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

Monday 7 December 2015

STAR MAKER. (07/12/15)

The rain pours down again but I am getting quicker with Blender. This post is going to be very nerdy. Nerdy and boring.
I have made a much better star. Last time I found a star in Add> Mesh> extras> Simple Star, deleted all but the front face; selected the centre vertex and extruded it.
Like this.

Then I duplicated and flipped the copy through 180° and messed for ages getting them lined up close enough to join them….It’s almost impossible. Then I mirrored the image to end up with ten points but it wasn’t what I fancied.
This morning I started off the same but once I’d loaded the star I reduced the centre diameter added a couple more points, converted it to wire frame selected the central vertex and extruded it then I did the same on the other side and finally scaled the whole thing on the ‘Y’ axis to get a thin star. I duplicated it rescaled and rotated the duplicate and then stuck them together, much better.





So far so good I then animated it and added a particle system so it sprays little sparks from the vertices, I could have done with it not spraying from the centre ones but you can hardly tell if I adjust the camera angle judiciously. Like a dog with two tails I was.
I even managed to give it a material using the node editor.

I love the fact that I can have as many editing screens open as I like.If I had room and money for a monitor twice the size life would be a dream. This is about the limit on a 23” screen. From top left they go rendered view, Node editor….I can’t really work it but it is good fun. Then at the bottom I have the star in object mode and last off all the time line. The yellow Key frames have several attributes for rotation, position and scale. If you want to see them and edit them You can create another little window and use either the Dope Sheet or Graph Editor. It is possible to delete key frames in the time line by popping the time marker over it and then hitting the space bar to bring up yet another sub menu but it isn’t a good way to go on as it destroys all the information in the key frame and not just the bit you are having trouble with.
I then set it to render.


This is it doing it and saving to the Desktop. I had a bit of a cuckoo as I forgot to change the file from PNG to H265 so whilst I put the kettle on it started filling the desktop with png. images. The times I do that! I’ll have to look in Preferences and see If I can’t change the default to AVI. I usually render at 1080 as it gives me plenty of file to move around when compositing a final video at 720 or whatever I use for YouTube. I also make the World or background black as I can then just change the blend mode to screen to get stuff underneath showing through.

Now I have a serious problem. It isn’t rendering the particles like what it oughta. It isn’t rendering them at all in Cycles Render and if I use Blender render it makes them haloed and not what I want.
I'll sleep on the problem it's siesta time and a little snooze usually sorts things.

16 comments:

  1. I love the cartwheeling starfish at th end. As for the rest.....nerdy. As you said. Too clever for me.

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    1. Frances it's too clever for me but it is entertaining.

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  2. I fell into a blender render once-- had to drink my way out. And thanks for the very nice comment on mine today.

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  3. Great effort and mind boggling for lemmings like me

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  4. Zzzzzzzz... I found this post nerdy and boring you cleverdick!

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  5. Replies
    1. Marie, so can I and would be better employed doing so.

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  6. At last, something I can understand!!!!

    I'm talking about the video clip - haven't got a clue what you're talking about before that! Impressive results, however.

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    1. Richard, It is fun but I wish there was someone else interested. I find it one hell of a learning curve and I don't use a tenth of the software.

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  7. Brilliant. I hate to think how many hours it has taken to get this far.

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    1. John, I am now on version six. I know what I want but it's finding how to do it that takes the time.

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  8. I have no idea what you're talking about, but you're not going to get rid of me that easily.

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    1. Bob, it's easy if you are interested. I can't be bothered with complicated grammar.

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