big red dragon

Multipost test, click to jump to posts

it works

Originally posted on Cohost: 2024-08-02
a cornell box made in blender 1.60 on windows ME. there is no radiosity solver in this version so the bounce light is faked with hemi lamps. everything is dithered as well because the graphics card only manages 16 bit color at this resolution.
the panel join arrows in blender 2.40 being rasterized so slowly you see the individual triangles that make up the shape

the poor Cirrus Logic CL-GD5446 graphics card from 1996 is really struggling though, only managing 16 bit color at the native 1024x768 resolution of the monitor

a cool thing is that in blender 2.40 you can see the individual triangles of the UI join arrow as they are rasterized (transparency is expensive!)

can you guess which of these cars have No Puno Flip enabled?

Originally posted on Cohost: 2024-08-04 two cars modeled and rendered in Blender 1.60

Originally posted on Cohost: 2024-08-06 Blender 1.80 running on Windows ME. A scene consisting of streets, cars and a couple buildings are present

the CL-GD5446 graphics card handles 256 colors faster than 16 bit color, but when I realized Blender 1.60 had no UV editing capabilities I needed to upgrade to 1.80, which refuses to run in 256 color mode.
So I'm now back to 16 bit color, with the interface in a smaller window to make it run better (which conveniently makes room for the render window)

character modeling in Blender 1.80 (on real hardware)

Originally posted on Cohost: 2024-08-07
character modeling in blender 1.80, with a front and side 2D reference used as background image in two viewports
modeling a paw
modeling the face of Puro Dark Latex Changed Skull Mask
a render of the Big&Round Puro Dark Latex Changed Skull Mask But They Are A Kaiju model, with materials that are too bright and a big seam across the middle because there's no mirror modifier so this is actually just half meshes copied and flipped But Not Yet Merged

some observations

  • there's no loop cut (or any operation relating to the concept of a loop)
  • there's no undo, only an ability to reload the mesh as it was before you entered edit mode
  • there's no snapping and the only way to merge is remove doubles
  • there's no dissolve operations
  • there's no knife tool
  • vertices in edit mode draw on top of everything, making it really difficult to tell what you select on denser meshes
  • there's no mirror/symmetry
  • there's no proportional edit EDIT: there actually is, i was thinking of 1.60
  • there's no shrink/fatten or vertex/edge sliding
  • the interface is pretty slow but that's due to the hardware, not blender

but other than that it's pretty familiar

next up comes the fun part: rigging and animating this, with the archaic concept of a skeleton being "a bunch of empties and Ikas"

testing the "lotsa Empties" method on the character model

Originally posted on Cohost: 2024-08-10 posing a character model in Blender 1.80 thats rigged using empties with a deform radius. (please excuse the crappy quality, I don't own a capture card)

rigged up one leg of the character just to test if this was viable at all, and it's ... acceptable!! The OOPS schematic view becomes a sort of rig bone selector in this case, which makes selecting the right "bone" pretty easy actually.

The hard part is finding the right place to put the empties that are part of the skeleton, and determining their radius. I found one solution; adding spheres and then putting empties in the same location, and writing down the scale of the spheres to use as radius

spheres placed inside the character model to act as guides for where to place empties and how big their deform radius should be

a test render of the model with one leg posed. the other leg is not weighted and there's some stretched vertices that were close enough to the belly "bone"