Blender modeling tutorial

Today we have a guest tutorial author!  My younger brother, who has recently joined me on the journey of teaching ourselves Blender (a free, open-source 3D modeling software), created an excellent, thorough tutorial of how he created a simple, yet highly maneuverable human model.  This model can be easily animated or posed.  Because the tutorial is composed entirely of pictures, with step-by-step instructions on each image, the entire tutorial is rather long for a traditional blog post.  Instead, we assembled it on a separate page, which can be accessed by the tab at the top of this blog, or by clicking the link below:

Blender modeling tutorial

FREE! DAZ Studio Pro, Bryce Pro, & Hexagon!

"Borgimi Village", created with Bryce 7. © 2011 Brianna da Silva

Are you interested in getting started with 3D art? Well, I'm excited to share the news that DAZ 3D is offering three of its programs -- DAZ Studio Pro, Bryce Pro, and Hexagon -- for free!


I don't know about you, but at first I found this a little suspicious, and suspected there were some sort of strings attached. But I went ahead and downloaded Bryce Pro and Hexagon, and wallah... it really is just free software, no hooks. (With the exception of a small sort-of-hook, which I explain below.)

This is over $800 worth of software for nada. For a limited time, of course.

So, what are these programs, you may ask? In a nutshell:

DAZ Studio Pro: 3D art and animation 
**Personal notes: Beware, there is a catch with this program. From what I can tell, this program predominantly uses prebuilt DAZ models, which you have to buy. And also, a word of caution: The human models for this program start off nude, and it's rather graphic. I haven't actually used DAZ Studio, so I could be a little mistaken about how it works. For now I'm just toying with Hexagon (see below), in the hope that I can create my own models that are neither graphic nor costly. But... the benefit of DAZ Studio is that it's easy and fast, for those who'd rather buy models than make them on their own!

Bryce Pro: 3D landscape and animation
Personal notes: I strongly recommend this software; it's not very user friendly for those that are new to 3D -- personal experience! -- but once you get the hang of it, it enables you to make some pretty cool art! And that's especially awesome when it's free!

Hexagon: 3D modeling 
Personal notes: As I said above... I'm drawn to Hexagon because it appears that, so far, I can create my own models without using DAZ Studio's graphic/costly ones. I still haven't actually gotten to the stage of making models, though! :-)

If you want some links to get you started with these programs, check out my Learn more page, where I have links to some other tutorials and resources I recommend.

Also, you can check out these forums from Daz3d.com:

Hexagon tutorial links
Bryce tutorial links

Happy 3D-making! :-)

Blender navigation solutions on a Mac

Apparently, in Blender, (a free 3D modeling/animating/gaming software that I'm beginning to learn), there are a lot of navigation functions that are crucial for using the software.  For an example, you need a three-button mouse, preferably with a scroll wheel, and you really should have a number pad.  What's a number pad?  A number pad consists of those number keys to the side of your keyboard - not the 1 through 0 number keys at the top of your keyboard.

A number pad

Well, I have a problem.  My computer is a notebook (AKA "laptop"), and it's a Mac.  My Mac does not come with a mouse, and it certainly does not come with a number pad.

So, can I still use Blender?  What should I do?

Today, I'll show you how I solved these problems, and how you can solve them too.

Before I do that, I want to mention a few things.  First, in my quest to solve my navigation problems, I discovered that we so happened to have an Apple "Magic Mouse" lying around the house.  Thinking my problems were solved, I gleefully set it up to work with my notebook -- only to discover that a "Magic Mouse" not have a middle button.  The first thing I'll show you today is how to give a "Magic Mouse" that middle button. 

Magic Mouse (Image from apple.com)

Second, I read online forums that said I could mimic a number pad by clicking the function key (fn) plus certain letter keys (such as J, K, L, U, I, etc.), but for whatever reason, this wasn't working on my computer.  For those of you who are experiencing the same problem, I'll show you the answer I found through intensive Googling... so now, if you have found this tutorial, you don't need to search any further!

The solution, to both problems, is actually quite simple: You just need to download two programs that will allow you to add a middle button and emulate the number pad.

Steps for adding a middle button


1. Download MagicPrefs

2. Open MagicPrefs Preferences

3. Select "One Finger Middle Axis Click."  (Note that there are a lot of other changes you can make with MagicPrefs... I didn't take the time to play around with it, but it looks like it has a lot of potential.)

Steps for emulating a number pad

1. Download KeyRemap4MacBook PrefPane

2. Open KeyRemap4MacBook preferences

3. Select "Change Num Key", as shown in the picture below.  (You can click on the image to make it bigger.)  If you're having a hard time finding the "Change Num Key" option, try searching "num", as I did in the picture below.  You may have to scroll down once or twice, but it should show up.

Well, that's it!  Pretty simple.  I hope this helps someone like it helped me!