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Earth, in it's new neighborhood

From Learning 3D

This was thanks to some fantastic tutorials:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=76226
http://www.enricovalenza.com/realplan.html
and
http://chamberlinproductions.110mb.com/blenderearth.html

And no, I didn't just swipe the .blend file, I actually walked all the way through the tutorial, and, gasp!, even sort of understand how it works!

CAD style modeling in Blender

I found this fantastic site here: Modeling a 608 Bearing that walks you through modeling a fairly complex set of shapes (at least for a newbie). It pretty detailed, and quite clear, and hte results are quite cool. After having gone through it, you definitely feel like you have a lot better grasp on how to conceive of shapes and how to get the final output you want - and it's *nothing* like how you'd work when you draw freehand.

Some shots:

From Learning 3D

From Learning 3D

Note the change in lighting! Changing the second light to a spot light, bringing it out a tad and focusing the spot on the bearings made a huge difference in color, bringing out the "gold" color of the bearing cages and allowing you to see the fold over clips much better, better contrast and so on.

From Learning 3D

From Learning 3D

From Learning 3D

Traveling at the speed of light in Blender

Simple, silly, but looks quite cool!

Take a scene, set up a camera, go to the World buttons view, add a texture (with an image associated with it). Click on the Map To tab, and make sure that only the "Hori" button is toggled on. Instant background.

From Learning 3D

Now, let's tell Scotty to turn on the light speed engines, so flip to the "Texture and Input" tab, and change the "View" toggled button to "AngMap".

From Learning 3D

Play with the dX, sizeX, dY, and sizeY values and you can get something like this:

From Learning 3D

First model with Houdini!

This is my first attempt at a real model with Houdini. No textures on the model yet, but it's a halfway decent first stab. Note to the Blender folks - lighting and camera positioning in Houdini sure seems ALOT easier than in Blender.

From Learning 3D