Blender 2.57 is out and Blendermama restarts 🙂
Still full time mom and still little time to blog but just as enthusiastic about Blender.

A few lines to fill in the gap – over a year has passed since my last post.

First of all and most important, Blender works! I have been able to use it since the alpha version and it showed to be, well, reliable, at least for the work I’m doing – architectural visualisation. I have been saving often but no real problems appeared.
I have been working on a few small projects – small residential, a hotel contest and a.. moon colony 😛 – and Blender did not let me down. I am much more confident than I was a year before, so much that I have accepted a couple of commercial projects and it all came out well.

For me nothing beats a real world project to really learn stuff. Just experimenting around on my own is not challenging and motivating enough. Taking on a client’s project – and on a deadline – revealed issues I never encountered when just playing around in Blender on my own. Sure, taking on a project when not really sure what you are doing can cause some anxiety and late nights.. ugh. The Blender blogging community was very helpful to me and though it’s difficult to take the time, I really try to follow the blenderheads and the great tutorials out there.

I am using only the Blender internal renderer right now, as I consider it best for a good work flow and for keeping project deadlines. I got good results from it and I feel that I’m getting constantly better at it.

I have been using the new stable release for a couple of weeks now and at first glance I couldn’t see any change from the beta release except from the splash screen 🙂 I had to read the overview from Blender cookie to discover the new stuff. The solidify modifier sounds like a really great addition and a post on it on Blendermama is on the works.

I have tried to upgrade the blog a bit, with a new image and a Gallery page I soon hope to fill. Old tutorials for Blender 2.49 are still here, I will try to update them in time to 2.5 – or make new better ones.