I can’t think of a much better time to be a Blenderhead.

Yofrankie is available for download ( http://www.yofrankie.org/download/ ), although if you want to show your support to the Blender Foundation in this way, you can still get the DVD version from the Blender e-Shop. ( http://www.blender3d.org/e-shop/ )

While you are there, a heap of new goodies are up as well – I’ve ordered a copy of the updated Blender GameKit and William Reynish’s “Learn Character Animation using Blender.” There is now an official “Blender for Dummies” book too for those who are interested.

Also, many of you may have seen “Freddy’s World” posted on Blendernation. I thought it was great and definately recommend watching it. ( http://fweibel.com/?p=freddy )

Without wanting to spoil it, there is a very nice explosion effect that I was inspired by last night and caused me to be up until about 5am experimenting with Blender’s particle systems and “Bounce Tumble and Splash.” I really need to make more time to read that book, also highly recommended for those of us who have a grip on the usual modelling and texturing type of skills and want to expand into the realm of physical effects, simulations and the like.

(Click image for vimeo animation)

Quite happy with how the fireball itself works, but the ‘trails’ need a lot of tweaking. Hoping to get flaming debris on the end of the trails too, but seeing as I have no real need for an explosion in the near future project wise, I’ll come back to it later. Which brings me to the post title…

I’ve been doing a lot of ‘playing’ with Blender the past week or so. You could call it R&D, but it’s basically playing with features. Much of what I’ve been up to is having a go at areas I haven’t used much before like the compositor, a lot of rigging constraints to help my character(s) be motion capture compatible along with a mesh deform modifier to help with the rigging, experimenting and researching a bit of lighting/material/render work, now some of the particle gear and so on. But there is only so much mindless fun one can afford. So in order to keep the experimentation up, yet have more of a directed focus, I’m thinking of creating a fully finished ’shot’ for a potential short film as a sort of ‘proof of concept’. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea because I’ve wanted to make a full short film for a long time, but restricting it to one single shot for now means it is feasable that I can finish it off to a high standard in a realistic timeframe before I commit a whole lot of effort to something and realise I can’t complete it.

Once I get a decent start on it, I’ll have a Blenderartists.org thread to follow for those who are curious. As a heads up – I plan to have the shot use displacement mapping, full body motion capture, facial animation and lip sync (1 line of dialogue) a lot of moody lighting to play with, organic and mechanic materials and models (one character in a scene), a lot of compositing effects and now that I have a taste for it, maybe an explosion…

And thanks JS for the birthday note, had a great day!

Cheers,

Ben.