I was perusing the Twitter scape the other day when I noticed a feed from Andrew Price, my instructor from the Nature Academy, who had mentioned a new web-site that supposedly allowed you to upload a 3D model so that others may view it. So since I actually had some 3D models on my computer I figured I’d just try uploading one to see if this really worked. Tadaa…
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Charlotte and I are back at it again, this time we’re helping out her friend Madeline by creating a short promotional video for the Leukemia Texas Organization. Madeline had approached Charlotte with the idea of creating two short PSA’s to show during a Hockey game, that the Allen Event center was having. The money raised during this game was going towards the Texas Leukemia organization and our video was in many ways supposed to inform and thank those that were in attendance. I knew that I wanted to help out in a big way with this project and I also wanted to make sure that the organization was very pleased with the finished product.

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For 4 days in December, the stars aligned and allowed for me and my friends to shoot a musical performance in our studio on Denton’s Square. I had moved into the space in July, and I had always wanted to shoot some bands performing within the space. Other projects and hectic schedules had kept me from doing such until the holiday season rolled around this past December.
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Better sooner rather than later. I had been working on an edit, at the same time I was working on the Nature Academy, of my girlfriend’s sisters wedding that I shot back in October. I had traveled to New York to film and attend the event.
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At long last I’ve made it to the end of the Nature Academy. Below you will find some information about my final projects with the course.
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When I first started with the Nature Academy I was definitely a little put off by the complexity of week 9′s project. I knew that it would be a tough one, but like all of these tutorials I knew that I would definitely be able to master my way through this one. To date I probably rendered this project the most, before I finally decided on the final scene.
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I’m now more than half way done with the Nature Academy and I’ve learned alot. For these 2 projects I had to use 2 different versions of Blender. For the Ocean project, I had to get a special unreleased version of Blender that contained the Ocean Simulator. What’s cool about this simulator is that it’s in a beta stage and will be released in an new version of Blender later this summer. So to get a sneak peak of what this new feature would entail I downloaded and installed the program. After a few simple steps I was easily able to create ocean planes that could be morphed and replicated infinitely (depending on the power of your computer). It was rather simple to get such incredible results.
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When I first started these tutorials I was over at my sister’s house showing them what I was working on. I played my reel for them to watch and I showed them my blender tutorials so they could see how they were coming along. My niece had requested that I make her a flower and I told her that I would after a few weeks. Now that I’ve finished week 6 I’ve got a daisy with her name on it!
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After 2 weeks in Blender, I can honestly say that I’m having a bit of fun. The hardest part for me has been trying to move my view around in the program while using it on my laptop. It’s not impossible, just difficult. I can’t use a number of the keyboard presets because the Mac Book Pro doesn’t have a number pad. I’m sure I can customize the keyboard presets to get around a bit easier, but I’ll manage for now.

This week I’m learning something new, obviously. For these 2 weeks I had to use external programs to generate my final render. In week 3 I had to use the program Arbaro to create my trees, which is actually a rather interesting program. Basically all this program does is create trees, by way of fractals. It breaks the tree down into 4 parts; the trunk, the main branches, the secondary branches and then the leaves. All I had to do was give it some mathematical equations and then it generated the tree for me. It took a few renders to create a rather decent looking one.
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Almost a year ago I had watched the following video online and was blown away by the quality of the animation. It wasn’t until a few months ago that I learned that this video was made with an Open-sourced application called Blender. Open-source is a philosophy, or pragmatic methodology that promotes free redistribution and access to an end product’s design and implementation details. In terms of Blender open-source means that the application is free and that anyone can download it and use it. This is great for the video community because it encourages people to share and create on a level that is not merely reserved for those that are wealthy. Also because the application is open-sourced, anyone can design or engineer additional plugins or work arounds with the application. This means that there is constant updates and changes being made.
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