Solidworks-Blender MSN group- bump

Yo Neil! :o) I think it would be interesting if you could recreate my tutorial for Maya for blender! If you use the same materials etc., people can compare the workflows and the results! Anyway, let me know what you think of this. Take into account that people won't usually just start following a tutorial like this, until they actually need to render in an external program. Therefore I think the number of members is not really a determinant for the interest. Also, you haven't really posted instructions on how to do things. The image quality is really bad (although they were supposed to be PNG!), and there is no text to go along with it. The flash-tutorial you made before was very clear, but I can't find that on the group!

Please consider moving the group to Yahoo! like I suggested, or like me start a Wikibook (which opens up more doors to keep the tutorial up-to-date).

Ewout

Mmmm I forgot to post the link to my Maya tutorial. I don't want to hijack your thread, I want to encourage you to make the same tutorial for Blender :o)

anyway, here it is (updated today with a few corrections and new images):

Interesting work Neil. Convinced me to go and download blender - now to find and work on some tutorials. Thanks for taking the time to show us (me) this.

Whats the difference between a renderer such as blender, and a typical photoeditor, such as PhotoShop? (Hope thats not too dumb a question?)

What are some other programs that do this? (Other than Maya, which I also see mentioned here) I like the fact that blender is free, which makes it the one I will probably try and teach myself, but I'd like to look at some other apps just out of curiosity. I seem to remember that Adobe also had a renderer?

Hi Ewout, Well I don't know what you mean there is not text? I have just finished putting comments on each one. The image quality is as good as it gets because whatever the size of the picture they get resized to a max of 600 x

600... nothing I can do about that. The originals are PNG - I don't know what format they are to view The reason why it is not as detailed as you might like is that I simply don't have the time to prepare better stuff as a textbook. The pilot Flash tutorial I made was quite time consuming to do well and didn't cover much ground. People are just going to have to sit down and learn the program and think for themselves. There is a wealth of information available if you go looking. That is the way I learned. I believe the things I have posted so far are helpful. The image quality should be sufficient for folks to get an idea of what they can create not withstanding my ability...I am a learner/improver too.. I hope. Without more obvious genuine interest from people I am not going to spend a whole lot of time on it. Personally I probably won't contribute more than about 3x as much as I have already. No reason why someone else can't put things up though... As far as redoing it on Yahoo or paralleling your Maya tut- sorry no. I don't envisage this group will be anything but a passing curiosity for the vast majority of SW users and that the few enthusiastic ones will go on to join up with the Blender community proper. Alone I simply can't answer everyone's questions and fix things for them and provide expert tutoring and do every other job I need to do working for myself. If people are aware of it because of my posts and some make use of it well I have done them a favour. Maybe they won't use it for SW at all..no matter I think Blender has merit on its own as a v. good open source program. neil

Photoshop is 2d. Basically you take pictures and text and mix them up, layer them. Change, size,rotation, colours, etc. You might do a painting or a drawing as well as make use of ordinary pictures. It is the stuff you do when you make a book, magazine newspaper etc. Blender, Maya , 3ds, SoftImage etc are 3d modellors just like Solidworks but it is geared to organic type shapes and animation. The sort of stuff people make computer games, film special effects- like LOTR, television adverts or animations like Shrek with. Rendering models the optical properties of the real world so that reflections for example are a genuine representation of the path of the light. A glass material will bend light as it passes through it and objects cast accurate shadows on other objects HTH neil.

Ok, somehow, I missed the picture comments. Good! The images are displayed as JPG (you can see the artifacts).

I thought you established this group to guide people through the process of learning. You say there's a wealth of information, which is the big problem of course. Where to start? I think that's where your group can help a lot!

No problem - Then maybe I will do the blender-version of my Maya tut myself! I do know enough of blender to do the steps I took in Maya.

Very well, keep up the good work! I also think Blender is a great program (much better than it used to be), with even more potential: The Orange project is a very good stimulus for people (especially Ton) to improve the animation tools and even the UI and the modelling tools - In my opinion Blender is coming very close to the big ones - Max, Maya & Lightwave.

Ewout

"I thought you established this group to guide people through the process of learning. You say there's a wealth of information, which is the big problem of course. Where to start? I think that's where your group can help a lot!"

I am doing my best Ewout. It would take hours and hours to communicate all there is to know about Blender and I would be repeating a lot of whets out there already. So far I have made 2 albums. I hope to get a few more up including some useful links as time permits. If you see the comments I have posted and reflect on what's there I think you will find I am giving you a strong head start. regards, neil.

Oh no, I didn't want it to sound like I think you don't do enough!!! I really appreciate any minute you spend trying to help other BlenderWorks-ers! I know how much time it takes to set up these instructions. I will post in your group when I have done the lighter tutorial!

Again, you're doing a great job helping the community, which I appreciate!

cheers, Ewout

Thanks for the info - Sean

Neil,

Just happened across this post, haven't been on the newsgroup in a while.

I've actually been too busy using SolidWorks and PhotoWorks to design and render new products to read posts, but I'm VERY interested in your Blender forays!

I had it long ago, and gave up trying to find time to self teach myself.

I did learn enough about it to find that it was more than capable of creating some great work, and it did seem at the time to have quite a dedicated following and a set of programmers who were rather quick with adding functionality considering it was free and open.

The cartoon shader example you put up is phenomenal!

I could use something like that for patent style images...

Perhaps more like line art than that even.

Anyway, keep up the great work, I'm learning a lot of useful things.

I'll be sure to join the msn group.

Best regards,

Matt Schroeder Product Design Specialist ATK Ammunition & Related Products

Hi Matt, I am pleased you dropped by and found something to interest you. Most likely there is a way to get a render with more of the appearance of a line drawing...I seem to remember reading something about that somewhere recently at the Elysiun forum... When I get more of the basic info up...slowly getting the content refined (just hope it reads well to others)... I will see what I can do to either provide a link to existing info or perhaps make an album page if people have a specific use for a style of render. As an aside someone is refining a script for exporting animations to Flash format with some restricted shading, shadows and outlines that would have a similar appearance. cheers neil