I am a big fan of the web site blendercookie.com, and they recently came out with a lovely tutorial series by Jonathan Williamson (using artwork from David Revoy), the Vehicle Modelling Series.
There are over 15 hours of movies, taking you through the process of modelling a Gyrocopter, from a series of pictures. It took we a while to go through all the videos, but it was well worth it. Here is a still of my final result…
Final gyrocoptor render
Here is a round-up of some of the latest Blender 2.5 tutorials and DVDs that I have come across. I am slowly going through them, and when I finish them I will upload the final renders and .blend files to share with you, but it will take me a while to get through them all.
In the meantime, here is the list, and below some of them is the current render that I have created after going through the tutorial.
Blenderella (http://www.blender3d.org/e-shop/product_info_n.php?products_id=133)
Creating realistic outdoor lighting (http://www.blenderguru.com/how-to-create-realistic-outdoor-lighting/)
Environment still 63
Blender Cookie Vehicle Modelling Series (http://cgcookie.com/vehicle-series/)
Another website I keep an eye on is Andrew Price’s website at blenderguru.com. Recently he did a lovely tutorial on creating an asteroid in Blender 2.5 and animating it…
http://www.blenderguru.com/how-to-make-a-realistic-asteroid/
I recommend you have a look at his site if you are at all interested in Blender and 3D work. And here is my asteroid, created by following his example…
…and here is the timelapse movie showing the steps that i took…
[tubepress video="xxpLBgyXcv0"]
… and here is the final animation (not perfect by any means) that I created…
[tubepress video="YR5ZFSnWEVg"]
We recently ran our first Blender 2.5 Introduction course, and I just wanted to share some of the models and animations that I created during that course.
Some simple examples of shapes and materials created within Blender
Disclaimer: It is only a four day course so the models are necessarily primitive, but useful nevertheless. To teach how to model a high detail human figure can take days, so we just created a simple figure – head, arms and legs. No fingers, toes, etc. Then we added a material and did a very simple animation with it (again learning how to do proper walk cycles etc is the job of another course entirely).
There are various branches of Blender in existence, and one of the ones I was keeping an eye on was the Ocean Sim branch. The people behind this brilliant project raised some money to port over an Ocean Simulator modifier to the main Blender branch.
Recently they produced a public build of Blender that works with their new modifier and it is blinding. I thought I would post a quick example that I made using this tutorial.
Here is a simple example I got going in a few minutes of playing around…
[tubepress video="j3uhrlhB4Ok"]
The more I use Blender, the more I see how modelling with Blender can produce fantastic results, with some people making it more of an artform. To show you what I mean, here are some links that show you just what a great Blender modeller can do (the second link shows you how collaborating can produce great work as well)…
[tubepress video="16660289"]
This is a review of the Beginning Blender book by Lance Flavell (Open source 3D modeling, animation, and game design) – pdf version.
Beginning Blender
Author: Lance Flavell
Title: Beginning Blender
Number of pages: 449
Publisher: Apress
Price (as of December 17th 2010): ($34.99 and $49.99 respectively)
Format: Comes in pdf and print versions
I love Blender, but ever since 2.5 came out there has been a dearth of good, up-to-date tutorials and documentation. It has been difficult to get information regarding all the various aspects of Blender.
Blender 2.53 (it is now 2.54, soon to be 2.55) introduced a new way of applying extensions (Python scripts basically). These are called Add-ons and they make playing around with scripts very easy to use and play around with. Blender 2.5x and add-ons are basically setup now in File > user preferences > Add-ons.
And there are a lot of them!
Blender 2.5 and Add-ons
They can be enabled very easily by just clicking on the checkbox on the right-hand side. For example, here is the standard list of items that can be added to your scene by pressing Shift-A…
I love Blender, and with the advent of Blender 2.5 alpha 2 I have been working through lots of tutorials to get up to speed with its new features (of which there are many). Here is a list of tutorial sites that I would recommend to everyone who is serious about 3D modelling. Most of these you have to pay for, but they are well worth it.
CGCookie Blender
Lots of great tutorials, going through creating a dragon, showing how to model a hand, head, eyeball, porsche, a mechanic, and many other tips and techniques and shapes.