The BSG (Blender Survival Guide) is now completely available on iTunes as part of the COW Podcast. Making a program like Blender takes enormous amount of time and resources. It’s a very expensive operation that relies on the generosity of people. More people know about Blender, more people will be likely to buy books and tutorials from the Blender Foundation and in doing so they help the development of the program.
Please help me increase the awareness of Blender by subscribing, rating and voting for this podcast. With enough attention the podcast will be featured in the main page of iTunes and that can attract more people who don’t know yet about Blender. My goal is to get in the top 50 of the technology section. It doesn’t cost you anything, the Podcast is free, but it will greatly help in making Blender a global success.
Click on this link to go to the podcats. Send the link to friends or share this blog entry with as many people as you can.
Thank you!
When I started the BSG I didn’t know if it would be even noticed. Well, you made it very clear since the beginning that there was a crowd of people “hungry” for accessible training about Blender. And so I kept delivering an episode every week for 10 weeks. Then I took a little break and now I have delivered two episodes in one day completing a standard set of 13 episodes of a TV show:
BSG 12: http://library.creativecow.net/ciccone_paolo/blender-survival-guide-12/1
BSG 13: http://library.creativecow.net/articles/ciccone_paolo/blender-survival-guide-13.php
I hope you will enjoy them. The Blender Survival Guide, or BSG, is now available on your desktop, on your iPad and on iTunes as a Podcast.
I’m quite happy with it and I think it will keep people busy for a while. Similarly to what happenes after the final episode of a TV season I’m gonna take a break and come back in a while with more and more content.
This “break” doesn’t influence the other Blender activites at the COW and I will be always available via our wonderful forum so continue to post your comments, requests and suggestions for new BSG topics.
So, as we say in Italian, “arrivederci”, which means “we’ll see each other again”, and keep blendering!
–
Paolo
As promised, a new episode of the Blender Survival Guide, BSG for short, is available for your viewing pleasure.
We spent 10 good weeks getting comfortable with Blender and now we are in excellent position to start stepping it up a bit. With BSG 11 I begin to delve a little deeper into the modeling side of Blender, showing how to modify basic geometry and how to solve some of the problems that you will face in everyday projects. This involves joining different pieces of geometry, re-arranging them, creating organized duplicates of objects, etc.
All this while we search for the “Holy Grail” of lighting: volumetric lights.
BSG 11, clocking at around 30 minutes, is only the first part of this new tutorial. Next week we will see how to actually achieve the effect by using the amazing Lux Render. You don’t want to miss it!
No, I’m not the tutorial nazi, this week I’m taking a quick break. You can find a bit more details at my COW Blog
This week episode of the Blender Survival Guide is a direct response to the feedback that you have sent after Episode 9 was published. Being able to edit the value and position of each keyframe to fine tune your animation is a necessary ability and the BSG 10 shows you how to do it.
Blender’s animation tools are very sophisticated and powerful but they use a unique layout for the UI and at first it might not be that clear where everything is. That’s why I wanted to cover this topic, once again, from the perspective of the MoGraph artists so that you can now see where everything is without having to read chapter after chapter of stuff that might never be used. Like rigging, for example.
So, if you were wondering how to create a “hold frame” or how to re-time your Blender animation, or you wanted to learn how to use markers (Blender has markers?), go to the Blender Survival Guide #10, it’s available at this link:
http://library.creativecow.net/articles/ciccone_paolo/blender-survival-guide-10.php
New episode centered around the theme of cerating a “flying photos” animation in 3D. Lots of good techniques and useful tips. The project files are included.
It’s that time again!
The glorious conclusion to our book promo is available! The Blender Survival Guide is online, at Creative COW.
I’m particularly pleased by this episode because it highlights a series of tricks that are at the same time simple and useful.
In setting up a scene or animation one of the most important features of the program is how you manipulate the objects, how you change their position, how you move them in the right spot. This week’s episode addresses all that.
Blender includes a bona-fide Non-Linear Editor (NLE). Nothing to threaten Adobe or Apple but a very handy tool that can be used at any time, on any machine, and that handles sequences of images with extreme ease. BSG #8 shows you how to enable it to add music to your Blender animation.
Lastly you might wonder how to set up a shot that uses two or more cameras. All covered in this episode of the Guide.
We are approaching the end of what I call a “Survival Guide” but more Blender tutorials, more topic-oriented, are scheduled to be released, here at Creative COW. The development of Blender 2.5 is finally reaching Beta status, and soon I’ll be busy planning a new set of video tutorials using the new version of Blender. It’s gonna be fun!
The Blender Survival Guide #8 is available here.
I don’t want to brag about it but we are at the 7th, non-stop week of Blender goodness, at the Creative COW, and there is no sign of slowing down 
. On the contrary, this week’s episode is twice as long as usual, clocking at about 42 minutes. And it’s not finished. Next week I will complete the job and show how to create the final result. But this week we see how to create a promo shot for a book, and in the process we learn how to apply multiple materials and textures to a single object. That is the kind of operation that you need to do over and over again when working in 3D. Getting a grasp on how to assign multiple materials is an essential skill and a perfect fit for “survival Blender.”
The BSG is meant to provide a basic, well rounded, set of skills that will help you approach Blender with the maximum amount of reward and the minimum amount of labor.
It seems that it has reached the goal as more and more people are now asking for more advanced topics. Those will be coming soon, a lot depends on the speed of development of Blender 2.5/2.6.
The curios notation for the version number is due to the fact that it seems that the Blender team has adopted a long-standing convention of the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) world. Odd-numbered revisions are the “in progress” numbers. When the program reaches release status the number is then converted to an even version. So, 2.5 is the in-development number and when Blender will be ready for release it will be called 2.6.
OK, so much for nerd-talk, the new video is available at: http://library.creativecow.net/articles/ciccone_paolo/blender-survival-guid…
Enjoy!
The next episode of The Blender Survival Guide, part 7, will be fairly intense and filled with lots of new techniques and information. Before we can tackle that task, which will be once again based on real life experience, we need to get organized and prepared. This week’s BSG is focused on gaining some essential tools to control our scene, from the “Tree View” (Outliner) to the use of Layers.
And while I have your attention, I want to mention that I’m constantly monitoring Blender’s evolution. While a lot of people have asked for tutorials about the upcoming 2.5/2.6 version, I find that it’s too much of a moving target to make it feasible at this date, mid-March 2010, to work on specific topics. I download the weekly builds, and I monitor the developer’s mailing list and it’s clear that there are still a lot of basic features that are missing; features that I find very useful in everyday work and that I’m not ready to give up just for the thrill of being on the “bleeding edge.” So, be patient but rest assured that once Blender 2.5 “gels” and reaches the beta status, new COW-worthy tutorials will be released.
In the meantime, enjoy part 6 of the BSG: http://library.creativecow.net/articles/ciccone_paolo/blender-survival-guid…
Happy Blendering!
