Blender Cookie Tutorial: Composition

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I found the new tutorial interesting because it is more about photographic composition than about using Blender. That means whether you are into Blender, virtual world photography, or Machinima you’ll probably find some handy ideas for composing your images.

Part 1 of 4 is here: 28 min

[youtube nhZdrjSIx2U]

The full series is here: Improving Blender Renders with Photography Techniques. They are free.

Various viewers make it easier to get to the viewer’s camera settings. In the SL Viewer most of the settings are in the SL Viewer Debug Settings. Third party viewers often have a photographer’s panel that exposes all the camera settings in an easy to access way.

Somato

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Inara has an article up on Yuzura Jewell’s Somato… a program that simplifies texture baking. The idea is to project an image you have onto a 3D shape. Then bake in shadows.

Somato
Somato

Yuzuru asked I check out the program. I’ve been spending my time on other things and just haven’t gotten to it. But, I want to let you know Yuzuru has Somato out. So, check out Inara’s article: Somato: create textures and shadows for sculpts and mesh.

Learn more and download page for Somato.

New Second Life Zipper Project Viewer

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The Lindens have announced a faster installing viewer: Project Zipper Viewer. See the SL Blog announcement: Try Project Zipper for Faster Viewer Installation.

The download is: Project Zipper Viewer version 3.7.2.286810.

I am expecting a surprise to arrive any day. This release would seem to be part of the infrastructure change needed. It might also indicate why the surprise’s arrival is taking longer than expected.

I’ll test the new install process if I can fin d the time. But, there are a number of things to play with just now. Plus there is some real life work intruding on my play time.

AvaStar 1-1-RC2-983 Released

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Gaia Clary has released an updated candidate. You can download it from your AvaStar download page.

Try this out and test it for problems. If all is well this could be the next release. In a few days Gaia will make a revised tutorial using the new release and probably Blender 2.7.

Blog Update 2014-9

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I’ve done some more work on my blog. For a time the updates for Followers failed, again. I got that fixed. I think it is still working after my last changes.

The notices fix broke the pages behind the menu items The Stuff and Viewers. Now those pages are fixed and it looks like Follow Notices are still working. Let me know if you do or don’t get notices.

I’ve been looking for a fix for the iPad’s having Google Ads that cover up some of the article text. I can only reproduce the problem on iPads. The problem seems to be in Google’s code. There is a particular page size that is not being handled correctly.

I suppose Samsung and other tablets might have the same problem as they render a page in the size range of iPads. I don’t have access to any of those. Let me know if you are using a tablet and seeing a problem.

I have some hope I may be able to correct it with a CSS change. But, not much. From time to time I’ll work on it. I’m just short time.