Having a full-featured 3D-suite like blender available and not knowing how to make use of its myriad of capabilities, always felt like a splinter in my eye… especially if you are very keen on all things computer-graphics and 3D. Since nothing ever happens by wishful thinking alone, you have to dive into it yourself in order to get rid of that splinter. So serving myself small helpings of written and recorded tutorials every evening, I am now able to wield some of blender’s more interesting tools at a basic level. I started with rigid and soft body-dynamics with some camera-effects.

Here are two dices being dropped on a table (rendered with the Cycles raytracing-engine). I wanted a scene with some convincing and extreme angular motions…

Some soft-body cubes with a slight depth-of-field effect (rendered with the Cycles raytracing-engine). The material for the cubes was very good fun to create, and it is a joy to tweak to get it exactly right…

A few days ago I also did this last clip (rendered in realtime with blender’s OpenGL-based 3D-view). For it I used kdenlive to add the sound for an engine-hum to give the scene a bit more atmosphere…

On a side note I want to add that these clips were created using a strict OpenSource-pipeline (ubuntu, blender, gimp, gstreamer, kdenlive) on a beefy desktop machine and a ultrabook-type laptop. Moving between these machines while working on the same project-files is effortless.