Amazing Spider-Man

My Blender Grease Pencil illustration "Amazing Spider-Man" made the CGCookie 2025 reel and it was the only Grease Pencil illustration to make the reel! 

 

What started as a doodle while I was on the phone, turned into a finished illustration. Using the Grease Pencil can be challenging and rewarding. I learned quite a bit from Grease Pencil guru Paul Caggegi’s excellent courses on the topic. 

 The style of the illustration attempts to reflect the Silver Age/Bronze Age of comic books. I even worked with the palette of colors comics used at that time. 

CGCookie is the premier Blender training site, so it was quite an honor. Check out the reel here: https://lnkd.in/eVftUGEb

Does This Compile?

When I was teaching at Sun Microsystems (2000-2002), I created the example below for my Java classes. Around day 3 or 4 I would start writing it on the whiteboard piece-by-piece and asking "does this compile?" Then I'd proceed to walk the students through why it worked. The point was to show how identifiers are resolved, and then show things that would conflict and why.

What’s changed is I added a little generic static method to add to the fun (they weren’t in the language when I taught).

class x {
    static x x = new x();
    x() { }
    x x(x x) {
        return x;
    }
    static <x> x x(x x) {
        return x;
    }
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        x x = new x();
        System.out.println(x.<String>x("x"));
    }
}

This code compiles and, when run, prints:

x

Bits of Blender #79 - Stroke Material Add-On

In this Bit I show you my new Stroke Material Display add-on/extension. If you work with the Grease Pencil, you may find this very helpful.

Stroke Material Display on Blender Extensions

The superhero in the video is Safeguard, one of the heroes from MOST: The Adventures of Ion and Echo! and used courtesy of MOST Comics, LLC.

MOST is a free web comic book done in the classic style of the Silver/Bronze age of comic book. It was done by Richard when he was in college.

Bits of Blender #78 - Mirror and Bisect

I watched a great video by Lino Thomas at the Blender 2022 conference. Afterwards I felt like I had to explore further mirroring and bisecting (and flipping) to create complexity using the mirror modifier.

One hour of greeble - Live workshop at the Blender Conference 2022

Bits of Blender #77 - Distribute Strokes Extension

I created a simple extension/add-on to distribute Grease Pencil strokes. 

I show you how the add-on works, how you can get it, and where you can find the code if you have interest in seeing how extensions work. 

Bits of Blender #76 - Joining Strokes in 4.4 vs 4.2

The way you join Grease Pencil strokes has changed. In this video I show you how it was in 4.2 LTS and compare it to 4.4.

Bits of Blender #75 - Run multiple instances of Blender on a Mac

How do you run multiple instances of the SAME version of Blender on a Mac?

It is a quick tip, in a nutshell... Run this in the Terminal: open -n -a Blender