What can I say, the guys at the blender foundation have been very busy indeed.
Loads of new features including enhanced fluid controls and simulation, a new grease pencil for sketch animations and also other new animation tools and a whole host of other improvements.
Check the link for the release log and download your copy now…
http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-248/
Ok, here is an update of how the bmw model is going, its getting there and its still taking quite a while. So far these results look quite promising. This project is a big one and I still have a quite a lot to do, wheels, alloys, light mouldings, grills, numberplates, wing mirrors, door handles and then background, materials and compositing. So the final render is still a little way off.
Well the lack of recent updates is because I have been grafting away at a low poly model of a BMW 1 series 5 door hatchback, and believe me it is taking ages. A select few mates have seen the progress to a degree but the project now is taking a lot more shape. I will be making some notes on modeling the car when then render is done, which will be helpful if you are just starting out in 3d. I will post a few screens up in a bit to show you guys the progress that it is taking, the results are looking good.
check back soon for more updates and whatnot
I have just made a new page that offers up my creative services to the wide world. Check the page for more details.
I created these pictures as birthday presents for a few mates of mine. The Desert Eagles were created by using blueprints downloaded from http://www.the-blueprints.com/. The purple one is an updated version of an older picture. The green one is an abstraction of some grass, and the last one with the face, was inspired from the film Nightmare Before Christmas. I would go into how i actually made them but it would be about 10 pages long, so I will spare the details.
http://www.kierantaylor.net/vids/array_anim.avi
This one uses the array modifier in Blender, it duplicates a single mesh to how many times you prefer. It then lets you animate and manipulate it, the movements and manipulations apply throughout the array without having to apply it to all the individual objects contained within it.
Seizmic asked me for a new background for his myspace page (http://www.myspace.com/seizmic), so I came up with this beauty! The background took nearly all day to do, it may look simple but it is way complicated. here is the short explanation, it uses lens distortion, simulated depth of feild and blur rendering pipelines along with multiple rendering layers for each mesh including ambient occlusion and soft shadowing.
This one is a single frame from the particle path animation to jazz up your desktop for a bit!
http://www.kierantaylor.net/vids/particle_paths.avi
This test uses a particle emitter mesh with Newtonian physics enabled and a bezier curve. The curve was used as a path which the physics particles emitted from the mesh follow along. The particles were set so they do not emit randomly, instead in a tight grouping from selected verts on the mesh, this created the particle beam effect that is going on! cool huh?
Well you might not know this but me and a few buddies are starting up a record label called Narukami Records http://www.narukamirecords.com/ and I have been kindly asked to produce some artwork for them. Many props to Doug from over at http://www.bluntbeats.com/ for supplying the original design of the dragon for me to work with.
This picture uses a few cool rendering methods in it, such as ambient occlusion, soft shadowing and subsurf scattering. All of these methods used in conjunction create a really nice feel to the final render, but it does take ages for it to compute all the data.