Blender

Lately I've been working with Blender. For those of you who don't know, Blender is a 3-D shape editor and landscaping tool, much like Sketch-Up. But Blender is much more technical, and you can do a lot more with it. After following some online tutorials, I've figured out the basics.
When you first open it up you see a square in the center of a grid. That is actually a cube, but since you are looking down on it, it looks 2-D. To change views go to this menu:

You can choose top, front, side or camera. The camera is that triangular thing in the bottom right. If you choose it for your veiw, you can see that that square is 3-d.
If an object is selected it will be highlighted purple. To do this right click on the object. To select multiple objects, hold shift and right click on them.





To add an object hit the space bar, add mesh, and then choose the shape you want to add.
Then you select properties of the shape. Double click to type in the properties, or grab the bar and slide it left or right to change it.
To edit the object even further hit the Tab button or change the mode manually using the menu next to the object menu. Now you can select vertexes and move them. Right click to select one, or shift-right click to select multiple ones. Once you have multiple ones selected you can move rotate or scale(the same way), all in relation to the object's center. When you are done editing the object hit tab or manually switch back to object mode.




To add color to the object, click on the sphere: this is the shading menu. Now you can adjust the red green and blue values.

To adjust shading, adjust the values in the shaders menu.
Clicking does some random thing, I haven't figured it out yet.
You can add cameras like any other object(space button). You can go to the different camera views using the same "View" menu.Now you need to add light, add lamp, sun, spot using the space button. You adjust the light using the shading menus, and you can move the light to where it is best. To take a picture hit F10, this takes you to the scene menu. You should adjust the render options to make the render smaller and at a lesser quality, or the render will take hours to do.

Mario 64

The image on top is my sketchup version of the picture on the bottom, it is incomplete, but it's taking me a while, so I thought I'd post my progress. To make this I just used the rectangle tool to draw the ground and wall, also to make the blocks. I only used the colors that sketchup had, so the colors don't really match. To make the trees I just stuck a bunch of spheres together. For the raised ground I drew the outline with the pencil, then used the push pull tool.

volcano eruption

I made this in one class. i just took one picture and airbrushed out most of it and left a little more of the picture in each successive slide

Mona Lisa Becomes Pope

Using Wikipedia's random article button, came upon a picture of some pope. Then I just scaled down a pictur of the Mona Lisa and put her face in.

Swimmer

This is just a quick clip made using pivot. It's just an easier way of showing different slides--much like going between layers in gimp.

Why you should wrestle

To make this I took a picture off Google and pasted my face onto it. I had to fill in the background because this guy's head was bigger that mine. To make my face this type of red I used the Hue Saturation editor under the Colors tab.

Jack the Revolutionary

Yes, I happen to have some pictures of the dog on my hard drive at work...so here's another where I tried to create the iconic Che Guevara type image that you see on t-shirts and posters using Jack, the Springer instead of Che. For this one I played with a few editing tools: 1. mask 2. colorize 3. threshold and 4. layer types (in this case multiply).

The mask tool in particular is really handy for creating an area to fill in with the bucket tool. You can check out a great tutorial for this method here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yupmgRJqwTc

Using the Curves Tool to Make Colors Stand Out

I played with the Curves tool on this photo of my dog waiting for a tennis ball. It is one of the more useful tools for basic photo editing. Curves works for changing the color, brightness, contrast or transparency of the active layer or a selection. To use it go to Tools>color tools>curves (or right click on the picture and follow the same path). Not sure how well you can pick up the difference between the two photos on the blog, but basically what I did was create an "s" curve and made the picture pop a little bit. The blue a little bluer, green a little greener, black a little blacker etc.

Broken Screen

I made this by using a screen shot and a picture of broken glass. On the broken glass layer i used the "select by color" to delete all the blue of the unbroken pieces of glass.

Tree

To do this I created layers of green and used a large smudge brush to create different patches of green. Then I used a very small smudge brush set at 90% smudge rate to create the grass. To make the tree I downloaded (with Marty's help) a tree brush. Then I used a small galaxy brush to make the leaves.

Super-Special-Awesome Pic #2!

Yep! This one was somewhat decent. I used a lot of pencil for this one, and the airbrush tool as well. I figured out about the straight line option doing this. YAY! But, anyways, the fuzzy brush also played a great part in this one as well. (I go for things that are slightly abnormal but still slightly believable.) The smudge tool also helped with the aura thing. It came out better than I expected! ^_^

Tranquil Reflections

This is just a different version of Ocean at Sunset

Ocean at Sunset

I started out with two fields of blue and orange. I added brown and red lines to the sky, then blurred it. I added white, purple and dark blue lines to the ocean. To get that wavy look, I blurred in waves.

I use a small paintbrush to to make the stars outline. I followed through with the blur tool to give it a faded effect. For the moon I used the ellipse tool. I filled in the circle with a soft white color. Then I used the paintbrush again for the black shadow. A good way to get the fade effect is with the fuzzy tool add-on. For the spots on the lighted side I used the spray-can tool set on a dark gray color. Just lightly spray in spots to blend in.

Desert Cliff

I did this by taking a photo off Google and selectively smudging, then I blurred the edges of the smudges to give it a more blended look. I had to smudge horizontally to show the different layers of rock that are common in the desert.

Desert Sunset

An interpretation of high desert blending into agricultural fields, which can be pretty dramatic out West.

Not quite a finished work, but my eyes are starting to cross a little. Just playing with shades of the sames colors. Really only a few. Three shades of orange-red, three shades of brown-black and three shades of green. Using the smudge tool quite a bit along with the calligraphy tool varying the size of each tool. I gained some efficiency by painting all of the dark sides of the mountain and then all the light sides, and then blended each side all in one step. The mts. are a little more neon right now than I would like, probably will go back and add some darker, more earthy shades later.

I also downloaded and installed 1100 new brushes to Gimp (there are lots of brushes available online). The instructions for downloading and installing brushes are on bapstmoodle. Lots of options.