So, it's been over a month since my last post and I haven't done a thing.  This is partially because I was: a. in New Jersey with my grandparents and cousin in early early July. b. packing up for summer camp in later early July. c. earning merit badges in summer camp for a week in mid-July. d. this is late July.  And next week I'm going on a family vacation. On to the other excuses for non blogging what's been happening: 1. Of course, there are all the minor details like my birthday , earning a learner's permit , signing college applications, etc. 2. Back with computer animation, I am happy ecstatic to announce that someone has downloaded my TARDIS model !  Somewhere, someone is using it for their own projects!!! 3. Speaking of downloads, I have downloaded and am coloring a Tardis interior from the same website.  To tell the truth, I actually like it that downloads all start out colored gray; it gives the person working with it something to do....

So, directly after I wrote my last post I realized that an update to Blender had been released and that one of the new features was a rendering method known as freestyle .  This is similar to "edge," only it has many more options. Here I placed my previous "edge" picture next to the new "freestyle" rendering.  As well as the much more hand-drawn looking freestyle edges, I also selected "Toon" in the basic material properties (which, by default, is set to "Lambert") and, with a bit of changing the properties (setting the nearby "size" tab to 1.0 instead of 5) you can get something really cel-shaded!  I also set the spectacular (or, how much it reflects light) to zero.  Again, there may still be a few things missing from professional cel-shading, but I am learning more! I've learned that a great way to model is to say "What does this button do?", save your project just in case, and press the button.  Not ...

Waaay back when , I got rather bored, so I drew up a random fellow falling inevitably to an unfortunate demise.  I must unfortunately conclude that after over a year on the blog, he still hasn't reached the bottom. The upper side is that I've not only solved the triangles on his head (it turned out that I had unknowingly duplicated the "head"--and as two things can't occupy the same place at the same time, Blender seems to show this as a random mix-match of triangles) but I've also discovered how to do cel-shaded animation! Here are the timey-wimey details: cel-shading is a way of modeling that makes it kind of look more hand-drawn.  Blender makes this easy: in a "Post Processing" tab in the general properties, you can click a checkbox called "Edge," which will give you a smooth edge surrounding your objects.  Now then, here's the poor fellow I mentioned earlier: The smashing bit about all this is that you can not only cel-shade ...

Done with Japanese part 二 of 四 (コンピューターで　えを　かくのが　大好きですよ)!!!  Beastly sorry for not blogging so long while I was finishing that up.  However, I have also been working on a completely (and I mean completely ) different aspect of Blender: the Node Editor! The Node Editor can be used for many different things, and a moderately new release of Blender added my favorite node ever (also the only one I happen to know): Keying!  In other words: green screening!!  I couldn't resist but to test this out with a professional semi professional rather small red and white blanket!  It took me a while to figure out how to save the rendering.  Fortunately, my book had the answer: I was connecting the keying node to a viewer node, which gives a preview, when I should have been connecting it to a composite node, which actually makes the image/movie show up on the rendering screen. What I was going for was a Harry Potter-style invisibility cloak effect.  Do I even ...

Did I mention I'm back from Japan? Well then, how I managed the Suzzane eye bulge was by using shape keys .  Shape keys can transform an object's shape in a serious way--as in, having a cube transform into a car, an owl into a person (I always wondered how they did that), etc.  All you have to do is make a new shape key (Object Data Properties>Shape Keys> +), which will be the basis key.  Then, make another key.  After that, you can make all the changes you want to the model and that's it!  You can adjust the transformation between the two shape keys via a little slider which will appear on the menu. The Suzzane idea came from Jason van Gumster's Blender for Dummies .

For whenever someone, while talking to me, uses a few words I'd rather not repeat:

Hi!  Way back when , I learned how to modify the game credits of a game known as Bejeweled 2.  But now, I'm getting a bit more ambitious. Grim Tales: The Bride is a puzzle-adventure game.  The plot so far: someone was killed and the person's sister wants to find out what happened.  Quite good, until a demon appears and says he'll tell her what happened if she can do some things, and if she fails he gets her soul.  And the game doesn't give you a chance to opt out.  Now, one of the things I've been taught is that it's generally not a good idea to make deals with demons (when I say generally, I mean always), even if it's in a game, so I shut down the program--but instead of switching to another game, I stayed with it.  In fact, it became one of my biggest obsessions. Why?  Here's an example: Grim Tales is the most hackable game I have ever played. Every single picture in that game has a jpeg image under the game's "hood". I'm an ...