Many thanks to Oscar Baechler for a fascinating tour of Blender last night.
Oscar showed us the basics of getting around in Blender's UI, including making the model, rigging the model (making a skeleton of "bones" so that character motions can be described), putting skin and texture on this (e.g., fur or feathers), animating and rendering. Blender is written in python and C and has an extensive API exposed and tightly integrated with the UI so that you can go back and forth between the UI and hand-editing the code generated in the UI. Hovering over the UI buttons shows you the API call associated to that action or property (what a good idea!). You can access a full history undo/redo history. Blender imports and exports to an incredibly long list of other tools including animation tools and game engines. You can also make automation tools for Blender such as Nathan Vegdahl's rigify, which automates rigging (see a tutorial video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Txl1X2WVX_E). Oscar also showed us some of his art work (see his blog at http://ogbog.blogspot.com/), an example blender character rig that he made (http://www.blendswap.com/3D-models/scenes/the-cataphract-rig-version-1-2/) that you can download and play with, a blender file exchange website (http://www.blendswap.com/), and other useful blender sites such as http://www.blendernation.com/. He described the Blender business model which seems very successful in the sense that the quality and speed of development of Blender rivals that of commercial software yet Blender is free and open source. It works like this: open movie projects are proposed with the direct purpose of adding specific capabilities to Blender. DVD pre-sales fund developers to make the movie and to build the new Blender features in the process. Once the movies are made they are available for free download (of the movie and the blender source files) as well as for purchase of the DVDs. Check out the movies here: http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/movies/ and production information here: http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/blender-open-projects/. Oscar runs SeaBUG (Seattle Blender Users Group at http://seabug.eventbrite.com) where he frequently delivers tutorial talks, as I understand (next SeaBUG meeting is 3 December). Oscar's friend and colleague, Tony Mullen, has written many Blender books, which you can find at Amazon or hopefully wherever you like to buy technical books. Oscar is also writing a Blender book, so check out the SeaBUG meetings where you might get to see Oscar demonstrate some cool stuff from his upcoming book! Hopefully someone will correct me if I have mis-stated anything or messed up the terminology at all. I'm not in animation myself, but Oscar's demonstration was so cool it made me want to get cloned in order to have time to try out Blender. And if you were at the meeting last night and you recall something cool or interesting which I forgot to mention, please post to the list. Thanks! Best regards, Melissa ----- Dr. Melissa Rice, PhD Full Moon Technical Solutions, LLC 14202 60th Ave, NW Stanwood, WA 98292-4808 email: mailto:[email protected] phone: 360-654-0709 cell: 425-923-7713 Friday, November 11, 2011, 10:06:25 AM, James Thiele <[email protected]> wrote: I am really interested in Blender but could not attend last night's meeting. Are there slides/notes somewhere? -- Some radio waves were modulated in the creation of this email.
