I hope you’re having a great Christmas/whatever-you-celebrate holiday season. Below is my entry into DotEasy’s MacBook give-away contest. If you have a minute, please watch it, like it, and share it with your friends. Thanks!
Update: I won! Thanks for the help!
I finally posted the animated book trailer for Creepspace: The Witch Game over on the Creepspace YouTube channel:
I’m following Andrew Price’s Introduction to Texture Nodes tutorial and applying it to Blender 2.5. Everything seems to be working except the Bump map portion. For some reason, it doesn’t seem to apply in the texture channel even though I can see it correctly (as far as I know) in the node editor. A screen cap is below (click the image for a larger view):
Blender 2.5 Nodes Problem
I didn’t put up a screen cap of the other three channels because they all display properly. I realize that this may just be an “alpha” problem, but if it isn’t, anybody know what I may be doing wrong or what the problem is?
Here’s my first go at the whole hair thing:
Hair Ball
And here’s the final result (so far) of my attempt to make a cobblestone street with purely procedural textures and the material and texture nodes. Not quite there, but on the right track.
Cobblestones, shmobblestones
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 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.