Skip to main content

How I Got Blender


In a couple of my posts, you may notice some computer generated images or animations. They were created with Blender. In this post, I'll explain how I got it and started using it.

A long time ago, I wrote a BASIC program that drew a circle; the user would give the program a number, and it would draw a circle that size. There was a problem, though: the circle had a lot of holes in it. I solved the problem by filling the circle, but that was like cheating. I told my dad about the problem, and he showed me a book about graphics.

I looked through the book, but didn't find anything about my problem. I did find a section with nice, colorful computer-generated images, however - and some were so good they looked like photos! At one point, there was a series showing the construction of a photo-realistic image of a room, starting with the edges, then moving on to the surfaces, texturing, lighting, etc. Here's a similar series I made using Blender (but not photo-realistic):
Edges
Surfaces
Color
Lighting
Bump-Mapping, Reflections, Specularity, and Compositing
It looked so simple, I was hooked. I had to make my own computer-generated image that looked like a photo. I asked my dad to get me some software for 3D animations, so he searched on Google and found Blender. It looked like fun, and it was free, so we got it.

I followed some video tutorials I found on blender.org to make some nice images, and then I started making my own stuff. It was a lot of fun. I raved about it to my sister, but she just got sick of it and hated to even hear the name "Blender." Eventually, though, I convinced her to take a tutorial and make some balloons, and now she uses it to create images, like me. She uses it for art, but I also use it to show people how things work.

So that's how I got Blender. If you're interested in trying it out, just go to the download page on blender.org, and download it. Maybe you'll find it as fun and useful as I do.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Gravity

Imagine the universe is filled with water. Instead of empty space, every inch of it contains pure water. No planets, no stars, only water. What happens? And what would happen if an air bubble formed? The answer to this question requires a basic understanding of gravity. Gravity is very important. It helps hold matter together, bends light, and distorts space-time (which, incidentally, is how it bends light). It also makes it possible to play football, and as Americans are big football fans, they would certainly agree that we couldn't live without it. Unfortunately, many Americans don't understand how gravity works. Admittedly, scientists haven't figured out a lot of things, but we do understand it well enough to make predictions and model physical events. One of the important things about gravity is that its strength is proportional to the inverse of the square of the distance. In other words, it gets weaker as you get farther away, based on the equation: F = c/d 2 where c ...
6 comments
Read more

Major Change of Ideas

Edit: April Fool's. The article completely fails to answer for the benefits of math and science (including medicine and natural disaster prediction). It grossly exaggerates the negative aspects of math and science. Incidentally, math and science have made a large positive difference in my life. Good morning, everybody! I decided to write a blog post to say that I will be completely changing the way I view knowledge and the purpose of life. Photo credit: my sister Basically, "higher" knowledge (including logic, science, mathematics, etc.) is completely useless. There is no point in learning these subjects, which is why I have dropped all my college classes and will not be going to school today. Instead, we should go to the fields, with a shovel and a rake, and grow crops. I will therefore end my blog and begin life as a worker at a ranch in Wyoming. Why this sudden change, you might ask? A few days after my last post (which nobody seemed to read), I came upon a realizatio...
Post a Comment
Read more

2014 in Photos

The year of 2014 is over; the year of 2015 has begun. Over the past year, I took a lot of pictures - more than 1200 photos of clouds, bugs, plants, rocks, and more. I deleted most of the low-quality and repetitive photos. Then, I selected 20 of the remaining photos which I thought were the most interesting or significant. In this post, I'll include those photos, in chronological order. Spring 1. Cold Hummingbird I took this photo after a late snowstorm in Spring. In the days leading up to the storm, it was warm and sunny and the fields were green, so the snow came rather unexpectedly. During the storm, one of the hummingbirds at our feeder was covered in ice and could barely fly. This hummingbird was more fortunate, but unlucky nevertheless. 2. Green Landscape I took this photo on the side of a biking trail. I didn't edit or crop the photo - this is how it looked. 3. Indian Paintbrush The Indian Paintbrush is an unusual flower. What appear to be flower petals are actually brigh...
Post a Comment
Read more