Friends and readers

I have just gotten word today, that I will be starting a new day job. Which will wind down pretty much my entire capabilities to moderate this site, and post new content. Since income was a constraint for me in publishing new content, this does alleviate some worries but does push this website to a little lower on a list of things to do.

I still troll around on reddit, and help when I can. I am looking for people who have experience in blender who may want to help this site grow, but as for now it's going to sit on the side. I may be able to work on some new content after the beginning of the year.

I hope everyone who has come hear to read some informative stuff on blender can continue to in the future.

I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season, and a happy new year. And if the world ends after the 21st, I won't have to worry about this website anyway. ;-)

Thank you to all my returning readers, and any new readers.
-AG

Dear Readers,

I've got a few readers who come here on a daily bases, I can't believe I've got so many. I haven't posted anything new in a while because I've been trying to get a new day job, and other things in order. So I apologize that I haven't been able to make any new content.

I have been working on a few things. I found a great piece of software that is a bit pricey for those who use free and open source software. That allows you to take multiple photos of a real object and create a mesh and texture from the pictures. I'll be writing a little something about it, and demonstrating it for those who are interested.

I also went to New York this weekend, which got my imagination going about architecture and the CAD work that you can do with Blender. I took a lot of pictures that will be helpful to do some interesting designs, and I'm planning on recreating a scene that I had done a while back. Which was supposed to be a high rise apartment/loft thing. I way overestimated the work involved, and I think I'm going to try to recreate it, with some new design ideas.

I appreciate those of you who come here for the tutorials I've posted and the comments I get. I'm open to suggestions or questions, please feel free to ask!

I don't make much money from this site, which I think is why it's hard to keep up with it. So if you like the content, and want to see more, I do have a donate link on the side.

Thank you for reading!

Fluid Dissolves

After helping out a guy on YouTube, having an issue with a scene he created, I decided to play around with this blend file, and log some more hours in the fluid physics sim.

He was having some issues with fluids disappearing from his scene, after leaving a square pipe and hitting aquarium floor that he had set up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNc1kMkZxBU

It took me a few tries to finally realize what was happening...

Tutorial #4 - Ocean Simulation

This is a quick little tutorial about how to set up the ocean simulator, and a basic scene to create a decent looking ocean. I was asked about this a while back, and with a recent animation I created, I felt like it was time to explain it.

So first, here's what we're going to be creating with the ocean simulator, a ten second clip. I'll then show the tutorial, and explain the steps.

Cycles CUDA vs OpenCL

Once again, I was helping out on Reddit /r/blender. Great place to see some works in progress, and help newbies, and discuss things about blender. Sometimes things amaze me there, but more often than not, it gets my brain going.

Whats better, this or that? Whats the difference between... How do I make this scene look better?

This weekend someone asked about Cycles, and GPU computing, and why he can't get AMD GPU's to work. It was mentioned that Nvidia cards are the cards Blender is being developed for, and to try some other builds for AMD cards. We get into a discussion about CUDA vs OpenCL, and that OpenCL has problems with shadows.

I decided to run a few tests.

Champagne Glass Scene, with Wedding Band (UPDATE)

So after a long few days, trying to get this ring modeled, I finally came out with a fairly good model. I learned quite a bit about modeling an object with this. I'm not going to go into too much detail about the process of making the ring in this post, but I will try to write something up over the weekend.


I will however show the ring, and the scene with the ring in it, after the break.

Champagne in a Crystal Glass, and How to Handle Liquids IOR

So I finally got my AC fixed. Installed 64bit Ubuntu on my blender machine, and 64bit Blender. Things feel smoother, but it likes to crash. So I had spent all of yesterday working on this scene, and most of today. Yesterday, was more or less trying out blender in 64bit to see what it could do more. Not much, but it does seem to respond faster.

I just wanted to post a quick sample of where I got with the wedding table scene. It's not complete, but I'll give some notes of what I was trying for.