I’m trying to adapt Colin Litster’s classic nebula tutorial (PDF) to Blender 2.5 alpha 2 and, so far, the gaseous effect isn’t happening. I suspect that maybe the texture isn’t being applied to the mesh properly: the overall glow and alpha parts look right, but it lacks any wispy, nebulous appearance.
Nebula Woes
Okay, with the render emitter option off, it gets better:
Getting better.
Here’s the basic idea. It needs a fair amount of work to look really good, but the concept is there:
Slowly getting better. Metal looks decent. Film part … not so much.
Metal looks decent. Film part ... not so much.
Taking another stab at Blender. This is a test of a small piece of something larger. In this case, I’m trying to make something that looks like old brass. I’ve got quite a bit to figure out. 
A test render from a Blender project, using Blender 2.5.
After some additional fiddling, the weathered part is better, but still not quite like brass.
A little more weathered looking, but still not brassy enough.
A frame from an upcoming Creepspace promo.
After picking up a used copy of Elemental Magic, I tried a first go at a surface bubble. This was done straight-ahead in Pencil and it’s kinda-sorta-okay for a first try, I guess. For one thing, I realized during the process just how little I know about what happens inside the bubble. And, in spite of my best efforts to make things overlap, all of the drops seem to hit at the same time. Lesson: 1 or 2 frames is not enough space to give a sense of overlap. One other problem is that, since I haven’t done much straight-ahead animation, my hang time on the droplets really sucks.
For a look at somebody who knows what he’s doing, check out this lava bubble by the author of Elemental Magic.
I’ve decided to really focus on some of the fundamental drawing skills again and see if I can push past this mediocre plateau I’ve been on for a while now. To this end, I’m doing John Kricfalusi‘s “$100,000 Animation Drawing Course.” Here’s a small batch of starter sketches. These will mostly be used to compare against later. I imagine it’ll take a while to get me out of the first lesson.
Starter sketches for John K's $100K
Frog study
And, here’s a little practice drawing directly in Pencil with a background wash in Gimp:
Drawing practice in Pencil (with Gimp background).
I found this old snippet from an abandoned project while cleaning out my hard drive. It makes me want to revive the project. Most of the art was created in Inkscape and then imported into KoolMoves where I added a few faint, wispy clouds (using a blur filter) and then animated the camera moves and the train cars. KoolMoves, unlike most of the software I use, is not open source, but it’s a really good and very inexpensive alternative to Flash, and it imports SVG files (which is what Inkscape makes). I’ve even been able to get KoolMoves running on Ubuntu using Wine/CrossOver. I plan to use KoolMoves to make a few original games for the Creepspace website. Take that, Adobe!
On a completely unrelated note, I’m not crazy about the new page layouts for individual videos over at YouTube. In particular, having the “more videos by this user” link on top of the main video seems like a really bad idea since opening it pushes the video you’re watching down the page. Not sure what YouTube is thinking with this redesign.
We’re back from my very first comics convention, HeroesCon 2010. I’ll have a more complete rundown of the weekend’s happenings in a later post, but for now just know that De and I had a great time, we met some really fantastic people, and we’re definitely going back next year.
