Realtime Rendering

A lot has changed in the world of modern art. We are at the stage that if you are considering the longevity of your art, you must be serius about realtime rendering. This technology is available to you as simply as embedding your desing in a web page and has been for over a decade yet only in the last few years has the quality been at a realistic level.

Building a small game like project in Unreal Engine is the perfect challenge to help you think about how you imagine your art. Is it immersive? an you visualize where your vision is located?

If you have been working with blender, 4.1 is out now and has the ability to save Universal Scene Description files. Unreal 5 has a plugin to utilize the USD file saved from blender 4.1 in a seemless fashion. I am actually shocked that the handoff is so simple.

Watch the video, it is an interesting conversation about today's state of independent game developerment.

Seeing that my previous post was recommending Wings3D started me thinking. Although I use Wings3D in my work flow, I utilize Blender primarily for 3D work. Blender is not focused on the beginner because of the plethora of task you can potentially begin and complete within Blender.

Say for instance, I want to build my own video game. That is a gigantic task, but it can be done utilizing Blender exclusively. Now that is great for a beginner who is serious and not just a hobbyist. Because you can learn every facet of game development while exercising to fruition that nearly "impossible" task. You could potentially become a sought after game developer with a Free Open Source Software suite. Sweet?

I could decide to make a music video to my new song or 3D visualization for any creative work. Blender can be used to model, rig, animate, & assemble the video or real-time walk-through. No area of production is uncovered. If you are ambitious enough to make use of the motion tracking and compositor, then no area of modern visual expression is left out of your reach.

Ok, Blender is not easy to learn, but vast resources are available to those that are serious enough to pursue it. Don't expect great things right away. Look for and follow tutorials. So much of learning is doing that I recommend following every tutorial that looks interesting to you. Do them over and over until you can finish the tutorial in the length of time that the tutor made the video. I started with a tutorial to make a baseball. If you find it then you'll understand why I found it challenging. Making the lases war very educational, but the entire tutorial taught me so much about MODIFIERS. After working with Wings3D for so long, I had not ever imagined what I was missing by not working with modifiers. It is funny how many times I wondered how the best 3D modelers achieved such amazing models. I thought, "This is going to take forever and then I may never become that good". Not so my friend, You will notice you skill level soar once you begin working with modifiers. Highly complex scenes are achieved with much less effort than you can imagine as a beginner with the use of modifiers.

One of the best features with Blender is the exporters. You can export any format that is freely available. Meaning that Blender does not play favorites like the pricey proprietary software. You can even export you new video game as an executable. You very own MyGame.exe!

So for this update, I simply want to add Blender to the list of modern free open source software for the determined beginner.

Modeling for 3D Printing with Shapeways

The right tools for the job!

As a beginner wishing to begin developing fabulous art to be displayed on the web, the only place to start is getting the right tools for the job. So, what are the right tools. For this article I'm going to suggest that a beginner has little to no budget to start. You might ask can anyone really develop professional quality modern web art with no money and the fact is absolutely! Allow me to share some great Free Open Source Software with you.

You may already have heard of Free Open Source Software, commonly referred to as FOSS, but have you tried any? Do you know that free software can be as high quality as you may need especially for a beginner. This means that you can do all of the fancy web art and more that you've wanted to do but without the high costs of the expensive proprietary software you've heard so much about.

So then, why is it free if it's so good? Because of the licences that require it to be free and stay that way. You may not know that there are computer programmers that like to write programs and want you to be able to use them without restrictions, so they will release them under many licenses that are designed to protect your privilege to do just that. I'm sure we have all downloaded an icon editor or ".gif" animator only to discover that although we are permitted to use the "free" program we actually have no rights and are reminded of the fact by the lengthy legal agreement we are forced to accept before using. I'm not going to tell you about any of those applications, you should have no trouble finding that HDD clutter on your own. In fact it is my intention to only list here for you the tools that I use, that are both "free" and safe to install on your computer.

By now you are likely wondering when I'm going to get on with it, right? Alright here it is, my list of free software that you are encouraged and legally entitled to copy, reinstall, modify and redistribute for yourself and your friends.

1. GIMP - GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. Simply put GIMP is a photo editor similar in features to Photoshop.
2. Inkscape - Vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.
3. Wings3D - Now with the next major browser releases will come WebGL for 3D artists. X3DOM already works beautifully in Firefox & Google Chrome.

I know it's a short list but for a beginner the last thing you need is to be overwhelmed with the long list. If you download and install these programs I assure you that you will have the right tools for the job of developing modern web art and it will cost you nothing but the time it takes to set them up on your computer.

You will find virtually endless tutorials and other resources to help you learn to use these fantastic applications.