8 December, 2008

As the teaching year grinds to a halt a couple of notable things have happened: the College of Computing has been shut down for 2009 due to low numbers, and I have been playing with Blender trying to get some interesting activities sorted for next year’s ICT classes.

Not going to dwell on the Computing College thing at the moment as I’m not ready to be rational about it. The 3D modelling however is way cool. I have been converting a couple of little cartoon characters I designed for stickers, t-shirts etc into 3D to see if I could. My first major hurdle was figuring out how to apply an image to particular faces and how the whole UV texturing deal-io works in Blender. I just took the faces straight from the Inkscape versions and UV mapped them around the spheres which seems to work. I did notice on some of the earlier attempts that a few had very small cartoon faces on every face of the mesh – cute but not what I wanted. I think I’ve got it sussed now so will test the theory in front of young students who will happily destroy my self-esteem if I get it wrong. No pressure there 🙂

I really want to build these guys into a theme for this web site – holiday work.