A Tide Pool in Kansas?

Ocean life has always held a fascination for me, something I suspect is not uncommon among those of us who end up as biologists. My mother gave me some of Rachel Carson's books, the The Sea Around Us, The Edge of the Sea and several trips to Cape Cod imprinted the smells, sites and creatures of the sea. So of course as part exploring Blender and mesh had to make something with tentacles. I didn't think I was ready to tackle squid or octopuses so decided on sea anemones. Easy enough right...well it took 2 days to get something that looked sort of like a sea anemone.

Here are three of my attempts. My first attempt is on the left and my latest attempt is on the right.

 The first attempt was not meant to be realistic and I had all sorts of trouble with painting the seams out. Both the second and third attempts are more realistic, which ironically was easier than what I tried to do in my first attempt.  The tentacles were done using extrude, scale and translate tools in the mesh editor. There are I think other ways to do tentacles but I decided to stick with the the tools I best understood. The last one is still has some seam issues but pretty minor.

Of course I had to make my own little tide pool. Which resides some where in the cloud or mirrored to my home machine, alas in-silico.

Playing with Light

Today I visited Paislee Myrtle's Dragon's Teeth site which is a wonderfully lit world as shown here:

This led me to do some lighting in Simone's World. Here is the result which is not nearly as well crafted as her world but I had fun with this.

By the way she is in a group called the Devokan Story Tellers. This link is to her Kitely World Page. http://www.kitely.com/virtual-world/Paislee-Myrtle/Dragons-Teeth

This world is free to visit and lots of the materials are copy-able. In fact I could not resist the group of fern fiddleheads just to the left of where I am in the second picture. 

My Kitely World is still not open for visitors...so you can't see my experiments with OpenSim physics or me accidently donning a giant orchid.

More about the Devokan Story tellers is at Danko's blog: http://journeymetaverse.wordpress.com/devokan-storytellers-page/

Slowly getting the hang of Blender

Last night I learned how to better use the sculpt tool in Blender including showing the edges which makes the grab tool MUCH easier to work with, and also how to do symmetry across an axis so I can do things such as these orchids:

Building is Theraputic

Slowly my Kitely world is taking shape as I get better at using Blender.  Just about very object in in this view except for the blue landing pad is made from mesh. The little purple flowers were actually pretty challenging for me though I am sure more proficient people could probably make these much more easily than I currently can. You can just make out a pink bridge that I threw together yesterday...OK so it did take me an hour to figure this out.

Here is a better view of the bridge:

Taking shape...

Slowly the world takes shape. The two mesh trees are duplicates. The one on the right has had texture applied but not too successfully.

Also it may not be apparent, but I replaced the default low elevation texture with a richer green one since I really don't want my world to be a desert world.

Framework for a tree

Yesterday I decided to try something a bit more ambitious in mesh-namely to make a tree with blender. So I started with an isododecahedron sphere and uses a series of selects, extrusions, and rotations came up with this framework. I didn't texture it but simply added a reddish material since I was more curious as to how well something like this would be handled in Open Sim. No problem as it turns out.



Here is my tree's framework on my Kitely test site.  Hopefully I can get to the leaves soon.

Morning Glories in Mesh

I've actually managed to figure out enough about Blender and mesh to put these morning glory-ish flowers together today.