Another 2.49 to 2.5 (beta) Guide

Well I'll just join in the fad; jump on the band wagon.... here are some of things that changed, moved over, got left out, and still are not added yet in 2.5 (beta). Just note this software is still undergoing changes. They are working on getting it stable.... Hello Beta!
Some of these are new, but most have just been reorganized, and put in locations in the interface that make more sense.

Grey Justice will punch you out... MAN!

Hey everybody!
I got the chance to follow along very closely with this year's Richmond 48 Hour Film Project with the Hand Turkey Studio Team... er... um well... I got to help out, I did some modeling. Last year I followed along with the Tinychat and the IRC channel, but this was a whole new experience.

How to Make a tire with your hands, and a little bit of love

As it happens, almost every vehicle needs a tire, My Subaru model did, so I found some tuts, and built myself a tire. I watched this tut at blendercookie on how to model a tire, to get an idea on how to build one of these things.

It turns out you start out flat, mash together some modifiers, apply a few of them, bend em' around a curve and extrude out the sides, and you end up with a modelled tire. Or thats how I built this tire anyway.

The Trees are Dancing! Oh Really?

Yes! Really! Quite a while ago I modelled and rigged a palm tree, thus allowing you to make the tree DANCE! Well, this rig I made for the tree makes its trunk extensable so maybe its more viable to use this to just duplicate and pose multiple trees, heh. I got the idea to post this because I was browsing blendercookie.com and saw a tut on modeling a palm tree, sparked my memory and well, you can go have your shot at making palm trees dance.

A break from the current, A break into the past!

So, it is March and I haven't posted this month yet, so here it is finally. There hasn't been much new artwork getting done due to having a certain windows RC operating system head into the land of "shutdownevery2hours". Been doing some OS 'experiment' have installed linux and have been trying to make things work. Well things were working, until yesterday, it seems i break stuff quite easily there. On a brighter note, I cooked some bacon today, now the stove is all splattered.

Dream Like Space Duck: He Can Fly!

Alrighty, here is a character that came into being, I think just for the fun of it, I don't really remember, but I think he started just before the BWC (Blender World Cup) 2009 came around and took up all my modeling time. Its just a side project and I code named him 'duckpound' hehe.. don't ask me why. But anyway I thought I would share this creatures love for flight and his great outlook on life.

Matcaps, no need for lights...

Matcaps, that is what they are called in Zbrush anyway. It is a pretty nifty way to light objects without needing any lights, seems like a useful technique for sculpting.

Thanks to the tutorial at BlenderArtists forum (note: there is a better way to implement this than the first post suggests, just go down a few posts.) and a tip off in the irc channel #smc I spent a day figuring out how to set them up in Blender 2.5, created a small matcap image library.