Blender

I asked the Puppy Linux Discussion Forum, can I use a tar.bz2 app with my 4.3.1 puppy?

By The Illustrator | 2009/12/06 11:45 Posted in 3D, Blender, Review, Software, problems | Comments (0)

I’m having a lot of fun experimenting with my new 3D sculpting and rendering suite, Blender 2.5, under Windows XP and I wanted it on my Linux machine too. But of course Linux has a reputation of being for nerds, and very difficult indeed to use, and installation of new apps is one of the things that is creating that impression. So how did I get on with the installation?

Let’s compare what you have to do to get this 3D app working in Linux with the simple and intuitive Windows procedure. In Windows all I had to do is download the Windows version, unpack it (even this can be daunting for inexperienced users, but unpacking a file seems simple to me now) and click the pretty icon with exe written underneath. Blender starts, no problem. But Linux. oh my goodness…

Take a look at this page of hints and tips about what might, and what might not be needed to kick the app into life. And this isn’t the most complex set of instructions I have found as I have been trying to install, oh no, not by a long chalk.

When people run into problems they start mentioning strange things like a scons package. To me that sounds like something that should be enjoyed with cream and jam. They also, with the best of intentions, offer lines and lines of gibberish that can be typed into something called a terminal, which looks like a c prompt and is just as cold and unresponsive. All mine ever says to me when I type the suggested clumps of computer geekery is “No such command or file.” Then it says “#”, and that’s it.

For those who enjoy laughing at the misfortunes of the less initiated here is a forum where I have been explaining the idiot things I have been doing, and begging for hints and tips.

Puppy Linux Discussion Forum :: View topic – can I use a tar.bz2 app with my 4.3.1 puppy?

Over the last few days of Googling around I have read thousands of similar stories of woe from billions (perhaps that last number was exaggerated) of other perplexed Linux users who can’t get stuff to install, compile, call it what you will. It might be a good idea for developers to offer already unpacked and compiled versions for idiots, sure they would be a couple of megabytes bigger, but they would be easier to use.

Having said all this I do have the old version of Blender, Blender 2.4, running on my Linux machine because a friendly forum lurker posted a pet – an easy to install version for my “distro” (Puppy Linux) – and a page of step-by-step instructions on installation. So with Blender’s great reputation for backwards compatibility I should still be able to swap files between the two machines and do useful work on both. And when 2.5 stabilizes I’m pretty sure that another kind-hearted forum spirit will take pity on us mere mortals and provide a Puppy Linux specific, easy to install Blender 2.5 pet package, with instructions.

It’ll probably be a while though…

I’m an early adopter, I just downloaded blender 2.5 alpha

By The Illustrator | 2009/12/04 21:04 Posted in 3D, Blender, Review, Software | Comments (4)

Wow, it’s great to be an early adopter of a state-of-the-art 3D editing suite like Blender. I feel like I’m at the cutting edge, blazing a trail etc. Of course all I’m really doing is poking about with something I don’t completely understand and reporting back some first impressions.

First Impression 1. It’s as easy as pie to install, just do like it says on the download page…

unpack the compressed file to the location of your choice.

Provided the Blender binary is in the original extracted directory, Blender will run straight out of the box. No system libraries or system preferences are altered.

blender.org – Get 2.5 alpha.

First Impression 2. It looks good. The looks of the interface have always been a little functional and basic with Blender (some go as far as to say it isn’t intuitive), and an awful lot of people have listed this as their number one turn off when it comes to getting to grips with this complex and powerful 3D application.

But it actually starts with a 3D scene now! All the old tutorials always used to start explaining what you were looking at when you opened Blender – it was actually a 3D cube seen from above, but it looked more like a sheet of graph paper with a dark bit in the middle. Now that isn’t necessary, it’s obvious at first glance that this app is about 3D.

First Impression 3. The first thing I tried to do was select a face of the default mesh I was presented with at start up. As an experienced user I knew to hit the tab key and click with the wrong button on the face. I’m pretty sure that this idiosyncratic way of working is, as ever, going to be the biggest hurdle for new users. I couldn’t immediately see any new simpler-to-figure-out (i.e. intuitive) way of doing this. But I don’t want to sound too negative. This counterintuitive way of working is rally quick to learn, way less than a day, and most Blender users come to understand why it has to be this way and even like it.

First Impression 4. Next I deleted the face. Now here there has been a huge improvement in the interface. The tool I needed was right there on the screen, and it was very intuitive to use.

I’ve had the this great 3D editing, animation, rendering, you name it it does it suite on my hard drive for only a few minutes and it has already convinced me that great strides have been taken compared to the earlier versions.

More first impressions to come, I’m excited to get to grips with this new revamp of a classic elder statesman of CGI and I’ll probably be having fun and making discoveries long into the night.

