Blender

Getting that awesome Blendery juice into production pipelines.

The latest edition of Blender For Dummies has officially been released…

I’ve been carving a lot more, both with the bent wood rings that I make, but also in general. For carving the rings, though, I need a stable mount to do that detailed carving work. Engravers have something like this, but they’re expensive and quite overkill for my needs. So I went about designing and 3D printing my own…

A few folks have suggested make the “It’s Vertex Not Vertice” shirt available for sale. To that I say… OK!

So here’s the premise: For scenes that take around a minute or less to render, performance is actually worse if you render on all of the cards with a single instance of Blender. This is because (AFAIK) there’s a bit of additional time necessary to collect the render results from each card and stitch them together. That time is a fixed short duration, so it’s negligible on larger/longer render jobs. However, on shorter render jobs, the ‘stitch time’ has a much more significant impact…

When doing my work, sometimes I need to get information out of a .blend file. For example, I sometimes need to do batch image processing (renaming, file conversion, etc.) on my rendered output. There’s not a nice way to just query the .blend file for that information. Sure, there’s BAM and even the old blenderaid tools, but they’re a bit heavy-handed if you don’t have them installed. So here’s the hacky solution I’m currently using…

OK, OK… I know that I haven’t posted anything new here since May. However, it only looks like I’ve been on a summer vacation. In reality, this has been a surprisingly busy summer for me. And the approaching last quarter of this year doesn’t appear to be slowing down. Not one little bit. So what have I been up to? Let’s scurry through the the list…

So in the midst of my indie writing shenanigans, the 3rd edition of Blender For Dummies is officially out and in the wild as of today! Wheee!

One of the rewards for my Kickstarter campaign is a daily tear-off calendar, with a lie from Definitely True: Year One on each page of the calendar. It’s actually at the printer being made right now (woohoo!). One of the fun things about a tear-off calendar is that it’s built exactly like a simple flipbook. So I couldn’t resist adding a little animation to the bottom of each page…

You may or may not have noticed that I have a little graphic to accompany my daily lies (now being shared over on Definitely True). Well… I made that in Blender. And for fun, I recorded a timelapse of the whole process. Of course, I didn’t have any epic music to lay over the video, so instead I hastily recorded a voice over to describe the various steps I took in the process. It’s quick n’ dirty, but I think it does the job pretty nicely for now.