Dec 27, 2019

A Guide to Making a Robot Character in Blender: Modelling I

Welcome to my new Robot Character series, where I’ll guide you to making a fully rigged and polished robot character in Blender 2.8. This series will be split into a few sections. Modelling I Rigging (Using IK) Modelling II (Details & Kitbashing) Materials and Environment Setup Video Tutorial Text Tutorial - Robot Character Modelling Guide First, we want to make sure our workspace is configured correctly.

Dec 13, 2019

How to Make a Low Poly Ferris Wheel

Today’s tutorial is all about animating a Low Poly Ferris Wheel in Blender. I’ll have lots of interesting tips and tricks when it comes to animating something that doesn’t quite rotate as expected, and show you one way of doing it. Also, we’ll be making use of a lot of modifiers to model this structure and taking advantage of instance duplication, a really useful feature in Blender. You’ll be making this!

Nov 29, 2019

Digital Note Taking with Atom and LaTeX

LaTeX is an extremely powerful typesetting system, and can be incredibly useful for all sorts of note-taking. I’ll be showing you my workflow for digital note taking, starting with setup of the Atom text editor to process LaTeX code, along with some examples and resources to learn more. Video Tutorial Installation Install LaTeX at https://www.tug.org/texlive/. It’s a pretty big install, and the UI isn’t great, but it’s enough to find your way.

Nov 22, 2019

Hyperspace II - Switching to Cycles

This week’s tutorial is going to be a bit of an extension of my previous tutorial. If you haven’t followed it yet, you’ll need to have the file, so you can either follow it here: https://wintermutedigital.com/index.php/2019/11/08/animating-a-hyperspace-effect-in-blender-2-8-tutorial/ Or get the .blend file below here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vr7G-T9Q33j7QSMkUtL6L2TqxJs2QxsQ/view?usp=sharing Tutorial Switch the render engine to Cycles from EEVEE. Disable world volumetrics by changing, under the world settings: Volume: Volume Scatter to Volume: None. Add a motion blur, and under the curve settings create a curve that looks like a left skewed distribution, that looks like this: 4.

Nov 8, 2019

Animating a Hyperspace Effect in Blender 2.8 (Tutorial)

Have you ever wanted to make a hyperspace-jumpy-whatever-its-called effect in Blender? Well, it was possible before, but now you can see it in realtime and render it incredibly fast with EEVEE. The setup here is pretty simple. In summary, these are the steps: Set the renderer to EEVEE! Set up the world. You can just change the colour to a darkish blue, or add an environment texture with one of these as the HDR background.

Nov 7, 2019

Making a Light Alarm Clock with Arduino + RTC for Beginners

Video Tutorial Tutorial Hey! If you have a lot of spare electronics and for some reason you don’t have an alarm clock then it’s actually pretty easy to make one with a couple dollars in parts. Here’s a pretty basic Arduino tutorial to design something like this. Part List You’ll need : an RTC (DS3231 chip based ones are very cheap, ~$2 CAD from ebay) an Arduino Nano (~$3-4 CAD) some LED’s (Ultrabright warm white are like 60 cents for 2 or cheaper) Jumper cables (for a breadboard) Breadboard A power supply or laptop or anything with a USB port that delivers 5v power The Electronics The basic idea of this Arduino tutorial is easy enough to grasp even if you’re unfamiliar with electronics: All you’re doing is sending the current time to the Arduino, which compares it with your preset wake-up time, and ramps up the brightness to a few LED’s based on how far past that wake-up time it is.

Sep 13, 2019

Hack the North 2019

Image from https://hackthenorth.com/#about Hey internet! I’m really excited for Hack the North, which starts today at the University of Waterloo. It’s the biggest hackathon in my country (Canada), and I’ll be attending for the first time (my first hackathon ever actually). Because of this, I won’t be posting a new video today, but I’ll make a short recap video of my experience there soon.

Sep 6, 2019

How to make an Arcade Machine

Arcade machines are one of the greatest relics of video game history, and today’s tutorial will show you how to model, texture, and light a 3D arcade machine cabinet with Blender 2.8. This is a beginner to intermediate Blender tutorial that gives a general overview of a lot of different techniques when 3D modelling. Video Summary Learn how to: Block out a model Select and configure common modifiers for 3D modelling Make and control edge loops Use the grid fill tool Differentiate between instancing and duplicating objects, and the uses Apply materials to objects Light a scene effectively Setup simple volumetrics Local and global translations Setup freestyle Apply quick effects to the final render Update Hey guys, so I’ve just started my first year at the University of Toronto in the computer engineering program, so I’ll be pretty busy over the next year.

