of my biggest knowledge boosts was (with the help of my book, which can be Herculean to understand sometimes anyway) assigning multiple textures to the “transporter.”  My problem in previous attempts was pressing the “New      +” in materials, when for more than one in one object I just press the overlooked “+” button near the New Material section. This next one is probably one of my favorite creations: a self-made movie poster! I highly doubt I’m going to make it a real movie, or even a short animation, but still quite fun.  This is ...

Well, more like mutant monkey heads. The original concept of this was from my brother, who also designed most of the monkeys and the background himself.  You see, Suzzane the monkey (shown here) is one of Blender’s primitives, so we just couldn’t resist mutating them awkwardly.  My Yoda post used a “mutant monkey” for the head. Suzzane, an “Easter egg” made exclusively for Blender. Anyway, I did everything I could to make the file a testing for one thing I was experimenting with: the game engine.  I used this for both first-person and third-person games.  The third-person didn’t use advanced movement (they were floating heads) but I could still make them fly around and respond to my keys.  There is a way to make the cameras follow the objects (parenting, which allows certain objects follow other objects) but I wasn’t interested in that at the moment.  Instead, I turned my work to first person, which–surprisingly–turned out to be a lot easier. ...

First of all, our friend, Mr. Bill, just got me a new computer built for graphics!  Including an updated version of Blender, I am now able to build and render images much faster! Second of all, I am now attending an online course teaching Blender!  This should teach me the ins and outs of Blender in a flash! http://www.k12.com , an all-subject online teaching site.