Category: Windows

learning a new creative path

whbeebe

I’ve been gathering an eclectic collection of skills over these past few months, ever since May of last year. Some of those are directly professional, while others are more of a personal interest. They’re all of a technical bent, whether it’s learning to run complex HLA federations or writing applications using node.js on an ARM-based embedded board. One of the skills I’ve been honing very recently is using a 3D rendering tool, specifically Blender. I want to spend the rest of my life, if at all possible, making items that matter for the world. One of the tools I need to accomplish this is a tool that can help me visualize and, possibly, help manufacture these items as well. And so I’ve turned to Blender to develop this capability.

Blender is an open-source 3D rendering tool that’s also free as in beer. This isn’t the first time I’ve used a 3D tool. In the past I owned and used Caligari’s trueSpace. I stopped using the product around version 4, about the time my girls were in late middle school and heading to the ninth grade. The girls were demanding more time (and that’s normal) and my job as a software engineer and systems engineer was demanding even more time. And truth be told I wasn’t all that happy with trueSpace. So I put the software on the shelf and moved on to other tasks. Over the years I had an opportunity to buy trueSpace updates, but I couldn’t see any reason to purchase them. I kept putting it all off until 2009, when Microsoft bought Caligari, eventually killing the product.

One feature that makes Blender special is that it is compiled to run on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. I have it installed on my Windows 8.1 notebook as well as the Ubuntu 13.10 notebook.

I started practicing with Blender on the Ubuntu notebook. I found a series of tutorials created by LittleWebHut, and I started, for whatever reason, with the two-part tutorial for the cup. Whether that was the right tutorial to choose for an absolute raw beginner in Blender I have no idea, but it challenged me enough to stick with it until I successfully completed both tutorials.

Unfortunately during the second part of the cup tutorial, Blender started to lock up the Ubuntu desktop. After two sucessive lockups I copied all the files I’d created under Ubuntu and moved them over to the Windows 8.1 notebook. I finished the cup tutorial and four others as well.

As I said I finished the cup tutorial under Windows. But when I finished I moved the files back to Ubuntu, brought the completed model back up, changed the desktop material color in the drawing to orange and then re-rendered it under Ubuntu. No lockups this time, and the application behaved exactly as it did on Windows 8.1. The only significant difference is that it rendered about twice as slowly, which is to be expected. The Ubuntu notebook is a four-year-old Samsung with a quad core i5, while my latest is a less-than-one-year-old Samsung with a quad core i7. The processors are significantly different, and the newer notebook has twice as much memory as the older, although I don’t think that had a significant impact for this model. I think  it was all in the processors.

These are the results of the tutorials I’ve followed over the past 24 hours. I haven’t spent all that time on them, as I’ve had to also spend time getting real work done. But I didn’t have to go into work as this was Martin Luther King’s birthday, so I worked these tutorials in between all the house work I also needed to catch up on. I like long weekends because I can start home projects and have enough time to actually accomplish something of significance. So while I wait for something to dry or finish, I come over to the notebook and plow through a part of the tutorial.

So far I’ve been remarkably pleased with my results and impressed with the capabilities of Blender. My past experience with trueSpace, AutoCad, and a very old version of Lightwave (back when it was bundled with Video Toaster) as well as growing up drafting in high school and college, help me to work with Blender as well as visualize the final end rendering. Decades of photography and thinking about lighting have also helped considerably.

I’m by no means a Blender expert. Just like any other critical skill, I need to keep working with this until using it becomes second nature, so I’ll keep running through the tutorials. At some point I’ll begin to “sketch” out some of my own designs, and I don’t think it’s going to be that long before my own work starts showing up here.

Blender is the right tool for me. From stills to its ability to generate animation to it’s programming interface (Python), it’s a powerful open tool that can fit into a sophisticated workflow. I could purchase a commercial tool, such as the latest version of Newtek’s Lightwave for $1,500 from B&H Photo, but then I’d have knock-on needs such as a more powerful workstation. And that’s a set of costs I can’t afford right now. Blender is that right balance of power and capability. Maybe if I get to the point where I need to create the next Avatar then I’ll consider all that investment in more expensive professional tools. But for my needs, right now, Blender is just about perfect. And I’m having a lot of fun with it. What more could I ask for at the moment?

