BenCrowder.net

I’ve been using Blender 2.5 rather often lately, and I’m finding that there’s not a whole lot of documentation out there yet. (And enough has changed from Blender 2.4x that a large-ish chunk of existing documentation is at least partly inaccurate.)

Also, I’m getting tired of thirty-minute video tutorials on subjects that should only take thirty seconds to explain. Applying that concept to textual tutorials, I’m launching a new site. It’s called Blender Quicktips:

It’s bite-size Blender — small, simple tutorials that get to the point as soon as possible and then get out of the way. In other words, tutorials that make the minimalist in me oh-so-happy.

I’ve only got a few tutorials up so far, but I’ll be adding a lot more, on all sorts of Blender-related topics (bump maps, using Blender on a laptop, weight painting, moving the camera along a path, etc.).

“Secret Agent,” made in Illustrator with some final touches in Photoshop:

The full-size image is on Flickr. And I still haven’t gotten around to writing that post on why I’m doing so much art lately, but it’s coming. I’ve also got a new website I’ll be announcing in the near future. Lots of stuff going on. :)

Time for a bit of a potpourri post. It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these.

1. I’ve moved both this blog and the Mormon Artist site over to my new host, and it went surprisingly smoothly. (Well, with a few hiccups like forgetting to enable mod_rewrite, forgetting to add the new domain zone, etc. And when I tried to import the 15mb WordPress XML file, I ended up with 7,000 comments instead of the 5,000 I actually have, so I had to dump the SQL directly and use that instead.)

2. The advantage of moving hosts like this is that I’ve been forced to decide what’s actually important and what’s not. I used to have around twenty-five domains registered. I’m paring it down to three. And I’ve gotten rid of years’ worth of cruft on the old server.

3. I love Linode. Everything feels faster and I’m learning tons (like how to use the MySQL command-line client, which I’ve always been meaning to get around to but haven’t yet).

4. I’ve unlinked my feeds from Buzz. I’m still trying to decide if I should unlink my blog from Facebook, though. Not sure…

5. Today included paring down my Vim statusline and then adding a wordcount to it (which updates when you save). Oh, and I added line numbers to the terminal version. See my .vimrc for the details.

6. To keep this post from being all geekspeak: Tonight we went to my brothers’ church basketball game — three of them on a team and they creamed their opponents. It was awesome. At first I kept thinking, “This is just civilized war,” and I still think that’s true of most sports to some extent, but yeah, it’s just a game. I have to remind myself of that. ;)

7. I know I said I was going to finish my novel Tanglewood, but I’ve decided to put it on hold for now and write some short stories. Also, I’ve got a blog post coming up soon on why I’m spending so much time doing genealogy and art and coding when I said not too long ago on here that I was going to focus solely on writing and design. :)

I’ve noticed a lot of cool photo manipulations online lately and got the itch to try my hand at one. Here’s the result, which I’m calling “Komodo King”:

As usual, it started out with a sketch:

I then went on Flickr and found some images (hurray for Creative Commons) that fit what I was looking for. First, the background wall (via cameliatwu:

And then the fighter (via fatniu):

Originally I was planning to use a frog or a chameleon, but I ended up going with a Komodo dragon instead (via jason_coleman):

I opened Photoshop, pasted the images in, and then moved, resized, and rotated them until I got a basic composition I liked (and I added a floor and did some basic lighting on the background wall and color correction on the dragon):

Next, adding a floor, basic lighting, shadows, color correction, and some rotation to get the dragon at the right angle:

Darker shadows (through burning and curves), more texture on the background wall, painting in some reflections on the dragon’s eye, and trying to figure out what to do with the fighter:

Cleanup on the dragon’s edges, shadow fixes, and a new dusty kind of lighting on the dragon (which I really liked):

At this stage I finally got something I liked with the fighter. Also did more cleanup on the dragon (including burning the shadows to make them more wrinkly):

The last stage was mostly just revising the fighter’s magic/weapon, painting the light reflections on the dragon, and doing some slight cleanup on the background wall (getting rid of the seams):

And there you have it. It’s meant to be sort of video game-esque (ala Street Fighter). And no, it’s not perfect (far from it), but I’m relatively pleased with the result. Taking random photos and weaving them together into a coherent piece is so dang fun.

You know, I seem to be doing a lot of art lately (and I’ve got another illustration in the works that’s coming along nicely), and wow, I’m loving it.

I’m resurrecting the Mormon Digitization Project, which I blogged about nine months ago and then abandoned while I went and got married. (I feel justified. ;))

Project page: Mormon Digitization Project

Brief recap: the goal is to find pre-1923 Mormon books (out of copyright), scan them, OCR them, clean up the OCRed text, and release the plain text files on Project Gutenberg (along with ePub editions, possibly PDFs, and possibly Lulu editions as well).

I’m starting with John A. Widtsoe’s book Joseph Smith As Scientist and will go from there. If you have any suggestions/requests, leave them in the comments (or email them to me). If I get enough people helping out, we’ll be able to tackle a few books at a time.

Process-wise, I’m thinking about trying Bite-Size Edits for at least part of the cleanup. There’s also a remote possibility I’ll use PGDP, but I really, really don’t like their interface. Right now I’m planning to track things using email and a Google Spreadsheet. (If I had more time I’d write a web app to manage it all for me, but Beyond is getting the bulk of my coding time.)

Yes, this will be kind of similar to the Mormon Documentation Project, but they don’t seem to be doing the types of books we’ll be doing. (I did use their text for the Standard Works web app and for this D&C reader’s edition I’m still working on, though. Good stuff.)

Want to help out? Email me (ben dot crowder at gmail) and I’ll add you to the list.