Whoot! I finished it!!!

Happy dance….
I am of course talking about Blender Cookies Interior Architectural Training series. It is a series of 25 videos that show you how to create an amazing room, one that I would love to have in my house, but that is a whole different issue.

Yes, I am aware that I am very, and I mean VERY, slow, and most of you finished ages ago. But finish it I did and that is a major win for me. You don’t even want to know how many unfinished projects are sitting on my hard drive.

This was an amazing training series. I have never done any architectural projects, so it was a nice change of pace to do something outside of my comfort zone.  The nice part was that none of it was really all that hard. The modeling was nothing overly advanced, in fact most of the magic came about after the modeling was all finished.

I learned quite a bit from this series. Linking assets is something I have never really explored, which is a shame considering how easy it is. The same with the material library. I can see great uses for that. In fact setting up a material library seems so much simpler when deciding on how materials should look. Instead of being distracted by the scene, you just use simple primitives.

I also really enjoyed that cycles was used. I am really loving how cycles works and the results that can be achieved. I now feel far more comfortable with both cycles and compositing and I have plans to put my new knowledge to use as soon as possible.

So here is my final render. I think it turned out pretty good. On a side note, I really would love to have this room in my house. What a lovely serene place to create artistic masterpieces.

Okey dokey, if you haven’t done this training series yet, I encourage you to do so. You will learn a lot and get to flex your blender awesomeness muscles.

Now I’m off to do Blender Cookie’s Intro to Characters modeling series while I wait for the recently announced cycles series.

Dang, dang and double dang!!!

Yesterday was a great day. I played in blender most of the day, resulting in the need to render my project. Not a bad thing in and of itself, but generally a long and tedious process where I have to wait for my amazing render of perfection. So knowing that I have no patience for long render times, I set it to render and went to bed.

Totally awesome way to deal with the render time issue. Right up until I woke up this morning. I always turn my monitor off even when rendering over night because it is overly bright and I can see it from my bedroom. So this morning when I stumbled out of bed and wandered over to turn on my computer like I do every morning, the monitor was off and I was not coherent enough to remember that I was rendering.

Yep I hit the power button just like I do every morning and bye bye over night render.

And of course I realized what I did just as soon as I hit the power button, which occasioned some very un-ladylike  words to stream out of me in unique and unrepeatable combinations.

Sigh, a smart person would have left a sticky note on the keyboard to avoid just this dilemma.

note to self: go down to your craft room and make a “RENDERING” reminder out of one of those cool giant chipboard tags you having been saving for a great use. I do believe this use would qualify as a great use.

Now I get to wait for most of the day for my render to re-render. Luckily I do have other things that I need to be doing. Sigh, I had just planned on doing them some other day, after I finished my project.

Dang, dang and double dang!!!

My tips for drawing eyes…

Nope, sorry… I got nothing.

Wait, yes I do.

1. Don’t let me do it, I have discovered I am rather bad at it.
2. Go watch TimVon Rueden’s tutorials on Concept Cookie, he on the other hand is very good at it.

Tim does an awesome job showing how he creates concept art. I have really enjoyed his tutorials. And he even features drawing exercises where he encourages you to try to draw different features. Usually there are links on the exercise page to tutorials he has recorded that will give you a good idea of how to get started.

Which would be how I ended up trying to draw Eyes.

Sigh!

I had watched all the eye tutorials, including the section on eyes from of the Natalia concept series (I actually watched that one several times.) Tim explained the process well and it looked rather easy compared to other parts of the body, most of which look seriously complicated to someone like me.

Due to limited time that week, I didn’t even get started on my “eye project” until the day the exercise review was posted. Yeah, shame on me, but I got to see his timelapse. So another mini tutorial for me before I started, score!!!!!

Tim suggested that we take a photo of our own eyes to work from, citing that it was a good way to practice as we would always have reference close to hand. Sounded reasonable. Right up until I actually tried to take a photo of my own eyes. I had managed to forget that I don’t photograph particularly well. And I discovered that taking photos of myself was frustrating to say the least. In most of the photos either I looked pissed off (I was focusing really hard on trying to just take the photo) or I looked stoned because I blinked. Finally I managed to get a photo that only looked slightly horrible or it’s possible I was just tired of trying to take my own photo.

So now I have my photo. I opened it in GIMP and got everything all set up. Just one thing left to do before I get started.

Once upon a very long time ago, I used to draw quite a bit. But like most things in life, if you don’t do it for any length of time, you get very rusty. In trying to take up drawing/sketching again, I have discovered that I seem to be suffering from a breakdown in communication between my brain and my drawing hand.

So I decided that I needed to get my brain and hand communicating and back on the same page again. I sat them both down and sadly enough, it went something like this.

brain: so we are going to draw eyes just like we saw in those videos

hand: huh? what videos

brain: the videos from Concept Cookie , by TimVon Rueden

hand: from where??? by who???

brain: never mind… we are going to draw eyes today… just do what I tell you

hand: shrug… whatever

brain: we are going to use this photo as reference

hand: OMG! That is one bad photo!

brain: shhhh, not so loud. We will fix it when we draw it

hand: yeah right, what world are you living in, we are not THAT good (snicker…snicker…)

brain: grab the stylus

hand: what’s a stylus?   just kidding …. got it

brain: okay we are going to lay down color first and to kind of block in the upper face, so we have a place to put the eyes

hand: we’re gonna what???

brain: paint color there…  not there… THERE….. good now add some lighter color there, darker color over there and blend….add a bit of lighter color there, a tad of darker color over here and blend…..add some more  lighter color here, and a bare touch darker color over there and blend

hand: OMG! would you make up your mind.. I’m painting over what I already did here… grumble… grumble (and brain thinks I am the confused one….)

3 hours later

brain/hand: hey that almost looks good!!!

brain: now we start the eyes… draw a smooth curving line in that dark area

hand: bah abah bah abah…..

brain: hello… smooth curving line

hand: huh, oh yeah…. drawing line….

brain: NOOOO! curving CURVING!!!!, it is supposed to look like an eye

hand: chill out, I don’t see you down here doing this….. hows that?

brain: it looks like crap, utter crap….. sigh, try drawing the lower lid now….. ugh! seriously…. you suck

hand: shhh, I’m on a roll!!!

brain: roll of what…. never mind…. okay add some shading..

hand: where??

brain: um around the eyelids… duh…

hand: here??

brain: OMG! Seriously… I am out of here… you are useless

Which unfortunately left my poor clueless hand to finish the project all by itself.

I did learn one very important thing though… drawing eyes is NOT and I repeat NOT as easy as Tim makes it look.

Okay, all joking aside. I did much better than I thought I would, although I did end up making the eyes look mildly cross eyed. Something I didn’t notice until the end. And I did have have considerable trouble making smooth curving lines. Something I will have to practice a bit more. Also, eyelashes and eyebrows are harder than it looks, to say the least. So anyhow, here is how my eye drawing exercise turned out.

Get free copies of Pandeia #1 and Humm! for FCBD

Paul Caggegi, well known for his Process Diary site and podcasts, is giving away free copies of his comic books Pandeia #1 and Humm! in preparation for FCBD.

Paul says:

FCBD Release! http://processdiary.com/comics/HUMM_FCBD.pdf Humm! special FCBD edition. don’t forget: Issue 1 of #pandeia is also available FREE! http://pandeia.com/?page_id=566 I’ve just gotten the eStore plugin to allow free products to show up there, so I will soon be making these items available through the store, also. Share and enjoy!

So grab a copy quick and help spread the word. Paul is AWESOME!!!

Awesome postcard download from the Tube Open Movie

Continuing their fundraising efforts, the Tube Open Movie has designed and made available a Tube Open Movie postcard / A5 suitable for printing. Instead of printing them and sending them out themselves, they have made the CMYK file available to all of us to printout, post and share to spread the word about their project and campaign. So if you know of a few spots to post them or pass them around, here you go. If you want to show the image on the web, better to use the one displayed on the download page. Thanks in advance for helping them get the word out!