As for Ubuntu, if anyone reading this can help me determine why Blender 2.69 is locking up an Ubuntu 13.10 desktop, forcing a hard shutdown, please drop me a note in the comments. I really want to move on to Ubuntu as much as possible.

Tutorials are here: http://littlewebhut.com/blender/

Update

I can’t leave well enough alone. This particular tutorial covered two key features I’m very interested in, using photos as textures on surfaces (direct and reflected) and physical modeling, in this instance the fall of a chain onto a surface. Now I truly am done for the day.

casual art sunday

whbeebe

This is not my first time around the track with Linux. Not by a long shot. I go back to 1993 with SLS, Slackware and later with Yggdrasil Linux. Over time I settled on early versions of Redhat, with a long period using S.U.S.E. Linux, later openSUSE, with side ventures into early Ubuntu and Mandriva. At this point in time I’m happy with Ubuntu 13.10 as my primary personal Linux platform. I deal with Red Hat Enterprise Linux at work. And for those odd needs to view other distributions, I simply install and run them as virtual machines using VMware Player. The battles with getting distributions to run on hardware are long since gone. Running on native hardware or virtualized, Linux Just Works.

I can do the majority of my work on either Windows 8.x or any contemporary version of Linux. My two primary platforms are Ubuntu (as just mentioned) and Windows 8.1. My need to run Windows is to support those tools and workflows that industry demands, primarily Microsoft Office. I also have several key software packages that support my digital photography, both from Adobe: Photoshop and Lightroom, and all the plugins for those tools such as the Nik collection (now Google Nik). Whatever it takes, I truly use the right tool for the right job. I’m long past engaging in strident OS polemics.

Right now, for the kind of work I do at home, my primary notebook is the one I’m writing this post in, the Samsung R580 running Ubuntu. It’s light and fast and does everything I want to do, and probably quite a bit more I don’t know about. The only time I touch the Windows notebook is when I’m post processing raw images from my cameras.

The screen shot is of my Ubuntu notebook using one of my photos as the wallpaper. The original photo was taken with an E-1 up around Ann Arbor Michigan one late fall day in 2011. It’s part of the sequence I wrote about earlier when extolling the E-1. The post processing was done at the time on Lightroom on Windows 7.

Ubuntu trimmed the original,which you see full size in the second screen shot. I love this image because of its lighting. It looks like a Renaissance landscape with its large dark clouded areas and touches of low sun lighting up the remaining fall foliage. I like to look at this than androids and abstract drawings that make up too many wallpapers.

It’s gotten to the point where it’s no longer an issue, except for very specific outlying use cases, what OS or even what set of applications you use. In fact, as Tom Warren of The Verge noted, there was no presence of Microsoft platforms at the 2014 CES. If products for platforms were mentioned, those platforms were Apple and Android. I could write another entry on why that is, but here’s a simple hint: cost of development tools.

For Android, development tools are varied and all free, and can be hosted on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX. For Apple, the development tools platform, Xcode, isn’t free, but nearly so for just $99. But for Microsoft, MSDN or Visual Studio or whatever you want to use is expensive, averaging well into the four figures and higher. Microsoft has never been free, but in the early days of Windows (late 1980s through the early 1990s) Microsoft was quite affordable. But in Microsoft’s drive to make development tools a cash positive cost center, the price of tooling and support was driven into areas where only business developers and major corporations could afford support. Microsoft, which started in personal computing, is now a corporate behemoth supporting other equally large corporations. They no longer have any real touch with consumer electronics which now includes personal computing. Even their X-Box line has been something of a series of happy accidents and appears lately to be headed off the rails. Old folks like me still use Windows because we essentially grew up with it, having been around when all we had was MS-DOS. Microsoft, in its blind pursuit of profitability and IBM, slowly moved on from those roots and left behind everything that gave them birth. You saw the results of that distant decision at CES this year. And it will continue on that way.

That’s not such a place to be if you’re a consumer, and especially if you a DIYer. The selections from everyone are all high quality. The freedom to pick and choose whatever and not have to be constantly drained, financially, is a Godsend. Microsoft won’t go out of business any time soon, and I’ve got better things to do with my time than worry about Microsoft. Very creative things.