Bits of Blender #62 - Stenciling

In this Bit, Richard and I show you how to use the stencil feature of Blender.

Bits of Blender #61 - Extruding Along a Path with Tapering

Richard and I have a new Bit out. We show how to use tapering when extruding along a path and our technique of keeping the taper object in line with the path that has the extrusion.

This is our first Bit in a long time. In this one you can tell we're having fun, especially towards the end. I hope you enjoy it!

8 years of Blender

November 7th marked the 8th anniversary of downloading Blender with the following email to a friend of mine.

This is interesting:
http://www.blender.org/

Technically, I became aware of Blender a couple years earlier than that when I came across the first edition of the book The Blender GameKit at my local Barnes & Noble. This email was in response to finding it free to download (which I did). You might say the last 8 years has been a Ton of fun! 

A Blender Game Character

On Wednesday, November 6th 2013 CartoonSmart.com is releasing a new course A Blender Game Character by John R. Nyquist, BFCT (me!). The goal of this 7.5 hour course is to show you how to create an animated character and then render out sprites. In this course you'll model, texture, rig, animate, and render out images in an iterative fashion. The course is downloadable in Quicktime format and you'll also get a coupon to stream it via Udemy.com.

A Blender Game Character is taught in real-time, no accelerated video (so a 10 minute lecture really is 10 minutes of work). You'll see my workflow as we develop this character from scratch and how Blender supports iterating over the creation of a character, even when in different phases of its development.

This course is intended for folks with some Blender experience (not complete newcomers). If you are comfortable with my previous course A Blender Quickstart (free to stream from Udemy), you will be okay (but maybe challenged). As a bonus, it includes the downloadable files for the 1.5 hour A Blender Quickstart.

For the month of November you can get A Blender Game Character for $20 (which is a 50% discount) at http://www.payloadz.com/go/jump?id=2398009&aff_id=3465194

Enjoy! :-)

Over 1,000 Students

This weekend A Blender Quickstart passed the 1,000 student mark! A Blender Quickstart is my free course on Udemy that gives you a quick tour (about 1.5 hours) of some of Blender's major features by building an animated pencil (with bite marks).

So far we've had one live session as well, it was great to meet some students in person (via Google Hangout). Many thanks to all the students who've taken this course!

Weather won't stop Blenderheads

Seven Blenderheads braved some cold, wet Colorado weather to come out for some hot coffee at the CBUG meeting at the Fika Coffeehouse. Clockwise from the left: Ryan, Ben, Ben, Chris, Richard, and Harrison (with me behind the camera), thanks guys for coming out!

Adobe Create Now Tour

Two weeks ago I attended Adobe's Create Now Tour event (use this if you're on a mobile device). I took notes and thought I'd share some of the things that caught my interest.

Behance/Prosite looked like it might be a decent option for a portfolio site. I've been ignoring it for some time, partly because the name "Behance" kinda bugged me.

Photoshop
The Image Size command has been updated. It does an amazing job of upsampling. The new algorithm is called Preserve Details. The default is Automatic, but who knows what that means?

The Patch tool was another that struck me as immediately very useful. Worth checking out.

Vector shapes can now have changes made to them (like rounding corners) live.

Camera Raw is now a plug-in. The should increase its usage, I imagine. You can have multiple radial filters, non-destructive healing, and lens correction.

You can copy the CSS from a type layer or folder. You can also generate Edge Reflow projects.

And I almost (did) forgot the Generator plugin. I used it later the same day after hearing about it. Perfect for generating images of multiple sizes (like when you're doing iOS icon work).

Illustrator
You can now paint with raster images. The guys on stage were pretty excited about this, but it seemed more like a feature for demoing. Reminded me of Painter's "image hose".

The most exciting enhancement was the Touch Type tool. You can alter individual letters without breaking the text apart. Rotate, scale, etc. How many decades have I waited for that? (I started with Illustrator 1 in 1987).

InDesign
The guys said something interesting about the dark interfaces with the Adobe apps, that dark means the app has been completely re-written. InDesign now has a dark UI. It is 64-bit, does background processing.

I liked the new smarter search for fonts and the ability to favorite fonts.

There is a feature for generating QR codes.

You can also output as an app for iPad. That looked interesting in the demo, but I wonder what the real world experience is. App development is not trivial and performance is key.

Edge Reflow
This is a tool for creating CSS. They showed creating a page from an open PSD. It also support CSS regions. An interesting menu was for "shiney" new features to use that are on the bleeding edge.

Muse
Muse is for creating small HTML sites without coding. It looked pretty decent. They played up the similarities to InDesign. TypeKit is built-in with access to 400+ fonts. It does not support responsive design, but it does make it easy to create different sized versions of a site.

Edge Animate
This tool has been percolating for a couple years now. It becomes more Flash-like all the time. Now it has symbols. You can bring the .OAM package into InDesign.

Kuler
They have a Kuler iPhone app, which reminds me I should download it. It was very cool (no pun intended) when they took a picture and got a color set from it. It also has Idea integration (Idea is a very nice vector iPad drawing app).