More Blender Coolness

I've not been feeling very blog-tastic the last few days... my energies have been taken up preparing a slew of new materials for my professional practice blog, but I just had to share this. The latest of Roy's blender classes was this past Friday where we learned to make camera's move along a curve (512kb Windows Media video file). The finished version in the class was actually cooler than mine because it they did tracks on the roller coaster, but I had to leave before Roy got to dupliframes.

For those of you who I've been pestering with this stuff, Roy has made positive noises about re-teaching his Intro to Blender classes this summer. Especially for the artsy folk amongst you, this thing is awsome for doing visualizations of architectural spaces (oh say, for installation work) as well as creating ground breaking new work.

Did I mention that it's free and you can do it on your Mac?

Hobbies

As odd as it may sound, my dad tracks bears in his spare time. For the past few summers he’s been trying to help the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks keep track of a Mississippi Black Bear. It's really cool work these folks are doing, trying to restore these creatures to their natural habitats. As a result of all this, some of the people he’s worked on this with send him pictures of the bears they’re tracking from time to time. What’s pictured here is a new litter of cubs taken sometime last month by one of the wildlife biologists (click on it for a larger version). I think that's a gig I could really like (overlooking, of course, the fact that I'm completely unqualified).

Things that aren't depressing

As a wonderful distraction from the suckfest that was life earlier in the week, I went to the third of Roy's classes in Blender. We covered the basics of materials and textures today. For those who remember hearing Amber and I talk about it, the first two classes were dedicated to creating an animated Gingerbread man. Here's Amber's version and here's mine; both video's are WMV files because it was the only encoder I could get to at the time... sorry 'bout that. If you put the video on repeat, it kinda looks like he's walking.