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Adding a Favicon to my 3D Blog « WordPress Plugins

By The Illustrator | 2009/09/26 09:21 Posted in SEO etc, logo | Comments (0)

Every time I open the dashboard on this interesting and experimental WordPress 3D blog I check the little section that shows three random plugins, I love plugins and widgets you see.

Today I saw this one > WordPress › Personal Favicon « WordPress Plugins and it immediately caught my attention because I have been itching to add a Favicon to my 3D Blender and role-playing games blog for ages. All the ultra professional 3D websites like, CG Arena and CG Society have a favicon – the little picture on the browser tab, and in the favourites list – and I have been eaten up with jealousy for some time that my cool CG site doesn’t have one. This plugin seems like it will do the job nicely though.

I read about favicons on Wikipedia because there wasn’t a lot of info included with the plugin and it seems I need a 16×16 or 32×32 pixel gif, or both I guess. So here they are > and , a couple of gifs, or do they need an .ico suffix, is that required (who knows this stuff?) . I cut them out carefully with Photoshop, but it looks like a rat nibbled them into shape. Perhaps I need to use a harder brush or something. Oh dear something so simple is going to take absolutely ages again.

Before I fart about trying to get a neat border on these gifs I think I’ll see if they actually turn up on the tab in my browser when I enable them. The perfect completed favicons will come in a later post.

Well, that’s enough messing with the world of 3D and optimising my blog, now it’s back to work.

Back to the Blender Manual, this time Animation Basic Tools, specifically those all important Ipo Curves

By The Illustrator | 2009/09/10 12:36 Posted in 3D, Animation, Blender, Cute character, Tutorials, logo, problems | Comments (0)

After hours of work I’m happy with where the grass (done in Blender with particles) and the clouds (same) are at. In fact I’m happy with the whole effect of the animation’s landscape. It’s a nice mixture of cartoon and realistic and Blender renders it quickly enough to animate. My pretty clouds even move from a camera left to camera right under their own steam without the particles doing anything crazy, rendering nicely every time and looking 3D. I even added the titles, and it’s almost time to move on and do some proper animation of the actual story, but…

Those titles look a little odd. Up to now, to make something disappear from one of my 3D animations I have simply been whisking it off to level 2 to prevent it being rendered at all. This is easy and works well, but there is a bit of a visual jar; one moment the titles are there, the next gone. It would be much better if they faded out.

The only problem was that I couldn’t set this from the usual dialog box, luckily I found the answer here Doc:Manual/Animation/Basic/Tools/Ipo Curves and Keyframes – BlenderWiki, specifically…

To set an Ipo Curve for these channels, select the channel and then create control points via Ctrl LMB clicking in the Ipo Window.

Now I all I had to do was append the Caramel Cat of the title – a mesh I created earlier – into my beautifully rendered new background with fading titles. I started by reading an explanation in Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Creating Blender Libraries – Wikibooks, collection of open-content textbooks, but when I tried it didn’t work.

Don’t you just hate it when that happens. I know for a fact that thousands of people append items to Blender files all over the world every day, but I couldn’t work out what I was doing wrong.

It turns out all I needed was a real idiot’s guide to appending, with pictures and absolutely everything spelled out in words of one syllable. And I found one http://download.blender.org/documentation/oldsite/oldsite.blender3d.org/142_Blender%20tutorial%20Append.html written by a guy who really gets how dumb your average user can be, and I don’t mind admitting it.

After reading this tutorial about appending meshes I worked out that the meshes I wanted were actually objects and once I started appending from the object library of the blend file instead everything went smoothly. My cat can now frolic amongst the computer generated hills of my animated background to its little heart’s content.

New More Ambitious 3D Blender Animation

By The Illustrator | 2009/09/03 19:29 Posted in 3D, Animation, Blender, Cute character, Illustration, Tutorials, eBook, logo | Comments (0)

I am itching to take my Blender animation skills to the next step, and as you can see from the illustration above I’m going to do it properly this time, with a storyboard and everything.

There are a bunch of things I want to better in this animation, compared with the first 3D animation I did with Blender. The first animation is set in a sort of virtual studio made up from a few rudimentary mesh planes as walls, but this time I want to create a groovy looking 3D environment with convincing looking grass.

The text on the first animation was a bit rough and ready too, so this time I want to create an animation with some graphically pleasing text and perhaps even a logo. I also want to have two animated mesh characters, so that there’s some interaction in the movie.

And there are a million niggling little other improvements I’ve suddenly decided not to bore all the readers of this blog with. Poor dedicated fools, they deserve some consideration.

In my last post I mentioned a book about animation that I planned to download from this page of cool Blender links, but the link didn’t work. I did however track the book down on Scribd, I wonder how legal the copy there is, but it turned out to be old school Disney animation. I thought it was going to be all shiny modern digital Pixar type Disney animation, oops. Needless to say I’ve kind of lost interest in it and I’m on to the next thing.

I mentioned before that I want grass in my next animation and one link on the resources page leads to some presets for Blender particles and it includes grass. Cool!

New look for the Blog : good for spaceships, and friendly magic cats too

By The Illustrator | 2009/07/27 18:33 Posted in 3D, 3D, Illustration, logo | Comments (0)

I’m working on that long overdue new logo for the various different creative things I’m doing, so that it all has a more uniform look.

There are some things about the current look that I like and that I’m going to keep. The purple colour scheme looks great both with the sci-fi, comic book, role-playing game stuff I do and the cute urban vinyl, character, children’s art and illustrations.

With my first attempt at a new logo I was worried that the shadow was too strong and overpowering to be a part of an easy to read site logo, although I do like the moodiness of the image. It’s amazing what you can do just by positioning the lights in Blender (a great free 3D app).

My next attempt kept the logo’s shadow and even added another, but the shadows are less intense. I wasn’t convinced that this made the logo any easier to read though. Doing text in Blender is the easiest thing in the world, or at least on the Blender scale of easy it is, so it was no problem to fire Blender up again and play about with the logo a bit more.

The final logo I’ve come up with is a nice balance between darkly serious for my science fiction / game related stuff and shiny pink for my fun character type illustrations and designs. I’m having a lot of fun messing around creating 3D elements in Blender and the versatility of this cool, open source and best of all free software is constantly taking me by surprise. I’ve used Photoshop and Quark to put designs for previous logos together but Blender gives the logo a certain cinematic 3D movie logo look that I like even more.

Starbright Illustrations

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Adding a Favicon to my 3D Blog « WordPress Plugins

Back to the Blender Manual, this time Animation Basic Tools, specifically those all important Ipo Curves

New More Ambitious 3D Blender Animation

New look for the Blog : good for spaceships, and friendly magic cats too

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