Tag Archives: problem solving

First stumblings with Blender 2.5

I’ve updated to Blender 2.5 and I’m starting to stumble around. I didn’t change to Blender 2.5 for any particularly good reason, I was quite happy with 2.94. I only installed 2.5 to see if I could get it to work without a graphics card the same way 2.94 will. I did my graphics card [...]

GIMP Tutorial section gets a makeover

I’ve been working on the tutorials section – including GIMP, Photoshop, etc – at my Illustrations website. It’s going to be a great page when it’s done, with link after link to step-by-step tutorials telling how to paint and render all kinds of images, from sc-fi to children’s book. But as I was editing it [...]

LiveWriter frustrations, but Sci-fi special at New Scientist includes fiction and other goodies

I love Windows LiveWriter for writing my posts about my experiences learning and using Blender, but it’s never worked well for me. Today I wanted to take a few minutes and post a progress report about my latest work in Blender (a strange 2D, 3D animation hybrid), but LiveWriter repeatedly failed to upload the fantastic [...]

More magic particle problems in my Blender 3D animation, solved!

I’m still working on my 3D cat animation. My playful and magic little 3D cat is trapped in a boring grassy landscape and decides to play a little game and use his magic to spread flowers over the 3D hills surrounding him. Of course the poor cat’s magic is going to have a sting in [...]

Lower bitrate on 3D animation equals smaller file equals faster page load time on site?

This is what I set out to test. With the default Blender audio and video bitrate settings, my animation was rendering as a very beautiful 3D film with CD quality sound, but it was well over a megabyte in size. While waiting for this huge file to download and be displayed people have two choices; [...]

Solved Rotate and Add Mesh problem thanks to – Blender Artists Forums

  Thank goodness for the internet and the brave nerds who post their problems there. In my latest fight with Blender (it had started refusing to add meshes, but actually it was adding them, just way, way, way off screen) I started pushing buttons pretty much at random in the vague, hail Mary, hope of [...]

That 3D spaceship mesh now has a nice planet to orbit

  There have already been a lot of changes made to this blend, which now has quite a few lamps, meshes and even a bit of text scattered about, but there is still a long way to go. The latest big change is that the scene has now got a planet in it. And a [...]

QuickTime mov animations with audio from Blender, how hard can that be?

  My animation was starting to take shape. I had a cat – admittedly a cat that looked like some kind of evil robot sock puppet (but I’m going to work on it) – and the cat moved, so now all I had to do was add a little music and a few sound effects [...]

Mirror Model is essential for 3D spaceship design in Blender, and here’s how to do it.

      Mirror modeling is easy in trueSpace, and helps in producing great symmetrical spaceships for role-playing game illustrations, but it’s not so easy in Blender. A common technique is to model one half of an object and use Alt D to create a linked duplicate which can then be mirrored on one axis [...]

I got Blender working (yippee). Now I have three free 3D engines sitting on my desktop.

My new free 3D graphics suite, Blender (it’s free), seems to have an even steeper learning curve than trueSpace, and the interface looks much more sparse and austere, professional I guess. But these 3D content creation packages are perfect for producing illustrations for science fiction role-playing games, and so it’s worth the effort. I mentioned [...]