Blender is seriously elegant software

I had to share this as it shocked me to see how easy it was to do real graphics work with blender. Compared to the crappy graphics on our local TV generates, it is awesome. I could outdo them on a zero dollar budget.

In this case I created a cube and joined it with the chair ( I just like to play ). It was an example file and I wondered about the wood texture. I opened the UV window and decided I would add the same texture to the cube I joined and I noticed another file there, I decided to UV map it instead and to my surprise it was an ENV map ( I do this in OpenGL for all my stuff and it is in nearly every game.). What stunned me is how easy it is to use. So.... I did a render, save rendered image as, used the Shift+DownArrow(on key pad) to get a changed view, rendered again, did f3, hit the + key (to increment the file name), enter, then continued moving it and saving 5 more times. I put them all in a single directory so I could get them in gimp. I use the latest gimp and it has some new features. I opened the files by selecting "open as layers" in the gimp file menu. I saved it as a file with extension gif and gimp asks a series of questions and then creates the animated gif ( you have to select that as it is not default). I uploaded the gif to my web site ( since blogger upload won't let you do animated gif AFAIK). I plugged that into the standard image block in the HTML. And done.

After explaining all that it doesn't seem all that easy, but I could do this in my sleep and actually I often dream that I am programming. The reason I did the animated gif is so you can see the fact that the image on the joined cube is not static and it changes with the angle of view, like a mirror. It isn't that difficult to do in a compiled "c" language OpenGL file, but it is not point and click by any stretch of the imagination.

If you want to learn graphics arts,:

1. Get Linux
2. Get gimp
3. Get blender
4. Have fun
5. Its all free as in freedom.