Starbright Illustrations (blog)

I’m missing all the fun I had creating spaceships with Blender and GIMP, and I was in the mood to do another. I already have GIMP on my Ubuntu Karmic Koala system so all I needed was Blender. Clicking install packages from the menu had Blender installed and ready to go in about seven minutes, the quickest Blender install I’ve done yet, yay Ubuntu, but of course it didn’t work straight away.

I had the same problem as last time I installed Blender on this machine, back when I was working with Puppy Linux, namely lots of pixelation and the text missing from all the buttons.

It took about ten minutes of Google research before I found a solution. This forum post solved my pixelation and text missing in Blender buttons problem . And I found another forum post explaining how to make a Blender launcher from this fix here . I made a link to it for my desktop and updated the icon with a png of the Blender logo that I found here .

All in all the install took only about twenty minutes, which is amazing when you think how uncooperative Blender can be if it doesn’t like the look of your graphics card. Although to be fair the problem usually lies with corner cutting in the graphics cards you find in laptops rather than with Blender, which is a very small, quick and well behaved little app.

The install was quick, but it wasn’t perfect, Blender still has some ugly effects on the menus and selecting with the right mouse button is a bit hit and miss.

I fixed it by switching to international fonts in the menu hidden off the top of the screen and turning the font size down to 8.

And as I was playing around getting things just right I thought to myself, why don’t I also download Blender 2.5 Alpha 2 (the latest bleeding edge Blender) unpack it and run the executable, just to see what happens?

It painted my screen black, filled it with icons and then crashed. Apparently I have a rubbish 3D card. I’ll just make do as best I can with the old Blender.

So with Blender working it was time to turn my thoughts to what kind of image I was going to produce. to show off what Blender and GIMP can do.

A wrecked spaceship for some reason came to mind, a long abandoned and overgrown wrecked spaceship. It might take a little while to remember all the shortcuts that Blender uses, but I’ll soon be back in the swing of it. I’ll post results as soon as I have them. I already have a basic 3D trident shaped mesh.