Mina

 Introducing - Mina.

Mina

Back to basic drawing lessons,  partly because I am really rusty and partly to get to grips with Photoshop Elements.

CG Cookie has a course on concept art that looks really difficult.   Following the principle: try something you don't think you can do, I plugged in my Wacom and jumped straight in.

I am quite happy with the result.  Although trying to measure up against Vonn on the CG Cookie site is a tall order.

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. 

Rocket Animation

My images have been a little still recently.  I thought I should do some animation,  mainly because I am not so good at it and I could use the practise.  I based this on a tutorial by David Ward at CG Cookie but after watching it through,  I did the modelling and smoke sim on my own without reference to the tutorial.

A couple of painful learning points during the making of this clip.  1) Don't change the size of the smoke domain in Blender in edit mode.  There is some sort of bug and the domain MUST be a 2x2x2 cube, scaled in object mode.   2) Don't expect to save the file, reopen it and the smoke will play the same way twice.  After a few hours rendering, I shut down my PC, to continue rendering next morning.  Unless you have baked the smoke sim to a cache on disk,  it will be slightly different each time you create it in memory after reloading Blender. 

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.