Wow, my OpenOffice plugin is working as a blogging client, and the spell checker has decided to switch itself on as well. OpenOffice rocks. After trying and failing with a long list of Linux blogging platforms, including one called Bilbo Bloggins of all things – none of which I could get to work in Puppy Linux – it’s great to finally be able to prep a blog offline.
The OpenOffice blogging client doesn’t work perfectly, and it reports an error after posting. I also have to add tags myself later from within the online WordPress interface, and the setup was anything but intuitive, but all in all I’m very happy.
Anyway, last time I posted I was talking about working into a render of the inside of a spaceship mesh done in Blender. I’m working into it with a graphics tablet (a Bamboo Pen tablet -bottom of the range, but still very capable). I have to use the tablet on my Windows machine, because I still haven’t managed to get it to work with Puppy Linux. I tried following some instructions on the Internet, but when I edited my Xorg file as described my computer did a good impression of having kicked the bucket. As soon as it had magically come back to life again I vowed never to edit such a system critical file ever again… until the next time.
Anyway I’m using this graphics tablet and I’m aiming to produce an image, a concept painting/drawing, which is something reminiscent of a Ralph McQuarrie illustration. Although I just saw some more up to date design paintings and visualisations in Edge magazine today, which are – some of them – just as good as the old school stuff. Edge is a UK computer games magazine, but one with very high production values. I’m not providing a link though because their online presence isn’t anywhere near as good as their print version. This concept art site on the other hand has some very nice stuff indeed, including these examples of inspirational spaceship illustrations.
» New 3D Spaceship model with Blender 2.5
