Tornado

Making the most of a bank holiday weekend,  I managed to climb a hill,  do some plumbing around the house and make a tornado using Blender's smoke simulator.

Inspiration and technical tips fron a tutorial by Thomas Piemontese on BlenderCookie.com

The most time consuming part was creating the house in a way that would disintegrate properly.  If I had more time, I would like to re-work the way the building parts are caught-up in the vortex,  some are moving way too fast for their mass.  Edit:  done

Edit 13th May: I re-did the physics for the disintegrating building and uploaded a new video.
It was thanks to a tutorial I came accross while browsing Andreu Cabré's site (original at BlenderDiplom) that helped most in figuring out how to control the particle distruction of the house. 

Rampant Rudolph

Another tutorial from CG Cookie.  I know it is out of season, I started modelling a cartoon deer and it just had to have a red nose - voila,  Rudoph.

Rampant Rudolph

 He has a simple rig for posing and animation.  The fur was quite tricky to set up,  I ended up differing from the tutorial and using vertex as the particle emitter to give more control on fur density across the mesh.

Architectural Visualisation

Working through a great short course at CG Cookie for producing architectural visualisations in Blender.  Here is the result.

Some great tecniques learned on how to get the best out of the latest Blender builds.  The course concentrated on several important areas, lighting, texture and composition. 

Some of the models in the room were bundled with the course and came from Blendswap.    The wall poster comes from Paul T Kavanagh at NewsnetScotland.

The view out the window comes from my own home-office.  I deliberately turned up the reflections in the window to obscure the view of the neighbours,  I quite like the effect.

Here is the wireframe during modeling:

And the Ambient Occlusion pass - which I also think looks quite cool: