More on the ball

Now I've finished adjusting some materials properties to produce dull and shiny metal surfaces, and glossy at the end. What do you think? It was quick and easy, at least for these simple shapes. One must remember to apply metal-effects settings to all the colours on the objects.

Attempted plastic ball 

Dull metal

Shinier metal

Ceramic (glossy) finish made obvious with dim lighting

There you have it. Quick, easy, and right away you can imagine what you could do if your project involved cars, weapons, and other shiny or metal objects.

Blender 2-colour ball tutorial done, and it reminds me of IKEA

Quick summary: the tutorial for adding multiple materials to an object worked fine except for setting the Lamp to 'hemi'; my Blender version 2.73 doesn't seem to have this option where and when the tutorial asks for it. Perhaps I'll find it someday.

For now, I did see how to attach materials settings to individual parts of an object. Very easy! I wonder about all the useful applications of this, where I might have an object or character that has a design or multi-colour aspect.

Observe:

Quick update on modelling in Blender

My 'person' tutorial from a the past few days is finished, with hat in place. I'm going quickly into materials and textures tutorials, so for now I'll just share what you'd end up with if you follow the tutorial I did.

Again, I'd like to share that the wikibook tutorial is well-written and easy to follow.

Blender progress with wikibook: simple person in progress

Simple person tutorial finished

After several short sections, my person is finished. Soon I'll be adding a hat. FYI, the tutorial is found at a wikibook link called Blender 3D: Noob to Pro and it's very easy to understand. I'm using Blender 2.73 and the tutorial works fine. Some older tutorials I found were difficult just because keyboard shortcuts and other instructions didn't seem to work with 2.73, which is currently the latest stable release of Blender.

I'm starting to get an idea of all the modification and sculpting one can do with basic geometric building blocks and "modifiers." Then, apparently, so much more can be done physics simulations, textures, bones, and rigging. Between cgcookie.com's Blender tutorials and the Noob to Pro wikibook, I'm having fun and getting a good, organized feel for the software. I think it's a good sign that already, just a week or so into the process, I'm starting to get ideas for characters I want to model and environments I want to construct in Blender. 

Then I get inspired and get out my pastels or watercolours and draw quick sketches as usual to keep track of ideas and try them out with my trusted tools.

Here's my completed person, at several stages of modification today.

Computer hardware issues

I'd like to mention that I haven't found any hardware problems. I'm using a one-year-old iMac, base model with 16 GB memory, and it works fine. In the olden days, an ordinary personal computer wouldn't run programs that involved 3D calculations, I recall, and we always had extra processors in my family's computers to make sure drafting programs like AutoCad would run alright. 

It's very exciting to me, to see people without any drafting background able to work with an open source program that does extremely accurate visuals without having to struggle so hard and rely on technical math, programming, and drafting principles. 

And it looks awesome! I dare ya to search Google for Blender samples of graphics and animations. Films too, don't forget those! Here's one page of samples that I like: 27 Inspiring Blender Animations.

Blender exercises going well using wiki books

I'm following two sources to learn Blender so far. After some trial and error, I found that http://cgcookie.com and http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/ have good tutorials and information.

Cgcookie has some free tutorials, and many more are available which look useful once you join their modest $18/month membership. I may just join them myself. I'm doing approximately one free tutorial per day, and I predict that finding good ones for free will eventually become frustrating. Rather than seek endlessly for free learning, I'll probably be ready to pay up for some respected course or tutorial membership site. Meanwhile, perhaps like you, I want to learn enough to understand what I'm getting involved with.

Unsurprisingly, learning Blender is invigorating my traditional art practice as well. I have made two drawings that were important to me, in the past two days. I recall saying the same thing three days ago, too! I also want to learn Corel Painter but that one is further down my list right now for practical reasons - I have upcoming projects that will benefit from understanding Blender and 3D animation.

Today's tutorial exercise - modelling a basic human figure

Following a tutorial in Noob to Pro, I was able to produce a basic building-block figure without flaws,  following very clear instructions:

As the day (and week) progresses, I'll add more pictures. The next part of the tutorial starts to look a little more like a normal human figure!