Ben Crowder

I may have mentioned this in passing before, but I think I’ve found why my growth in 3D art (specifically Blender) has been rather stunted for the past while: I’ve been trying to do it all at once. Rather than focusing on one aspect at a time, like modeling, I jump in and try to do modeling, texturing, lighting, and everything else simultaneously. And for a relative beginner, that just doesn’t work.

So, to fix that, I’m putting myself on a regimen of sorts. For the next while, I’m going to focus entirely on modeling. I won’t let myself texture anything. I won’t add a single light beyond the default one. In fact, I think I’ll even keep myself from rendering for a while. (The 3D window does well enough at showing you what the object looks like.) After I’ve gained enough skill with the modeling tools — both polygonal and NURBS — to feel competent, I’ll focus on texturing. UV texture, bump/displacement maps, the works. And once I’ve got that done, then I’ll move on to lighting. I’ll teach myself how to light daytime scenes, nighttime scenes, indoor scenes, outdoor scenes, the works. And then to animation, and so on. (But I think I might actually keep myself away from animation for a while, if only so I can master 2D art in Blender first. I should turn out a better artist that way, I think.)

We’ll see if this works. I think it will. :)

[tags]Blender, 3D, art[/tags]

Here’s the cover I put together for the ward directory this semester:

[tags]BYU[/tags]

Another setting of scripture, this time from 2 Nephi 2:25.

[tags]Book of Mormon[/tags]

I’m having to use Quark for a book project I inherited, and ick, ew, it’s so…blech!

Okay, that’s too harsh. And I realize that a lot of it has to do with my having used InDesign for so long. But I really, really, really don’t like Quark. It just wigged out on me after I double-clicked on a text box, and all the text that used to be in the box is now showing up in a cascading fountain to the left of the pasteboard. But the text is still in the box, just invisible. I reopened the file, but still the same problem. I quit the program and restarted it, then tried to open the file again. Crashed. Tried again. Crashed. Tried again. Crashed. Luckily I saved an earlier version of the file, but still…

I hate Quark.

[tags]Quark, InDesign[/tags]

Another Book of Mormon setting, this one of Mosiah 3:19 and incorporating a photo from romainguy on Flickr:

[tags]Book of Mormon[/tags]

Watched a documentary on the Book of Mormon tonight (the sequel to Journey of Faith) and came home wanting to do something Book of Mormonesque, so I put this together in Photoshop:

In other news, my Mac Mini was running rather slow — okay, really slow — and it was a painful chore to do almost anything, so I bit the bullet and bought 2 gigs of RAM. Had to have the people at my college bookstore install it, since I tried and couldn’t for the life of me get the darn thing open. (Luckily it only cost $25 to have them do it.) And now it’s smooth and sweet, and even though I’m running CS2 all of the old sluggishness is gone. It’s so fast I want to sob tears of joy. ;)

I’m starting to get more into TeX, slowly, and hopefully I’ll have some new work up soon. In the meantime, I’ve begun work digitizing John A. Widtsoe’s book Joseph Smith as Scientist, and I’ll typeset it as well when it’s done.

[tags]Book of Mormon, Photoshop, Mac Mini, TeX, Joseph Smith[/tags]

The other day I bought some paper for inking and a new paintbrush. Drew this fellow on the right:

After I finished, I had an urge to do watercolors, so I pulled out the dinky little set I have, chucked the pathetic little brush that came with it, and used my nice new squirrely brush to paint this girl in a lake. The brush made all the difference. (The other thing that made a difference was pencilling out my drawing first, rather than just painting from scratch.) Anyway, this my first real watercolor, and it does indeed have problems (the blotch on her hair, the weird skin coloring, etc.), but it’s a start. And it successfully managed to get me to stop loathing watercolors and start loving them. :) As for the story behind it, I originally just had the girl’s head and the suit coat, and then I put the sky behind her, and then I wanted to extend the suit but I messed up and it looked so much like a lake that I decided to make that the picture instead. :)

There are advantages to being sick. In this case, since I’ve been home in bed all day, I spent some of my waking time to put together this dashboard:

Having half a dozen different websites has made it almost mandatory for me to put something like this together, to create a central page where I can direct people (and put on my Moo MiniCards :)) and not have to explain each time that Top of the Mountains is my main blog and Blank Slate is my personal website and so on and so forth.

