Trains, “Planes,” and Automobiles

Continuing my way through the Blender tutorials, next in line was (more or less) learning how to use a plane to create terrain: using proportional editing (the equivalent to Max’s soft select) to create hill or mountains with the next part being creating a volcano, albeit in a very rudimentary form. This tutorial also had you play with lights and a very basic texture just a little bit. Much more on that later, I’m sure. For now, here’s the volcano.

Learning Blender

I needed a good free alternative to those other overpriced packages, like Max and Maya, so I decided it’s time to actually learn how to use Blender. I’ve been reading and watching a couple tutorials so far and I’m certainly picking up on the GUI. It was a little awkward at first, especially right clicking to select stuff, but I got use to it fairly quickly.

I started with the overly simple tutorials. Figured it’d be the best way to get up to running speed. The link below is the one I’m currently going through and it’s been very useful so far at getting me going.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro

I just finished up creating a simple humanoid and rigging it with bones. Sure, it’s not the best looking and it certainly won’t deform properly right yet, but that wasn’t the point of the exercise. I’m not planning on focusing on character modeling and animation anyways. I’m trying to learn Blender to create environmental objects for levels.

Here’s a render of the simple humanoid for great justice.