Without a doubt some of the most "elegant" follow up meeting notes
I've ever read on a computer meeting.
Thanks Melissa for writing them.
And sorry Oscar that I had to miss your presentation last night as it
sounded great.
-Kevin
Kevin LaTona
STUDIO SOLA
Web | Mobil Development
Seattle WA USA
current work: http://studiosola.com/2/web.html
services: http://studiosola.com/2/services.html
linkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/kevinlatona
On Nov 11, 2011, at 11:16 AM, Melissa Rice wrote:
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?
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Some radio waves were modulated in the creation of this email.
