Matlar WebBlog

Progress Report

Gumboot — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 12:37:01 +0000

I thought i better give a progress report since ive been abit quiet as of late.

Software: New software, better than the smell of fresh bread, a brand new car, but not as good as ice-cream, horray for ice-cream!.

Ive concentrated on Blender as i would prefer to use something Opensource when possible and the support in Unity of Blender seems excellent. My feelings for Blender are mixed : ) Clearly very powerful (love) but the learning curve is (for me at least) overwhelming at times : ) (hate). I think i have a reasonable grasp of its basic usage and the time needed to create something is much more reasonable now.. i will continue to play with some of the more advanced features and with time it should be second nature, luckly i have time : ).

Ive also been playing with 3D Coat not for the sculpting features but for the per-pixel texturing features which i find more ummm natural to use. Ive arranged for a student licence and should be getting right into texturing shortly : ). Ive also secured a nice texture collection which should help keep things moving along : ) .

Hardware: Ive put together some old parts and some new ones to create a dedicated graphics pc , the specs of which arnt very interesting except for a couple of exceptions : )

Space Navigator – very useful for the 3d work im doing (not really useful for much else), very well supported (so far all the modeling software ive tried) and seems Very well built for the price (Amazon had the best price for me).

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti – a really nice video card : ) bought because of its impressive performance (# of cores), 1Gb of RAM and was almost within the budget : ). 384 cores makes for some Very fast rendering and I’m very happy with it (so far CUDA support basically in all 3D tools to some degree)

Spheres Of Doom

Gumboot — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 05:28:42 +0000

Ive created a small set of 7 Spheres of increasing poly count for the use of gauging performance.

Info – Download

Checkers

Gumboot — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 12:35:34 +0000

Just playing with the idea of what i call wrappers, basically seperate flat objects ussed as indicators (changes in color etc). I have kept them (every so slightly) seperated from the main object and have givven them a slightly smaller surface just for clarity and also gives it a little extra umm 3dedness : ) Edit: Added 3 more models

Info – Download

GLC Player

Gumboot — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 01:10:06 +0000

Ive been ussing GLC Player ( http://www.glc-player.net/ ) to quikly view the models and to create the info pages for the models, i also ussed it for the first header of this blog). Its small, fast, doesnt need installing (zipped version), and so far i like it alot.The only issues so far are the fact it only seems to display my .obj files correctly (probably due to the fact i export from blender not the actual original native app) and the html it exports needs abit of modification before its suitable for upload (2.2.0 and 2.3.0 64bit).

Youll find an .album file for each collection/model i post here which GLC player can use to load all the models at once (hopefully works outside its original folder, let me know) or you can open more than one file at a time if all else fails : ). Keep in mind ive supplied the models in all the formats blender can export to as well as the original .blender files but it seems only the .obj files should be ussed inside GLC Player atleast in my case.

If you know of model viewer that compares do let me know : ) especially if its snapshot and exported information features are more robust.

Witches Hats

Gumboot — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 14:39:04 +0000

This was my first sit down session with Blender after i got through the GUI and modeling sections of the video tutorial. Nothing fancy at all, very basic shapes, at most 5 objects-segments, very low poly count.

Info – Download