Aug 30, 2019

How to make a Low Poly AK47 (Part 2 - Animation)

Animating a gun in Blender is actually pretty easy. There are a few moving components (all of them mechanical, so they move uniformly most of the time) and no special rigs required in this case. My animation took a total of 5 frames, in which I packed: The bolt sliding back (Linear translation) The weapon recoil (Small, mirrored rotation along one major axis and linear translation) Muzzle Flare (A simple, 3 frame scaling project) Muzzle Flare lighting (Animated emission from a pointlamp) Camera movement (Small camera shakes, made by tracking and parenting the camera so it mirrors the recoil) And some other effects alongside it:

Aug 28, 2019

Presenting BBT Tap! - Idle Bubbletea Café! (Download Link included)

BBT Tap! is a simple idle game I made with Unity over the summer for the android platform. It was a lot of fun but it made me realize that I was focusing on breadth of content rather than depth of gameplay, and has given more ideas for improvements on future projects. Features 14 Upgrades to improve your BBT Café 16 Achievements, hand drawn pixel art skins for the app 50 Levels to progress through High Quality pixel art graphics, made in Aseprite Clean UI, made in Inskcape Simple, casual, and fun gameplay Trailer Link (Get it for free on the Google Play Store) LINK

Aug 23, 2019

How to Make a Low Poly AK-47 (Part 1)

Making a low poly gun in Blender is surprisingly easy. This beginner tutorial will show you how to make a low poly AK-47 model in Blender, taking you through the workflow and process of modelling, shading and lighting, in about 40 minutes. My voice commentary is limited to important thoughts on the workflow and some ideas I think are important. If you follow this tutorial, and maybe even try applying it to different objects, you’ll eventually understand the idea of “Tracing” in 3D, which is pretty much what I’m doing.

Aug 16, 2019

Building a Game in 48 Hours for the GMTK Game Jam: C0RRUPT0R Devlog + Thoughts

Well that was my first game jam and a ton of fun! I built C0RRUPT0R, a simulation-card-game about destroying the world by sabotaging modern technology as it’s being developed, and balancing the finite amount of power you have available to strategically interfere with an automated tech tree. Video Overview All in all, it took me about 16 hours to build this - 50% spent in Unity, 25% programming in VS Code, 10% making art in Inkscape and Blender, 10% reading the documentation and 5% composing the background music on the guitar.

Aug 9, 2019

Animating a Stylized Pixel Planet in Blender 2.8

Welcome! We’ll be making and animating a stylized pixel planet in Blender 2.8 today, which is a technique I used in a recent game I made for the GMTK Game Jam. It’s a really simple and cool looking effect, and is very versatile in case you want to experiment with pixel art with Blender in the future. The main techniques (or, I guess, nodes) are the [SHADER TO RGB] material node and [PIXELATE] compositing node.

Aug 2, 2019

Blender 2.8 Ocean Scene Tutorial - How to Make a Cyberpunk Ocean with EEVEE

The Ocean modifier is one of the coolest things Blender is capable of, and layering effects on top can make a really neat cinematic. You can make an ocean scene very easily with Blender 2.8 and the new (and awesome!) EEVEE render engine. Finished Product Tutorial Modelling and Modifiers Replace the default cube with a plane, and attach an Ocean modifier with the settings changed below, and a Wireframe modifier.

Jul 27, 2019

Easy Realtime Lightning in Blender EEVEE

Lightning beams are a cool looking and extremely easy effect to make in Blender 2.8, and it can be done in REALTIME with the new EEVEE render engine. Step 1: Remove the default cube, and replace it with a plane. Stretch it out along the Y axis by S > Y, and then scale it down on the x axis. The final length of the plane will be the length of the lightning beam.

Jul 20, 2019

Making a Supermassive Star in EEVEE

I’ve been working on this texture for the gassy plasma-ish surface of a star for a long time, and it’s finally done. Inspired by DLC art from BO4 Zombies: Maybe I’ll work on flares next This is a short speedmodel, and there isn’t much to it. I animated the location of the texture coordinate, so the texture would appear to move though the model was stationary. The star’s texture nodegroup