Some Updates for the Holidays
Posted on December 19, 2003
I will be leaving Indianapolis tomorrow for Colorado, where I will spend the next couple of weeks with family. So right now I’m procrastinating on packing by installing Linux Mandrake on my ancient IBM PII 300Mhz notebook. Earlier today, I realized that I usually do some projects (mainly to do with the website) over the Christmas break. Since I will be out of town, away from my PC, and probably away from any computer, I decided to bring my laptop with me so I can do some work, although it ay have more to do with the new Blender, and less to do with the website.
Yesterday, I created a tutorial on creating a simple armature in Blender. An armature is one of the ways to make things move in Blender, but figuring out how to set one up was a bit of a pain, so I created the tutorial to remind me how to do it if I forget, and help others who might have a similar problem.
Speaking of Blender, they have a new version out 2.31a, which includes a raytracing renderer. One of Blender’s shortcomings was the lack of the ability to realistically render transparent objects, like water or glass. This new feature takes care of that. It also adds to Blender’s ability to render reflections. Previously, reflections required creating a “reflection map” for an object. The raytracing does it automatically. The downside is that using the raytracer adds quite a bit to the render time. In the article announcing the raytracing feature, Ton Roosendal (Blender’s creator) said this, “The algorithm has been optimized and is now ten times faster. Combine that with a PC that’s fourty times faster than in the early 1990′s and raytracing is almost usable.” When Mandrake is finished installing on my laptop, I plan on installing it, even though the processor is the flower of 1997 (?) technology. I did create a very simple image on my PC to test it out, and was somewhat impressed. I just did a glass sphere over a marble plane. Nothing fancy, but the plane did reflect off of the sphere.
Well, Mandrake is about done istaling, so I guess that is my cue to get off my ass and start packing.
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