MrSide

Hello world!

A lot happened since the last post so I'll probably have a lot to say.

First of all, I have officially graduated from the 1 year course I was taking at Desgraff institute at Sherbrook. If you'd like to, you can see my demoReel here : www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LjdoS…
Everything was made in Blender except for the typewriter. I originally didn't get a good grade for it as the presentation was really bad but I think I made it better since the original version. I still had some problems with the mesh display on the Yamato as you can easily notice. Anyway, I hope you like it and feel free to leave me your impressions (negative as positive) on it.

The end of the class brings great news for me as I was chosen to be part of a group of people that will be trainees in a Montreal business. It won't be in cinema or in video game as I would have wished but it is still valuable experience and a thing I'm really glad of. I should start this Monday, I can't wait.^^

Also, as you might have noticed in my gallery, I finally have finished my Yamato ship. It sure took a long time but it is finally done and I'm very glad it is.^^ I don't really know what I'll do next, I was thinking of an another car I started in 3Ds max but I'd also like to work on my textures and maybe start doing tutorials again. Speaking of personal projects, I have started a drawing contest with my talented friend . The goal will be to do 100 drawings in 100 days following a random list of themes. The winner will be the one who has made the most drawing at the end of the 100 days. Even if I'm really bad at drawing, I'm excited by this project and I suggest you do the same if you want. You can see my horrible drawings here mrside.deviantart.com/gallery/… (yeah, the site is in french as it is our native language) and the list for the 10 first days  is : a shoe; a fish, a chest, something green, a woman's face, a chair, your lunch, a dog, something in the kitchen, a tree
If you intend to take the challenge too, be sure to tell me!

That said, I wish you best in your projects and a great day and a half!

Just a quick update to wish all of you a great Christmas if you're celebrating it and a great celebrations time!

We'll see ourselves next year.

Hi everybody!

Just telling you that I won't upload my BGE tutorials on deviantart anymore. Not until I fully complete the series, mainly because it fills my gallery for nothing. So I'll wait to have completed the series and then I'll upload a deviation with all the links of the series. It will be simpler that way.

So, what are you guys doing these days?

So I have been making tutorials for the Blender game engine for about 4 weeks now and I must admit it completely kills me. No, frankly, this stuff takes so much preparation, research, practice and side work, it is amazing. And now, after more than 1 hour of video, I am still not happy with my voice and accent.XD I still get confused with my verb tenses, I often misspell words and worst of all, I still get blanks while explaining. Those errors make me restart the whole recording over and over as I didn't find a good video editing software yet. The good thing is that I keep learning as I deepen and test everything before I include them in my tutorials.. but yeah... that's still hell lot of work.

I'm kind of glad about it though. They are not really popular yet and the feedback is almost absent, but I have the feeling I'm doing a good job... except on the speaking. >.<

Hi everyone!

In case you didn't know, Blender has a built in game engine and I am working on it lastly. I'm really curious to see what is the limit of this game engine. It could be fun to discover it is actually as powerful as another application of the kind but I don't want to speculate on that. So far, let us say that it becomes far more interesting to use once you learn how to work with it. I have learned a few good tricks while making my generic level with it and I feel more comfortable with it now. Hope I can pass some of this knowledge down but I seem to have some problems with making tutorials, this is so stressful. >.< But I shall overcome it and do something good one day.

Tip of the week : how to navigate int the graph editor?
Just in case, the graph editor is the place where you can see your animation curves. An animation curve is how the animation is interpolated(calculated by the computer) between two keyframes. A keyframe is a frame(1 picture in the 24, 30 or 60 images per second of an animation) in which you tell blender to remember a specific value. For example, if you have a complex animation of a cube moving from point A at frame 0 to point B at frame 30, you would have a keyframe for the position at the frame 1 and 30 and blender would interpolated a transition between the two point in the 28 free frames. This would by default be a smooth transition but can be changed. SO this is the graph editor, now here are some tips and shortcut that will help you use it :
ctrl-middle mouse button : will scale the time axis(left right) or the value axis(up down) depending on how you move your mouse. Very useful.
"." : Will zoon to the selected handle(keyframes) the same way it zoom to the selection in edit mode, object mode or UV mode.(God I like how this software reuse its shortcuts)
"L" : Will select the pointed curve the same way it work in the edit mode or the UV mode.
Lastly, in the graph editor toolbar(should be under the viewport), you will fin a button with the shape of the cursor. Always put it on. What it does it that it shows you only the animation curves of the selection. If you don't put it on, your graph editor will become very messy very quickly.

And that is all for this week, Have a great one!