As for the page itself, the background is seven or eight photographs layered together in Photoshop. I painted the icons in Photoshop (except for the Beyond icon, which I made in Illustrator a while ago).

This is the first step in a move towards redesigning all of my websites, and hopefully it won’t take an eternity. :) Anyway, I’ve got several other bits of work that I haven’t posted about yet, so expect more posts in the near future.

Here’s an update on how the open source experiment is going.

First, I was never able to get Blender to work with the ATI Radeon card that came with my computer, so I bought an XFX GeForce 5200 FX online, and Blender now works! But it’s slower than I thought it would be. ~sigh~

I’ve gotten LaTeX to use Minion Pro, and I started typesetting As a Man Thinketh, but TeX is choking on the file and I don’t know why. I haven’t put much time into it, though; I’m sure I’ll be able to figure it out soon.

The GIMP has pretty much all the functionality Photoshop has (at least the parts of Photoshop I use frequently), but it still has a lot of usability issues. Photoshop is far more polished, and it doesn’t feel like somebody took a dresser drawer full of clothes and flung it across the room.

On a similar note, today I worked on some wedding invitations for a friend. I began with the GIMP, since that’s the natural choice for doing work involving photos. And the photo part was easy enough, although I really wish the space bar would allow me to pan. ~sigh~ Anyway, it’s when I started adding text that my frustrations began. First, all the text in a box has to be the same size and font, which is bothersome. Second, OpenType features aren’t supported, so no oldstyle figures for me. Third, not even the hinting on my Minion Pro font was supported, so the tracking and kerning was hideously off.

So I switched to Inkscape for the text, figuring I’d just export to an image and then paste it into the GIMP. Inkscape did let me change the size and weight and such of the text within a box, but it still didn’t support OpenType, and the hinting was the same as in the GIMP. I started laboriously going through the text by hand, setting the tracking to look the way I wanted it. (And hoping my friend wouldn’t want many changes to the text.) And roughly ten percent of the time, the granularity of the tracking wasn’t enough for my tastes — it would jump back and forth between way too much and way too little.

At this point I thought I’d give Scribus a try, to see if things got any better. Opened it up, placed a textbox, and pasted in my text. And I was delighted to see that the hinting worked! It makes a huge difference, let me tell you. But then I tried to select some text — um, what’s up with text selection in Scribus? It’s hard to select anything. And then when I tried to add some text to the box, it kept moving my cursor to the end of the paragraph after I typed each character! One by one, I had to click back at the proper spot. And there was a plethora of other usability issues as well. But in the end, after taking about four times as long as it should have taken, the project was complete and I was satisfied enough to consider it done.

Overall, I haven’t exactly been impressed with these open source tools. (With the sole exception of Blender, which I absolutely adore.) Sure, people work on them in their spare time, and so naturally they’re not going to be as polished as Creative Suite, but still — how can they sleep at night knowing their tools are such a pain to use? I know I shouldn’t complain, because the GIMP and Inkscape and Scribus are certainly better than nothing, and a lot of work has gone into them. It’s just sad to see that the usability is so pathetic.

But since I haven’t bought a new Mac yet, I’m committed to using these tools for the time being, and I’ll make them do what I want. And in the meantime I’ll dream of InDesign and Photoshop. ~wistful sigh~

At one of my internships I’m designing a Monopoly-esque game board (probably in Flash, but I may end up doing it in HTML/JavaScript instead), and since a game board needs art, I’m using Blender every chance I get. :) Here’s part of the hoard of coins that’ll build up as the player progresses around the board:

(I just threw the background in there so it wouldn’t be all black.) Anyway, it’s a lot of fun, and I’m finding that game design is rather addicting. :)