zengar

Yeah, it's been a while since I posted one of these. In my defense, I have been working on something but had to start over twice when undocumented keystroke combinations rendered me unable to continue editing the project. I could render it, and technically I could edit it from the perspective of the camera, but the field of view was blank in top/front/side views.

I know I've mentioned that Blender isn't user friendly, but I'm not sure if I mentioned precisely how. Just about everything can be done by keyboard command, and that takes a lot of keys so just about every key is overloaded. Shift+key, Alt+key, Ctrl+Key, Shift+Ctrl+key... Keys that will do different things depending on whether you're in edit mode or in object mode, or if your cursor is in the view window or the control panel window. As a result, while I know that it was pressing "Ctrl+P" that messed me up, I don't know what it actually did. Normally it just parents on object to another, and I have no idea what I did different those two times. Now I just save before I use it just in case.

Anyway, I turned this out while taking a break from building that project for the third time:
( This is actually just a cylinder on a simple plane . . . with a bunch of fancy material work. )

This time not everything was procedural, I used a drawing of an eagle from here.

And what have I been up to on this fine and sunny (if also windy enough that the perceived air temp is only 37 degrees Fahrenheit) Saturday afternoon? I've been running through tutorials re-teaching myself how to use Blender. This becomes necessary every time I go without using it for more than a few months because the creators of it don't buy into the whole "user friendly" idea, and important features are sometimes moved when they update it. It is free, however, and it is powerful. (no, really. Take a look at some of the things in that gallery. I'm not sure I believe that some of the really were computer generated, much less using free software.) This is nowhere near the category of those examples, and it may not look that impresive to someone who hasn't tried to do this, but I'm fairly happy with this trial run.
( A render of a scene that contains not one stock texture or model. )
I learned a lot about trying to get glass to look glass-like from this one. And wood isn't an easy texture to mimic (procedurally) either.

It'll be a little while before I have anything really interesting to post, since my imagination probably exceeds my abilities at this pint. If, however, I don't have anything to show for my time in a week or so, please get on my case for being lazy.