Spaceships, some of my pictures are on page one of the Google image search for Spaceship pictures

By The Illustrator | 2009/11/21 20:32 Posted in 3D, Blender, Illustration, Review, Software, Spaceships, spaceship | Comments (0)

I was looking for some spaceships as sources of inspiration for my latest 3D spaceship and imagine my surprise when i did a Google search with the words Spaceships and pictures. Two of my images where there on page one.

I’m always a little mistrustful of typing anything into an online textbox. I have often typed 200 word works of genius containing my thoughts on science fiction, spaceships, robots and other indispensable themes so many times, then hit post, only to be told that the page could not be loaded. And of course when you hit back arrow to get to the previous page – it’s empty. NOOOOOOO…

So now I absolutely have to have a blog client on my machine. I’m offline right now and I just saved these first four lines, that’s how paranoid my dodgy computers and other IT technology has made me.

As this is a test post I’m going to keep it short just to see what happens, although I will try to hit the 250 word minimum I once read about in an article on SEO, you might have noticed that an awful lot of my posts are exactly 250 words long.

I have been using the version of Blender that’s now running on this Puppy Linux machine, after heroic efforts to get it to talk to my x windows and graphics card – and my latest spaceship is going well. Unfortunately when I tried to insert a copy of the latest renders of the spaceship interior, and exterior with a nice planet in the background Deepest Sender just asked me for the image location without giving me a browse button to find the file on my local machine.

Oh dear I hope that isn’t’ going to be a deal breaker.

But as I suddenly suspected according to www.surfthemind.com/index.php/2008/09/17/power-blogging-tools-deepest-sender/ it seems impossible to post images from deepest sender. I’ll Just have to give Scribe Fire (another) try instead.

Scribefire’s image handling is basic to say the least, but at least I can upload them from my computer. There switched to Scribefire, and here’s an image, and a rather fine 3D one, of a spaceship.

As you can see this spaceship still needs a lot of work, both inside and out to make the renders look like they are even approaching a nice completed CGI look.

But the 3D meshes are taking shape and it shouldn’t be too long before they are done. Even including delays caused by me playing with my new Bamboo graphics tablet and trying to change the language in Inkscape to English. There’s always something else to fiddle with…

Thinking about designing and making games in Blender 3D

By The Illustrator | 2009/11/16 19:55 Posted in 3D, Animation, Blender, game design, spaceship | Comments (0)

I’ve recently been tempted – prompted by playing lots of FarmVille – to make a game using Blender, so I’ve been reading tutorials like this one –> Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Platformer: Creation and Controls – Wikibooks, collection of open-content textbooks. It looks hard of course, but not so hard that I’m totally put off from trying.

The next tutorial along makes designing a maze game seem almost easy. After reading it I decided definitely to have a go at creating my own game. It would probably be a space game rather than a maze game though.

And once the game is done I can save the results to an exe file to be used on Windows machines. That’s cool.

But what should my game be about. I think the easiest would be a 3d game with 2d action. I’m thinking of a spaceship having to navigate through an asteroid field.

One of the things I’m not totally over the moon about with modern games is that each level is programmed and set in stone. If there is a bad guy hiding behind a hay bale in level one of the game the first time you play it, then he is going to be there every single time you replay it.

For me, this just makes playing games a tedious exercise in remembering what comes next. I would much prefer to randomize the placement of these obstacles and in the space game I’ve just started to design in my head that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Just reading tutorials, which might seem dry, can be a great source of inspiration for my own art and illustration, and soon game design.

Designing Another Spaceship (with mesh and textures) – Orbiting a Planet

By The Illustrator | 2009/11/12 20:59 Posted in 3D, Blender, Forum Thread, Illustration, Review, Software, Spaceships, role-playing game | Comments (0)

Now that I have my second copy of Blender installed on my Puppy Linux laptop I’ve actually stopped faffing around with disk partition and installing codecs and started modeling again – not Kate Moss modeling, 3D computer generated art modeling. And it seems I’m not the only one, I recently found this this cool thread started by a stats obsessed 3D spaceship designer. Which includes this post from iliketosayblah

i love the stats…i wish all ships had stats…

… and I couldn’t agree more.

This was such an interesting thread to read; it had an argument about physics, it had advice on how to design spaceships, it had a crazy amount of stats, and I learned some new vocabulary. The comments on the meshes that the Blender artist posted included one that complimented the greebles on the surface of the spaceship.

Now apparently, according to Wikipedia,

A greeble or nurnie is a small piece of detailing added to break up the surface of an object to add visual interest to a surface or object, particularly in movie special effects.

Now I didn’t know that, but you can bet I’ll be using these magnificent words a lot more from now on.

I’m going to call the spaceship in this 3D image “The Packard” after the Packard Bell laptop which I did most of the design work on the mesh and basics on. I also produced the jpeg for the texture on the same plucky old laptop in Gimp, which was a pleasure to work with and seemed to be every bit as powerful as Photoshop, even though it opens in a fraction of the time.

