I just finished writing a tutorial/Q+A article for 3DWorld magazine. I can’t post any images from it obviously, but if all goes well it should show up in the newsstands in issue 85. The tutorial was fairly involved and fun to write, and delves into animating (in blender) via modifiers and keyframed materials. It’s nice 3DWorld frequently carries blender content- in the past they had many tutorials, they covered the elephants dream movie project during its production, and they recently had an issue around the theme of opensource software in graphics/movie production- I believe it was issue number 80. Writing the articles with FLOSS software is quite handy- I use screenshots and renders from blender, inkscape to create text and overlays, and finally gimp to put it all together and export a .psd document. Coupled with multiple desktops for the different apps, my workflow has gotten quite smooth. For the copy I’m using abiword, though any text editor will do here since there are no format requirements. For future articles I’ll switch blender to use truetype fonts at a large size for the interface so I can capture nice big readable text for the screenies.
I’m back from Argentina, where I worked on the Plumiferos project: A totally courageous studio (Manos Digitales) making a full length animated film using only free software; They’re running Ubuntu workstations, Fedora servers, and using blender, gimp and other free software graphics tools to make the movie.Since stuff keeps coming up, I decided not to wait till all parts of the site are done to publish, so the blog is now online. I need to work on the nav structure and the templates for the static pages before I get galleries, etc. online.