New Tutorial: How To Create Demonic Ink!

Whew! This took a helluva lot longer than I expected. Codec problems, rendering issues (I think this took 12 hours to render - too long?), and the final product is far from perfect, but it's here so I'm happy ;)

Presenting my first foray into making a video tutorial for Blender (Best watched in Full HD):

As mentioned in the video, here's the free background texture you may use for any of your projects:

And finally, feel free to contact me if you'd like to take a peak at the blend file that I used in this video.

Enjoy and Happy Halloween!

"Demonic Ink" Tutorial Preview!

Hey guys!

I noticed there hasn't been any real tutorials on creating a physically based realistic effect of Ink spreading onto paper. I thought I'd create a tutorial, and, well, one thing lead to another and now it's a spooky Halloween effect!

Oh well.

Here's the preview. I will release the tutorial very soon!

Andrew Price's UI Proposal - My Suggestions

Just saw the latest video that Andrew Price came out with for the proposed Blender UI redesign. Really interesting stuff! Don't agree with all of it, but I think it's a step in the right direction.

I added my two cents to the argument, and that basically is the arrangement of tabs at the top that would define the different tasks one would generally want to accomplish. Here's my post in its entirety:

I actually think it would be more intuitive to make the tabs at the top (model, material, texture), organized according to the steps one would take to complete a project. They would essentially replace the "workspace" tab that currently exists.

So, my ideal order would be: Scene, Model, Rig, Texture, Animate, Light, Render, Composite. Sculpt could be a subset of the Modelling tab and Texture and Material could collapse into one. Similar to how you have it arranged now, there would always be an option on the top left part of the horizontal panel to switch to nodes if that is possible. The scene tab would be the area where you'd define the gravity, background color, ambient occlusion, as well as camera tracking.

The modifiers tab would exist as an option in the properties box on the right when you select an object.
As for the particles, hair, physics, those aspects would be available as a right click function when you select an object. It might show a tiny icon ("Make Smoke Flow, Make Fluid, Make Rigid Body"). This would then be available to tweak and adjust in the modifier tab which would now be in the properties box on the right.

As well, perhaps there could be physics objects available to select in the tools panel to get started, say a sphere that has the flow property applied. The bounding box for the fire and the fluid (for water sims) would be automatically generated, because why would it ever be necessary to manually create it?

These are all the suggestions I can think of now. Thanks for all your hard work!

Poker Chips Falling - Test

In other news, here's a slow animation I rendered a while ago featuring poker chips falling. Not very exciting, I know, but wanted to play with Blender's different Film looks and how fast Cycles renders on my new comp.

You'll also notices the physics is a bit wonky for the right two chips, who have decided to take it upon themselves to slowly edge away from the other colored chips (racist are they?):

Blender Artist Post Mentioned In Blender Guru Podcast

Just got a bit of nice recognition from Andrew Price's latest podcast. He referenced my post from a few days ago about fixing Blender's interface. Brought up some great points and helped clarify what he meant by the term "broken".

You can check it out here: