ABOUT ME

I live in a camper van with a West Highland Terrier for company.
My passion is creating images but it is a work in progress.
I am always willing to share what knowledge I have and can be contacted through the comments on this post or e-mail ADRIAN
ALL IMAGES WILL ENLARGE WITH A LEFT CLICK

Tuesday 1 January 2019

NEW YEAR, NEW BLENDER.

I have downloaded Blender 2.8 Beta for the New Year. It was released in Beta about a month ago. It seems stable enough from what I've seen. I had a bit of bother unzipping the download using WinZip so right clicked the Zip file and did it that way. There is no installer at the moment so after much pondering and a few naughty words I clicked on the Blender icon  and it loads up quick sticks. Here is the bit I clicked on.

If in doubt I click the largest file. Seems to do the job nine times out of ten. It loads straight away so no problems there. I just wish I were computer literate, it would save hours of head scratching. The thing I like about computers is that it is hard to really cuckoo the job. I did copy and save the zipped file in case I managed to confuse the machine. A not unheard of occurrence.
This version of Blender has a magical feature called EEVEE it is a real time render engine and I was so impressed that I made a little video to show you all why. The Blender render engine is gone but Cycles is still there for really posh renders. Many shortcuts have gone and we now have leftclick select which is grand for someone like me who uses several 3D programmes.
Here it is doing it's stuff in real time.
Brilliant so much to learn and so much fun to be had. I was going to build the video here in 2.8 but bottled it and used my normal workflow. Blender 2.7b for the pictures, Audacity for the sound as my voice is croaky and the dogs always need editing out and finally Handbrake just to reduce file size for YouTube.
A good start to 2019.

4 comments:

  1. It looks pretty amazing, Adrian, but I shall resist trying Blender for myself in case I get hooked - I have little enough time on my hands already. Best wishes - - - Richard

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    1. Richard, a very wise decision. I just love free stuff. Funnily enough I never got on with GIMP so spent a Kings ransom on Photoshop.
      I am stunned and it was well worth an hour to get it up and running.

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  2. That looks a brilliant improvement. I will wait for an official update to show in the daily checks that Linux Ubuntu makes as I don't think it will be easy to integrate by hand.

    I've been faffing around trying to get a 3d printer working. It worked for about 15 minutes then something broke. The Chinese makers have been excellent in providing step by step detailed diagnosis instructions but with the time difference it is one step per day. Today I think we finally found the fault. A faulty stepper motor. One of the coils seems to have gone open circuit. If they live up to their good reputation a replacement will soon be on its way.

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    1. It seems fine John, not intuitive to start it mind you. Also my version won't accept an image sequence and I tend to render out a series of PNG files. I have done quite a complex render and it is fast. Not as good as cycles but good enough for video.
      I have had trouble with servo motors in the past. Stepper ones will be worse on anything but light duties. You may want to look at FreeCAD as Blender is far from ideal for modelling. So is FreeCAD but file formats are better for CNC stuff.

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