But only a little. This is my first real project using Cycles in Blender and I still have quite a bit to do. As a WIP I thought it might be neat to put a screenshot of me working on the laptop on the laptop – if you see what I mean. That won’t be there in the final. Oh, no, it’ll be quite different and soon…
Laptop Recursion
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’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?
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.