There is a lot more work to come on this spaceship. It needs some smoother hull plates mixed in with the basic structure of this mesh, but not too many, because I want it to retain a low-tech feel. It needs a lot more greebleing in the area connecting the bridge of the spaceship to the main body, that’s still looking to thin and aerodynamic, like an airplane, and that’s not what we want at all in this workhorse of the planetary spaceways. And I might even look for another free science fiction table top role-playing game so that I can produce some simple stats to go with this powerful but workaday spaceship.

How To Enable Video Hardware Acceleration for Blender in Puppy Linux

By The Illustrator | 2009/11/09 22:18 Posted in 3D, Blender, problems | Comments (0)

I just got Blender working on my Puppy Linux machine. It’s even working a bit better than the one on my Windoze laptop. It is an older version, 2.48a, but hey it is still absolutely fantastic, and I’ll be keeping an eye out for a newer pet file now I know my laptop can handle it. I’ve reproduced the advice that fixed things for me here because it is sitting on a password protected page as far as I can tell.

But if you are a Puppy Linux aficionado you’ll know what those passwords are and cans ee the full page here Howto Enable Video Hardware Acceleration. I’m pretty sure it was the OPENGL 7.2 drivers “wot won it for me”, but I made the edits to xorg.conf too so I can’t be sure that both steps aren’t needed. There’s no way I’m going back in to reedit after everything started working just to test out that particular hunch.

Howto: Enable Video Hardware Acceleration
Step1: Install the Packages:
–(edit)—
Integrated cards:
–(edit)–
"xorg_OPENGL-7.2.pet"
"xorg_DRI_MODULES-7.2.pet"
–(edit)–
———————————————————–
Step2:
Then go to:
/etc/X11/xorg.conf
Then right click the file and "Open as Text"
Find the values:
# Option     "DRI"             # [<bool>]
# Option     "NoAccel"     # [<bool>]
Change These to:
Option     "DRI"             "True"
Option     "NoAccel"     "False"
Should look like the picture below.
Restart puppy linux to activate hardware acceleration.

I’m on such a roll that i might even treat myself to a new bluer theme for my blender to differentiate it from the default theme I’m using on my Windoze machine. I feel all geeky and techno-whizz, using buzz words like Windoze, but don’t worry my next cack-handed disaster at the controls of the Linux laptop should cure me of such annoying habits and delusions of geekdure.

I found some nice theme links here at Psiteo (it didn’t take too much finding, it’s on the first page of Google results). And following a link I chose the black theme from this very nice looking 3D site. I figure that I sculpt and render so many spaceships that it’ll be nice to work against a black background, the better to judge the final effect of each change I might make to a texture. And using the Blender theme tips at this forum thread I ran the script and got it working.

3D art in Puppy Linux with Blender. Almost.

By The Illustrator | 2009/11/08 22:42 Posted in 3D, Blender, problems | Comments (0)

Next after GIMP, I wanted Blender for my Puppy Linux machine. OK I really tried Activesync next but it’s a piece of effluvium created by Microsoft and it was beyond my wits to get it to work, it’s difficult to get it to work with Windows never mind Linux.

So – back to my happy place – how to get Blender sorted out so I can create more beautiful 3D spaceships. This forum thread was very encouraging. .

Puppy Linux Discussion Forum :: View topic – Puplet that includes blender ?

And Jade14 had taken the time to provide links to all the files needed to run Blender. Amazing. Thank goodness for nice people like this. So I started downloading and installing, and it took a little while – some of these files are bigish.

I downloaded the version of Blender he suggests as stable (2.8) and then went looking to see if a newer version was available as a .pet – just out of curiosity.

I couldn’t find one straight away, so on with the install. I was careful to install each pet file in the order Jade14 lists in the post. Two of the Python pet files failed to install, but I carried on regardless in my usual devil may care way.

It claimed to have installed successfully, and even created a shortcut to click in the menu, but when I clicked it nothing happened. Heck.

Another forum post hinted that I should restart the x server. That is an option in the menu button at bottom left, and totally easy to do. After I restarted Blender appeared, but it looked sad and injured, blocky pixels here and there, no writing on the buttons.

I had a go at installing those missing Python pet files again. Again both failed. After waiting a few minutes Blender started to work perfectly – except there was no text in any of the menus and no icons on any of the buttons. I know Blender is very shortcut focused, but you need some text menus and buttons to help you along. So how was I to add them?

I got half of the menus working by changing to international English. I used a copy of Blender running on my second laptop to find the button. But it isn’t quite working yet.

