The Blender Diary

Hello all,

Well I have done it at last, designed my first character for The Wooden Rocket short. He is called Professor Wesley and he is the main character for the movie. He is the designer and builder of the wooden rocket.

Having been my first attempt at anything like this is took me about 16 hours, but I have learned a lot from the experience. The next big step is going to be when I rig him for animation. I think I have got all the joins in the right place, but time will tell.

The rest of cast will include the Rabbit family (Dad, mum and baby/kid) and a rather accident prone bird. I will be posting character / animation tests for them here as soon as they are completed. My first task however is going to be rigging the Prof for animation. This being my first try, I want to make sure that the underlying principles I have used are going to work for the other characters too.

Well that’s about it for now.

If you like what you see and want to help, please feel free to make a donation by visiting the Crusade Multimedia web site and click on the donate button.

If you have any questions / comments or want to know more about the Crusade Multimedia and would like to get involve, please feel free to email me. I would love to hear from you an will do my best to reply as soon as I can.

David Morgan.
david@crusade-multimedia.co.uk

Professor Wesley Character Test
The Wooden Rocket Trailer

Please visit www.crusade-multimedia.co.uk for more information.

Hello again,

Yes I know, its been almost a year since my last post. This year has been one heck of a ride for me. I have been waiting most of the year for a heart operation and at the time of writing (22nd November 2007), and I am still waiting. So sorry for not keeping this up to date.

One thing that has happened during this year, I have had a lot of time to think, to wait on the Lord and to examine open source software. I have at long last managed to get ride of Windows for good (after about two years of trying). I am typing this in OpenOffice.org on a PC running Ubuntu 7.10 flavour of Linux (for anyone out there that might be interested.)

Open source software has come a very long way in the past few years, and while Europe as a whole has embraced the philosophy, here in Britain things are very different. When you say the phrase ‘Open Source’ most people just walk away saying he will get over it. The other reaction I come across is shock as if you have just used a swear word.

Almost all the people I have met who cringe at the idea on the whole Open Source movement never even seem to have used an Open Source application. If they have, it was a very long time ago and they found it not to be up to the task they needed it to for fill. If you inform them that things have changed a lot since then, they are reluctant to try again.

So how do you get around the reluctance to try something different. To break away form what has already been established as the normal.

During my time spent with the Lord over this year, He revealed to me that the only way that people will except what Open Source can do is by showing them what can be archived.

O.K. I know what you are thinking, what has this got to do with animation / drama?

The answer is quite simple. First as you may have gathered from the statement above I am a Christian. For years now God has been putting it on my heart to produce good quality moralistic drama. These dramas to be first and foremost entertain, but also to have a moral centre to them. To this end I have been blessed with an abundance of story ideas that are just crying out to be produced. unfortunately most of the ideas that I have been given would be difficult, if not impossible to do in a five minute slot in a church service.

The Wooden Rocket short has now changed from just something to do in my spare time to a full blown project to test the feasibility of using Open Source software in every step of the production cycle. While the project is still in the early stages the software has preformed well and I hope to have The Wooden Rocket finished if not late December, then early January 2008.

So what is Crusade Multimedia all about then?

The goal of Crusade Multimedia at this stage is:

1. To Promote the “Wooden Rocket” Project and future productions projects.
2. To Promote Open Source Software in both the home and business by snowing what can be achieved. To offer help, support and advice on using Open Source Software.
3. To encourage others out there who have a similar dream of producing drama / videos which are both entertaining and have a moral core to them.
4. To help raise funds for future production projects.

If all goes well a pone the completion of The Wooden Rocket project, I hope to make Crusade Multimedia an official Non Profit making organisation early next year with the goals stated above.

So there you have it. A strange year to say the least, but I have learned a lot and I am learning something new on a daily bases. Perhaps it is a lot to achieve, but I believe with God’s help it can be done.

For those of you who may be interested, I will be putting some of my old scripts for download at a small price in the next few days. Each script be accompanied with a story outline, cast list and sample page or pages so you can see what you are getting. Please feel free to pass these on and use them as many times as you like.

Well that is it for now. If you would like to know more about Crusade Multimedia or feel you would like to get involved, please feel free to contact me by email at david@crusade-multimedia.co.uk, I would love to hear from you.

You can also leave feedback at this blog but please keep things civil. Any feedback left with derogatory or bad language will be removed.

David Morgan.

Please visit www.crusade-multimedia.co.uk for more information.

Welcome to my blog. So what is the Blender Diary’s all about. Well over the past fews years I have been trying to get my head around doing 3D animations / short films.

Having very little in the way of financial resources to put into the project, most of the professional packages (ie LightWave, Maya, 3D Studio Max) where out of the question.

A few years back I started working with True Space. While this had the potential do produce some very stunting results, doing anything other than smile modelling required a great deal of effort to produce detailed models. So I decided to put the whole project to one side.

Just before Christmas (2007) I was bored one evening and decided to do a google to look for any open source 3D modelling software. I came across several package, but most of them seemed to suffer the same fate as True Space. Then I came across a package called Blender 3D (http://www.blender3d.org). At first glance it looked on the surface just like the other packages I had checked out earlier that even. All that change when I went to look at the Gallery section of the Blender 3d web site. Some of the examples posted on the site just took my breath away with the level of detail and realism and all this from a complete free (open source) modelling software ?!.

Now I know what you are thing, Yeah but I must take a lot of work to get things to come out looking that good, and that was my first reaction too. But I still downloaded blender that night. Over the next few evens I began to play around with it, not quite knowing what I was doing, but the results I got just from playing around with the software where pleasantly surprising. Modelling vectors had gone form being a chore to being a pleaser. Just being aloud to place unconnected vectors where you wanted them (something I could never do with True Space) and being able to join the together with a single key press was just a joy.

So now after two months of playing around with Blender 3D I have revived my dreams of doing 3D animations. And here at the Bender Diary’s I hope to chronicle my attempts at creating my first animation project called THE WOODEN ROCKET.

Any help or feedback is welcome, but please keep things civil. Any feedback left with derogatory or bad language will be removed.

Thank you for taking the time to read this blog.

David Morgan

Please vist www.crusade-multimedia.co.uk for more information