I was having a little bit of trouble with my original empowerman I did earlier this week with the rigging and the way that the mesh was deforming while animating. I’ve decided to use this guy instead for the time being as I become more experienced. He is rigid so I can concentrate on the animation rather than the deforms.

Hopefully in the next few days I’ll post up a few animations of this guy.

It’s quite cute. Not bad for a first attempt.

Rigging and Animating him is another issue though – time to read the manual and my blender books to learn some more. I’d like to have him walk around the screen and wave ‘hello’.

The latest version Ubuntu Linux was released last month (8.04), and thought that I’d give it a go and see what happens.

I am quite impressed as to how far ubuntu has become. I have a dual head 19″ LCD monitor setup, and it just worked out of the box. Blender absolutely flies on ubuntu compared to windows!

I used to play around with gentoo, but again I felt as though I was fighting the computer just to do something (hmm.. maybe I should get a mac). I just want something that just ‘works’. Ubuntu detected all my hardware except my webcam (which I can live without for now).

I still have a small windows partition on my PC for when I am desperate and have the urge to play a game or two. I’ll most likely need it when spore comes out in a few months time.

I really think Microsoft has a bit of competition on its hands if Ubuntu keeps going in the direction it is heading.

BURP stands for Big Ugly Rendering Project. Currently the only application that BURP supports is blender, which is fine by me, because that is the only 3D modelling application I use (and all you ever need).

I have a few machines around at home here doing mundane stuff (backup server, file server, web server, etc) and I was originally looking on the net on how to set up a nice local render farm to play around with. While serching for one, I came across a distibuted render farm project on Blender Nation that the blender nation. What a great idea! I can donate some of my spare CPU cycles for other blender users, as well have access to a global render farm.

Here are my current stats (I’ve also added it to my sidebar).

Some of the notable blender renders are viewable in the BURP Hall of Fame. Some of these downloads are quite big though (20Mb+). You may have to use VLC to view some of the videos if you don’t have the right codecs installed on your computer.

BURP isn’t the only project that BOINC supports, there are hundreds, ranging from searching for aliens in space (SETI@home) to cancer research.

Donate some CPU cycles today!

While practising my blender skills I updated by blender design and you can view the updated animation below.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JZYHLnlBSQ

The tank builder was given the all OK to start buildling about 2 weeks ago, so I should be seeing it turn up at home shortly (there will be pictures!).

Can’t wait!

Look out Steven Spielberg.

I’ve placed up there a test animation that I did (took me about 5 minutes to make -- and it shows).

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Durh9TbXHJo

This animation was done with Blender, using the MPEG4 (xvid) format, recorded at 320x240 with 30 FPS. This is the suggested format for youtube to make them look good.

It was a lot easier than I first thought. I created a bezier curve for the clip, then mapped a circle shape to the curve. Added a shiny material to the object and then rendered.

I’m finding that building organic models are a lot harder to do than simple objects. Guess that just comes with practice.

Its rather simple, but you have to start somewhere. Not bad for a first attempt.