Right then. The mission: to mount the Hydra's base station under my desk, which means mounting the EM globe sideways. It's the bit that generates the magnetic fields that the handsets use to sense where they are, so mounting it sideways will confuse the computer unless I reconfigure the coil connections.
I'd got this far last time:
My first Blender project:
Since 3D Studio Max doesn't run on Macs and I'm slowly getting rid of all the PCs in the studio (muhahaha), I needed an alternative 3D package. Had a quick look at Maya but thought I'd better give Blender a go - it's free and open source, which is always appealing, but when I had a go with it a few years back the interface was a bit clunky and the learning curve looked daunting. Lots has happened since then, though; Blender's really matured into an incredibly capable package.
No better way to learn than to try and produce a project for real - so this is it: my first Blender project. To keep things relatively manageable I stuck with Blender's internal renderer, doing a separate render of each element using the "Edges" option to get the outlines, then using AE's Roughen Edges to erode them a bit. Everything was assembled and composited in After Effects, though Blender has an increasingly powerful compositor of its own now - have to try it next time.
My first go at doing character animation, too; Blender's approach to skeletal animation seems much simpler and more straightforward than Max's, but the key thing is that there are tons of free tutorial videos available, courtesy of Blender's growing army of supporters. Groovy.