Planet Blender

Pioneer Spaceship for Illustration Friday
Starbright Illustrations (blog) - 2009-12-26 23:57:43

I was very pleased to see that this week’s word on Illustration Friday is Pioneer. I draw a lot of spaceships with GIMP, and design a lot of 3D spaceships too, with Blender, and pioneering is one of the coolest tasks a spaceship can be put to – to boldly go and all that.

For this Illustration Friday image I have added a very literal human pioneer in the foreground of the picture, as well as the pioneer spaceship in the background. There is a hideous alien monster lurking in the bushes too, about to make the astronaut pay for his curiosity with his life, or at the very least scare the living daylights out of him.

This illustration is perhaps not the finished image just yet – I’m thinking there may be some more mileage in it. It has some of the sketchy guidelines of the image which I produced in GIMP with my graphics tablet, and some of the colours of the finished image blocked in too, again in GIMP. I’m thinking of it more as a concept sketch for an electronic painting.

It has already gone through a couple of stages before being considered a finished concept sketch, with colours and shapes being added over several layers. I have saved the illustration in the native GIMP format as well as these jpegs so that it will be very easy to go back to it and bring it from the concept sketch it is now to the completed virtual painting that I think I can see lurking within.

To get it to a more polished and detailed state will require a load more foliage in the jungle, and greebles on the spaceship. The jungle foreground should be darker and the spaceship, planets and sky background should probably be even lighter.

The choice of an alien jungle for the setting of the image is of course explained by the fact that I’ve just seen Avatar, and I loved it. I also got a book of the concept images for the movie, which I’m currently leafing through, and it is interesting to see how many of the design and visualisation images for this sci-fi extravaganza were obviously put together on a computer without harming a single sheet of real, honest A4 paper.

Getting your work digitally printed
Blender Guru - 2009-12-26 14:31:02

Being that it’s Christmas, I decided to put my blender skills to the test by creating a Christmas card for my friends and family. It’s one of the first times I’ve gotten my work professionally printed, so it was all very new to me. The result wasn’t perfect but I learnt a few things that I thought I might share with you.

Learn from my experiences in the video below!

In the true spirit of Christmas, I’m also giving away the source file to my log cabin scene. Feel free to pull it apart and see how it was made!

In 2009, we’ve seen the biggest attendance on record for a Blender conference as well as the massive milestone release of version 2.5, so it has definately been a good year for Blender.  A big thank you to the community and the developers for upkeeping the true spirit of open source. I can’t wait to see what 2010 brings.

Notice How Streetlamps Do Not Celebrate New Years
ArtofInterpretation.com: Recent Images RSS Feed - 2009-12-26 14:00:00

From my "Common Objects Uncommonly" series. Technical notes: Entire scene is mesh. As always, pure Blender internal render.

Intro to UVs/Sculpt on the Alien Character – part 2
Blender Cookie - 2009-12-26 13:00:26

In this follow up tutorial to the Box Modeling an Alien Character, we introduce you to the basics of unwrapping the UVs, simple detail sculpting, and the very basics of texture and normal maps. This is meant as a technical guide on getting you started down the texturing path, please feel free to take these [...]

http://blendercookie.com

Twitter Updates for 2009-12-26
Matt Ebb - 2009-12-26 10:01:00

• @DoctorKarl according to Brian Greene (The Fabric of the Cosmos) smallest meaningful unit of time is Planck Time: 10^(-44) secs in reply to DoctorKarl #

KYouB is back in development
AniCator.Com - 2009-12-26 02:52:02

Videos: BlenderArtists.org Thread: Link Enjoy KYouB’s moves!

Upular
Virgilio Vasconcelos - Animation - 2009-12-26 02:00:34

Look at this fantastic music video made only with sounds and images of Up:

[read the full article]

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!!
Blender Underground's Video Tutorials - 2009-12-26 01:56:56

We here at Blender Underground hope that this Christmas of 2009 finds you well, and that the new year of 2010 will find you even better. At our request, please take an opportunity to fulfill the spirit of this holiday season: forgive a debt, and provide help to somebody less fortunate than yourself. If you’re [...]

Ideas for tutorials
jahka particles - 2009-12-26 00:20:00

My final course exams are now out of the way so I have a tiny bit more time for particles again, but I still have to get my thesis done so only bug fixes for now. However I had this idea for the near future about making some video tutorials about particles not unlike the ones I've already posted in this blog. I don't really know about my artistic abilities, but at least hopefully I know the functionality of the particle system inside and out :)

I don't have any subjects planned out yet and I think I'll throw the ball to you guys. So please leave comments on what would you like to learn about particles. No need to "+-1" the suggestions as after sufficient amount of ideas I'll probably arrange a vote for the first tutorial subject and after that for the second and so on.

There's no timetable yet, but I'm hoping to have time to start at some point during the next months, so start thinking about ideas!