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!