Bonobo Extreme

We returned our System76 Kudu Professional because it was very slow when editing more than 100,000 faces and vertices. We figured this was due to the integrated Intel graphics card.

We replaced it with a System76 Bonobo Extreme with the following hardware:

• nVidia GeForce GTX 870M with 6 GB & 1344 CUDA cores
• 16 GB RAM
• Intel i7-4810MQ (2.8 GHz, 4 cores)
• 17.3" 1920x1080 matte display
• Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64 bit

So far, the new system works beautifully for Blender. It doesn't have any trouble editing and displaying complex objects with more than 100,000 faces/vertices. And it's a little bit faster than the Kudo (1:37 to render the BMW vs. 1:43).

GPU rendering is actually slower than the CPU rendering, but I think that's because I'm using an older driver (331.38 which is part of Ubuntu 14.04) instead of the latest which is designed for the GTX 870M card (340.32). I plan to try again once Ubuntu 14.10 is released in a few months.

One cool thing: The backlit keyboard is nice and you can cycle through different colors as in the pic at the right.

One not-so-cool thing: The touch pad is so large that it picks up my palm movement when typing and moves the cursor around, sometimes leading to bad typos. I usually just use a mouse connected with USB and turn off the touch pad with fn-F1.

Simple Animation

We just want to learn how to make a simple animation where the camera spins around an object.

First we tried this tutorial on camera animation here:

• This guy doesn't explain things nearly as well as the other guy!
• We gave up on this one because the method isn't a smooth circle around the object and he goes too fast to follow along

Next, we tried this one with a bendy clock and this one from Tutorial Brothers, but just ended up using pieces from each.

Here's the general process:

• add a curve--path
• scale the path with S, a number, and enter
• edit the mode by pressing Tab (the path gets arrows on it that shows the direction)
• select points on the path and pull it into a half circle
• move the path so it goes around the teddy bear (which is centered on the origin)
• select the camera and then the path (with shift-right-click), then ctrl-P and select follow path
• move the camera so it's at the start of the path, rotate it so it points towards the bear (NumPad-0 shows the camera view)
• Do the same (follow path, move to beginning of curve but behind camera) for both light sources
• Set the length of the animation to 100
• Set the output (under render, on right-hand side) to png
• Press animation and it will create a picture for each frame to be assembled later

We later used the above process to add a bezier circle which then became the path all the way around the bear. We modified the number of frames in the circle with the properties--curve section (when the circle was selected).

To assemble the pictures into a video, the best tutorial we found was this one on BlenderDiplom by Gottfried Hofman. Not only does he show how to make a video from images, he also shows how to add an audio track and fade it in and out--something we also used.

Here is the finished animation:

Making our First Creature

To make a sphere and change it:

• Add, Mesh, UV-Sphere
• Numpad-5 for ortho mode
• Scale along the z-axis, press S, Z, 2, Enter (makes an egg)

To move a vertex and move others proportionally:

• Tab to go into edit mode (or select on bottom)
• Make sure vertex selection on the bottom is on
• Select proportional editing button on bottom and select connected
• Select a vertex with right-click and then left-click (both seem to be needed)
• Press G and a circle appears which shows the area of connectedness (change with mouse wheel)
• move with mouse, restrict to x, y & z by typing those letters

To make a 3D curve around a path:

• Add curve, path
• Edit mode (tab or select from bottom)
• right click node to select and move with arrows
• create circle with add path circle
• scale circle to smaller size
• select path and go to geometry section on right-hand side
• find bevel object, click on it and apply the circle

Join objects together by selecting them and click join or ctrl-J

• then select part of it, go to materials and add new
• play around with different surface types

Prepare for render

• Numpad 0 for camera view
• N to display properties and then check the box lock camera to display
• press N again to get rid of properties
• Then adjust picture in view so object is in the camera frame

Saving the picture

• press F3 and save as png

And here is our first creature! It's a bit cartoonish, but we're just starting out!

Intel Integrated Graphics: Houston, we have a problem.

While doing our Teddy Bear Tutorial, once we got above 100,000 faces and vertices, the response to mouse clicks selecting parts of the model got really slow--10 seconds or more! We realize now that this is the limitation of using integrated graphics cards as mentioned on the blender system requirements page and in this discussion. The delayed responses made it painful to use so we're sending back our System76 Kudu Professional and getting a System76 Bonobo Extreme.  So far, System76 has been helpful and prompt in answering our questions. We'll have to pay shipping to send the computer back, but then we should get a full refund because we've had the computer less than 30 days.

Teddy Bear Tutorial

Since we want to make animated creatures with blender, we decided to do this Teddy Bear tutorial so we could learn about making hair.  It's cool how many options there are, like color ramps and roughness. It's also cool that you can comb and trim the hair to make it look more natural.  Above is the result of our efforts, which took 6 minutes to render on our Kudu Professional.

New Laptop for Blender from System76

Our new laptop arrived from System76 with Ubuntu installed.  Here are the specs:

• Model: Kudu professional
• Screen: 17.3" 1920x1080 matte
• CPU: Intel i7 2.5GHz - 4 cores
• Graphics: Intel 4600
• RAM: 16 GB
• HD: 2 x 1 TB 7200 rpm drives
• Keyboard: backlit and num-pad

We ran the BMW benchmark test and it rendered in only 1 minute and 43 seconds! That's 17-times faster then on our old Dell computer which took 29.5 minutes for the same render.

So far, the new laptop works really well for Blender. The big screen is nice and the num-pad is great because Blender uses it to switch views.

Learning Blender - Coffee Cup

This is our blog on learning Blender.  We ordered a new laptop from System76 but it hasn't come yet so we're getting started on an old Dell.  The render time for this benchmark (image at right) was 29.5 minutes! The new computer should be around 2.5 minutes.

We're starting with this coffee cup beginner tutorial.  Here are our thoughts while doing the tutorial:

• It would be nice if the narrator in the video told us why he is selecting certain options so we can start learning the details.
• When scaling (pressing S and moving mouse or typing number plus enter), Ctrl-Z didn't work to undo the scale. Alt-S will reset the scale to the value when it was created.
• We finished the coffee cup and rendered it with 500 samples (it took 20 minutes!), and here it is!