What is THAT? you will ask. Well nothing exactly, I was playing around a bit to unwind after “serious work”. I opened Alchemy, a fun random drawing software I sometimes use for “doodling”. When an interesting shape took form, I saved it as svg, opened it in Inkscape to clean it a bit, then in Blender. It imported as a planar curve object, so I converted it to mesh, made a random selection of vertices and moved it around a bit and got this. Not particularly useful in real life projects but I needed an image at the top of my post to draw your attention 🙂

I’ve been quiet for a couple of weeks because of a combination of close deadlines and .. spring. The weather is finally nice around here so I went out more with my kid but work also blossomed. No idea how I managed in time but it went well.. except maybe for the sleep part…

I am posting just a glimpse of the projects I worked on:

So I pasted cutout people a lot and at weird hours. I used some older collections I have, and found a free new one that looks very nice from Pixelflakes. They also have great inspiration images on the site and Photoshop tutorials.

The 3d trees in the first one I made with Sapling. In the night images I had to paste photo trees at the end as I had no time to get the 3d ones in before rendering. Because the timing was too tight, I rendered the hi-resolution (4600×3000 something) as soon as I had enough in it, to make sure I don’t end up stuck with a two hour render and get no time left for post processing. Though 2 hour render for hires could sound great when comparing to some render times you get on Cycles, for me it is still too much. Sometimes I get a “small but essential change” just the day of completion of the project, and it’s great to be able to do it and make the client happy.

Next on my list before getting caught in the next project is making a post on my b-mesh tests and editing the “Why Blender?” page. I rewrote that not so long ago but since then, a lot of Blender architectural visualization material appeared on the Internet, mainly because of Cycles. A lot of nice interior images are passing through Blender Artists these days and big Blender tutorials sites, Blenderguru and Blendercookie, both have posted tutorials on rendering architectural interiors with Cycles, which is very good for spreading the word so I should add that to my introduction. But this is also distracting from the use of Blender Internal so I’ll finally try to put together those needed chapters in “how to”, about lighting exteriors and interiors with BI. I also want to make a post on night renders.

These were my thoughts of the day…

Wish everyone a beautiful spring!