Various drawtypes in Blender – quick test

There are various drawtypes for objects within Blender’s 3D viewport.   Besides that, there is the Subsurf modifier and the “Set Smooth” button which adds goroud shading.  Here is a simple screenshot illustrating my point:

Drawtypes, Subsurf, and Set Smooth in Blender

Now I admit that this might not be worth reporting about, but it’s better to state that fact here than at the beginning of the post, warding readers off. 😀

Next on the Dancing Taco project: continue modeling the onion, then test the shading and texture with renders and tweaking.

I have started setting up some big goals for me this semester, (with someone’s excellent help,) and I really hope I accomplish them.  It will be extremely hard to conquer these goals, but it will be worth it.

Anyhow, I wish you the best in all your worthy endeavors!  God bless and goodnight!  I cherish your prayers.

-b

First successful alpha in Blender!

Yahoo!  Praise God!  I have made my first successful alpha texture in Blender!

What is alpha?  It is the “invisible”, the transparency per se.  Whatever is set as alpha, you can’t see.  Whatever is a normal color, like red, green, or blue (RGB) displays in it’s normal color.  With alpha you can have a complicated image (say, of a leaf,) applied to a plane.  The area around the leaf will be turned to alpha.  Loading the image (PNG or TGA) into Blender, you then apply it to a plane, and go through a series of steps.  Finally, rendering it, you get a wonderful result:

First successful alpha leaf in Blender

Well, maybe not all that wonderful, but the possibilities sure are astounding!

Imagine a cutout animation, set in a 3D world!  Or a tree with twenty thousand leaves – imagine it, you don’t have to model a complicated leaf, duplicate it twenty thousand times, and make your polygon count 4,000,000,000, causing your render time to go bonkers!  Instead, just apply the alpha image to all your leaves (a simple plane,) and kapow!  Your render time is lightning fast compared to what it could have been!

Go ahead and find out how to do alpha texturing in Blender. Carefully follow the steps.  One important step that I didn’t get right is this: for any objects that you want to recieve the shadow of your alpha image, make sure you turn on TraShadow in the Shaders Panel (for the objects that are recieving the shadow.)

Here’s an image of the GIMP and Blender, and what some of it looks like.

Making the leaf transparent with alpha - using GIMP and Blender

God bless,

Thanks for listening!

-b

P.S. I have run into a problem editing the interview of Dr. Narendra Singh.  When I get to a certain place in the video, the video gets stuck and he is frozen saying part of the same word.  This is an error, and some fault with the program or video file.  The video file plays fine, so my guess is it is Premiere.  Now is the question of “Now what?!”

MaPZone – Free texturing tool looks promising

For those interested in CG (computer generated) 3D, I ran across an old article in BlenderNation.com (a great resource for daily news about Blender related topics – you can read the article here,) about MaPZone, a freeware texturing tool for Windows. I haven’t tried it out yet, but it looks promising.

From the website:

MaPZone is simply the most advanced texturing tool ever. MaPZone is only intended to be used for producing high quality textures, and this is what it does best. Based on a unique and patented technology called the FX Maps, MaPZone is the only procedural tool giving you that much control over your creation.

You can check MaPZone out here.

Now onto finishing some important projects so I can be free for filming!

God bless,

Banor