3D Spaceship Motion Blur, Asteroids and Planets

By The Illustrator | 2009/11/07 19:23 Posted in 3D, Blender, Illustration Friday, Tutorials, illustration, role-playing game, spaceship | Comments (0)

The first thing that jumps to mind when thinking about the word blur – well at least in my science fiction steeped mind – is the motion blur of a spaceship rocketing through the interstellar void. (Blur is this week’s word on Illustration Friday the art challenge website – see the left-hand column for the link).

I decided a blur of a spaceship was a fine idea for my picture for the art challenge site and got going with my preparation. To make my interstellar void I started looking for NASA images of space, such as this NSSDC Photo Gallery: Asteroids where I selected a nice asteroid, or this Gimp fan’s selection of images where I downloaded the big old planet in the background of the illustration.

I wanted the asteroid I downloaded to be in the foreground, so I had to turn it into a png with a transparent background. I used a particle system to make the segment of the planetary ring in the background, loaded up my planet and then set to work on the mesh for my spaceship.

I made two duplicate copies of the 3D spaceship mesh, one to act as the outer hull, and the other to act as bits of metal structure that poke out from it. I had the most fun with the texture for the outer part of the spaceship. I was inspired by the surface of the asteroid, and I wanted to give my spaceship a skin with a similar texture so it could easily hide in an asteroid field. In the illustration the asteroid field is a ring of debris surrounding an unlucky planet after its moon has been blasted to bits.

I was just considering what set of table top RPG rules the spaceship would best fit with, and if there were any new free science fiction rules sets I could root out when one of my posts was commented by an RPG enthusiast with some free RPG links on his site. Up With Role Playing Games. The links are in the left hand bar, I do like a good collection of links.

The only thing left to do was load the render into Photoshop and add some windows, a plume of atomic fire coming out of the engines and of course the motion blur that was the inspiration for this image – thanks to Illustration Friday.

The only problem was, I liked all the detail on the surface of the spaceship so much that I couldn’t bring myself to blur it more than a tiny bit around the edges.

Oh well…

Frozen, and at last something to show for my 2.5d 3d animation efforts in Blender

By The Illustrator | 2009/10/16 15:27 Posted in 3D, Animation, Blender, Cute character, Illustration Friday, illustration | Comments (0)

It is Illustration Friday time again and the word this week is “Frozen”, and that suits me just fine. Here in Vienna it is freezing, and we even had a little bit of snow yesterday, though it didn’t lie, perfect inspiration for this Illustration Friday word.

I’ve snipped out a detail from a painting I did a couple of years ago and I think it looks pretty and says frozen quite clearly as well. Looking at the image it seems like I overdid it with the “save for web and devices”, everything in the picture is a little blurry and pixilated. I’ll be more careful in future, but I think you can still pretty much see what’s going on in the image. It’s a picture of penguins sitting and killing time on an iceberg for anyone who needs a clue.

And it’s nice to have an old school painting on the site after all the Photoshop and 3d Blender CG art I’ve been doing lately. It’s tempting to pick the paint brush up again and do more of these images.I could even then scan in the paintings and load them into Blender. Then I could stitch them around an invisible 3d object and make animations out of them.

I’ve already started experimenting with this idea, although so far I have only scanned in some basic sketches, and not any complex paintings. The results are already starting to look pretty good though.

This animation is just a small test, just a rotating mouse head made from a sketch that I scanned in to Blender and animated in 3d.

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

By The Illustrator | 2009/10/07 11:22 Posted in 3D, Animation, Blender, Review, Software, problems | Comments (0)

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 and interesting post I had prepared about these 3D shenanigans (In the end it took five upload attempts). Instead of quickly posting and then getting on with doing something 3Dish and creative I’ve been nerding about on the internet with Google looking for bug fixes – again.

That’s so annoying.

I suppose I might be having problems today because Yahoo, my blog provider, is meant to be upgrading my WordPress version – but I doubt it. I blame Microsoft. I’m tired of using their pretty, but buggy stuff and it’s time to either fix it once and for all or try something else.

And it seems I’m not alone. Fix For Problems between Windows Live Writer and Wordpress — MindTWEAKS talks about this very problem, and claims to have a solution. I was very brave and messed with the code, like geek girl suggests. It didn’t help, LiveWriter is still very unreliable, but a comment on her site led me to Blogdesk less pretty but more stable, apparently.

Blogdesk failed to set up my blog and every time I opened it it tried to configure Word. Very strange behaviour. I decided to give BlogJet, the other suggestion in the comment, a try instead. I rolled up to their website and it turned out that you actually have to part with money to get the software.

So maybe I’ll either fiddle with BlogDesk and get it working, or – gulp, sound of swallowing pride – I’ll stick with LiveWriter after all.

p.s.

I’ve always been a big fan of New Scientist. I love reading their stories as inspiration for science fiction role playing game scenarios and 3D meshes, illustrations and animations. Now they have printed some fiction, and it’s well worth a look Sci-fi special: The fiction of now – New Scientist.