I picked up Terry Pratchett’s Raising Steam when I was in the UK for the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary celebration last November, it is a wonderful book you really ought to read. Now they have put together a great little collection of the characters and objects from that story as PDF files that you can download, print, cut out, and fold into their 3D likenesses. Hop on over to Raising Steam 3D and get your free downloads, so you can create your own collection. Thanks to Jenn for the heads up on this one.
And you can learn how to do that in 20 minutes, by watching this excellent TED video by Josh Kaufman. If you are not already a major TED fan, you should check the project out. This is the way to help yourself become the best version of you that you can create; by learning how to learn, and grow, and develop. This particular lesson is only the tip of the iceberg.
Daz 3D is a powerful free 3D modeling and animation software package that has everything you could want to create your own animations. Mind, if you are not careful, the content store may drain your wallet in short order. But that is mostly a problem for the lazy, who are not willing to do the work to create their own stuff when they can just buy it off the shelf.
Once you have downloaded and installed the free software package, knowing how to use it would be pretty useful, so some tutorials would help out. As with most training and tutorials, any of these concepts apply equally to a lot of different software packages that do the same general job. The major real differences between them are what the buttons are called and which menu they live in, although each program seems to have 1 to 3 things it can do with a click that the other programs need a procedure for. So if you use a different program for your 3D modeling and rendering, most of the info will apply once you figure out where those buttons live in your software.
The first one is a basic intro to 3D modeling and animation, demonstrating the basic components any animation is made of. Once you understand what the components are, it is just a mater of learning how to do each of them in whichever program you prefer, and finally how to put them together to create your finished product. The second tutorial is about the program itself, Daz Studio, showing you where these functions live in this software and how to use them. Again, most of the concepts work in any software, so you might want to at least watch it once, even if you use a different program. And if you don’t already have a 3D modeling software package you prefer to work in, then I recommend downloading and installing either Daz or Blender, as the best free 3D programs on the market today. There are more tutorials where these came from, keep your eyes open and you will find a lot of good ones.
Yes, this is a step-by-step tutorial about how to build your own Minions in Blender, a powerful free open source 3D modeling program. Since I personally love Despicable Me (both of them), this seemed like a great project to learn from. Download your free copy of Blender and start creating today.
This Flash Fiction contest is 3 Minute Futures, and they are looking for someone to write a short, powerful story. The world renowned science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson will select the winner, and Star Trek actress Gates McFadden will direct the To the Best of Our Knowledge productions into a finished radio play, with the help of LA’s Ensemble Studio Theatre. The competition runs until March 1st, 2014, be sure to Submit Your Entry before then! Thanks to Boing Boing for the heads up on that one… and just how many of you actually remember Gerald McBoingBoing, the namesake for that site?
SIGGRAPH is a venerable name in the world of computer graphics, the name itself being their usenet newsgroup identifier, Special Interest Group, Graphics, from the days before the Web. At last year’s ACM SIGGRAPH convention, for the first time they held a series of four classes they consolidated under the banner of SIGGRAPH University. They are approximately 3 hours each, and they are university level courses in some aspect of creating computer animation. After watching any of these, you will understand the basics of how to create, not just a picture, but an entire project with timelines and interactions between components.
The one I am embedding on this page is Introduction to 3D Computer Graphics, where you get a bit of the history of how the technology got to this point, but you mostly get a complete mental map of how to create your own animated movie from the ground up, in excellent detail, using whichever set of software you prefer. As you might have guessed by now, I prefer to use a boot-from-DVD Linux build that includes free versions of all the different kinds of multimedia production software you could ever need. If you would like to burn your own arsenal of amazing free multimedia creations tools, check out these other posts and select the one that looks best to you: Musix GNU+Linux 3.0 (mostly music recording, mastering, production, some graphics and video), Ubuntu Studio Live DVD (a complete multimedia suite that has everything you need for most projects, organized by workflow, one of the best builds), Open Artist Live DVD (They took the kitchen sink approach, throwing in every piece of free and open source software that might be useful, and compiled them into folders organized by the type of task you were trying to accomplish), and AV Linux 6.0.2, a personal favorite of mine when it comes to A/V Production that will go live tomorrow.
The other classes in this series are:
An Introduction to OpenGL Programming
The Digital Production Pipeline
Mobile Game Creation for Everyone
And there are more coming up later this year, at Vancouver SIGGRAPH 2014!