City Street

I'm sloooowly moving forward with the rendering of the trike in an urban environment, but that means making an urban environment for it to be in. Ive had to learn a lot about texture mapping and baking to get the effects I want.

I've put far more detail into some of the objects in the scene than I'll ever need, especially the textures for things like the fire hydrant and mailbox. And far more actual modeling in the street lamp. And some of the object scales are off. And of course it needs more light, badly. It looks like twilight at the moment. I'll probably fix that using the compositor nodes when it's all said and done.

Still, it's been fun. Next step is to link this whole scene into the trike file to and add the motion and then render. And hopefully I'll find ways to re-use the elements so it won't feel like they were wasted effort.

The Zoo

Rub his belly for luck!

Went to the North Carolina Zoo this weekend, to celebrate Kerri's birthday. The weather was perfect, and the animals were cooperatively active. Followed by dinner at Elizabeth's.

Strata Studio Pro versus Blender

I've been using Strata 3D CX for nearly twenty years now, and I'm very familiar with it's strengths and foibles. And for what I have been doing (creating renderings of tradeshow display ideas to get clients interested) it is a marvelous tool. The interface is designed so someone coming from an Adobe background can start working relatively quickly, like holding down the spacebar to pan around the view, or option-spacebar to zoom. But as I got deeper into modeling, specifically modeling organic shapes with textures, I noticed there were things it didn't do. And some of those things are pretty crucial, like UV mapping of textures. Also the animation controls were unreliable for things like skeleton based mesh deformations. They just added a UV mapping feature, but it is lacking. Previously their advice had been to use Wings, another free program. But that's how I started using Blender.

Strata added Lua scripting, but there hasn't been a monumental surge of scripts being written for it, and little by way of documentation.

Blender, on the other hand, has very little documentation beyond things put out by third parties. The sheer number of tutorials is gratifying, though it does make want to speak in an Australian accent when I work in Blender.

There is no real polish in Blender. It's like getting a car that doesn't have body panels, and the stereo has to be installed by the owner. Setting up materials can be a challenge, and I still have no idea how some things work.

Strata rendering is both more accurate and faster than in Blender, but there's limited ways to share 3D data with a general audience. Their one tool in that regard is poorly documented and in my experience it is buggy.

I will continue using both, but I'm leaning more and more towards Blender.