Anttilat

I still haven't got around to study more "Essential Blender", but I did do one entry for blender-fi.org forum's weekly contest. The subject was "Hyperion (Dan Simmons)". I haven't read Simmons' books but I know that they are sci-fi and that Saturn has a moon called Hyperion. So I did this (click the picture to see a bigger version):

After months of struggling we finally got the site transferred to a better ISP and our domain back. Tuomo wrote about it a short rant so I don't bother to complain about it more.

Rest of "hands on"-part of "The Essential Blender" ch. 7, rigging and skinning, is finished. Skinning was interesting and also a lot more frustrating than rigging.

My breaks just keep getting longer, it seems. But I took some time to continue again, this time learning about rigging. I've been doing the tutorial in "The Essential Blender" ch. 7, rigging and skinning. Right now I'm through the rigging part, skinning I'm planning on doing later today.

After another long break I'm back in business. And I had a great chapter to continue with. Chapter 6 of the Essential Blender was about character animation. This chapter was apparently abridged from "Introduction to Character Animation"-tutorial

We've had all kinds of annoying problems lately. First our hosting service started doing funny things and caused this website being unreadable for several days. We still haven't heard any explanation of what was going on. Once the site started to work again we got trouble with ATI's proprietary graphic card drivers. Right now I get all kinds of funky effects if I try to do too many things at the same time. We're waiting that the latest ATI drivers appear to Debian's repositories and hope that it'll fix the problem.

Everyone around me seemed to get the flu and it looked like I'd survive without it. Then today I've been quite tired and had a little bit sore throat and finally some fever too. Blah.

So I didn't really feel like trying to concentrate on studying the book, so instead I experimented with what I've learned. I decided to make a house - a dog house actually. It wasn't quite as easy as I initially thought.

The beginning of the next chapter of the Essential Blender, chapter 5, was a lot of fun! It teaches about sculpting and multiresolution modeling. The task was to model a head of a monster. This was a fun way to model and felt a lot less technical. There also was a lot less key combinations to remember.

I'll probably do something more with Blender today, but I just wanted to share with you my great accomplishment: the finished oxygen atom! :P

I had a week-long break in my Blender studies, but now I'm back as enthusiastic as ever! This evening I went through the rest of the 4th chapter - refreshed my memory as well as learned something new - and took another try with that oxygen atom.