Solidworks-Blender MSN group- bump

Yo Blender nuts,
I have added most of another album to do with getting around meshes.
Let me know what you think.
http://groups.msn.com/Solidworks-Blender
Join up if you are interested. I won't keep it going if there isn't any
audience.
I don't want to bug people here by bumping it too often.
cheers
neil

 

Interesting work Neil. Convinced me to go and download blender - now to find
and work on some tutorials. Thanks for taking the time to show us (me) this.

Whats the difference between a renderer such as blender, and a typical
photoeditor, such as PhotoShop? (Hope thats not too dumb a question?)

What are some other programs that do this? (Other than Maya, which I also
see mentioned here) I like the fact that blender is free, which makes it the
one I will probably try and teach myself, but I'd like to look at some other
apps just out of curiosity. I seem to remember that Adobe also had a
renderer?

 

Hi Ewout,
Well I don't know what you mean there is not text? I have just finished
putting comments on each one. The image quality is as good as it gets
because whatever the size of the picture they get resized to a max of 600 x
600... nothing I can do about that. The originals are PNG - I don't know
what format they are to view
The reason why it is not as detailed as you might like is that I simply
don't have the time to prepare better stuff as a textbook. The pilot Flash
tutorial I made was quite time consuming to do well and didn't cover much
ground. People are just going to have to sit down and learn the program and
think for themselves. There is a wealth of information available if you go
looking. That is the way I learned. I believe the things I have posted so
far are helpful. The image quality should be sufficient for folks to get an
idea of what they can create not withstanding my ability...I am a
learner/improver too.. I hope.
Without more obvious genuine interest from people I am not going to spend a
whole lot of time on it. Personally I probably won't contribute more than
about 3x as much as I have already. No reason why someone else can't put
things up though... As far as redoing it on Yahoo or paralleling your Maya
tut- sorry no. I don't envisage this group will be anything but a passing
curiosity for the vast majority of SW users and that the few enthusiastic
ones will go on to join up with the Blender community proper. Alone I simply
can't answer everyone's questions and fix things for them and provide expert
tutoring and do every other job I need to do working for myself.
If people are aware of it because of my posts and some make use of it well I
have done them a favour. Maybe they won't use it for SW at all..no matter I
think Blender has merit on its own as a v. good open source program.
neil

 

Photoshop is 2d. Basically you take pictures and text and mix them up, layer
them. Change, size,rotation, colours, etc. You might do a painting or a
drawing as well as make use of ordinary pictures. It is the stuff you do
when you make a book, magazine newspaper etc.
Blender, Maya , 3ds, SoftImage etc are 3d modellors just like Solidworks but
it is geared to organic type shapes and animation. The sort of stuff people
make computer games, film special effects- like LOTR, television adverts or
animations like Shrek with.
Rendering models the optical properties of the real world so that
reflections for example are a genuine representation of the path of the
light. A glass material will bend light as it passes through it and objects
cast accurate shadows on other objects
HTH
neil.

 

"I thought you established this group to guide people through the process
of learning. You say there's a wealth of information, which is the big
problem of course. Where to start? I think that's where your group can
help a lot!"

I am doing my best Ewout. It would take hours and hours to communicate all
there is to know about Blender and I would be repeating a lot of whets out
there already. So far I have made 2 albums. I hope to get a few more up
including some useful links as time permits. If you see the comments I have
posted and reflect on what's there I think you will find I am giving you a
strong head start.
regards, neil.

 

Thanks for the info - Sean

 

Hi Matt,
I am pleased you dropped by and found something to interest you.
Most likely there is a way to get a render with more of the appearance of a
line drawing...I seem to remember reading something about that somewhere
recently at the Elysiun forum...
When I get more of the basic info up...slowly getting the content refined
(just hope it reads well to others)... I will see what I can do to either
provide a link to existing info or perhaps make an album page if people have
a specific use for a style of render.
As an aside someone is refining a script for exporting animations to Flash
format with some restricted shading, shadows and outlines that would have a
similar appearance.
cheers
neil