All for Free

I put this page together as a supplement to my Anatomy class. It uses illustatrations and photographs to show how the action of each muscle affects the face. http://www.blakeketchum.com/index.php/facial_muscles

I am very excited about sharing this lesson. It should be finished by the end of The year. It begins to apply the complexity of Blender that I mention early in the lessons. You will make orbiting entities of a variety of shapes and sizes and create a .mov file that shows your solar system in motion. You can even use your UFO from the Extrusion lesson and have it visit your solar system! The lesson will include:

• Blender's fun and powerful sculpting tools
• Working with multiple objects (adding and importing)
• Vertex painting
• Parent-child relationships in Blender
• Animation, linear and in cycles
• We'll touch on lighting your scene
• Rendering and export into a standard-format movie that you can share with your friends or post online.

Jeff Helgesson has put a wide variety of jazz Trumpet transcriptions in PDF form on his blog. These are very cleanly arranged, readable transcriptions.
http://jeffhelgesen.blogspot.com/search/label/transcribing (general)

This lesson covers a wide range of techniques that can be used to build a mesh from the ground up.

• Orthographic versus Perspective modes
• Background Images
• More ways to add to and manipulate your mesh
• Optional orthographic images that can be used to build a hat, although I recommend that you build your mesh from original sketches

At first, I thought this was a silly novelty, but after inspecting a little further, I see this as a fantastic creative tool for the generation of form and pattern.

My work is pretty stodgy- figurative sculpture - but I can envision this tool thoroughly entiching my conception of gesture, fabric flow, and composition. 

I can also see this tool as having fantastic power to unstall someone who has white canvas block. 

All this, not to mention that this tool is free - the code is open -  it's designed and implemented to make the world a better place. It's Mac/Windows?Linux compatible.  Take a gander: al.chemy.org

Blender is a great animation program and it's fast to work with - and frustrating to learn -  in large part because of its reliance upon keyboard shortcuts. Here's a nice list of shortcuts that I find most useful in  the mesh modeling stage of Blender workflow.

This lesson offers practice in the all-important Extrude function. It sounds dry, but you can make UFOs, rockets, wands, and many everyday objects using  these few fundamental operations.The lesson emphasizes the following:

• Free and constrained extrusions
• Grabing and scaling extrusions
• Adding loops to extrusions
• Realising an object in Blender

This first lesson helps orient the student to the interface with hands on activities in Edit and Object mode. This lesson is mostly an opportunity to doodle and experiment while learning the interface. Critical Lesson Elements:

• How to save
• Edit and Object Modes
• Adding, Selecting, and Deleting objects
• Grab, Rotate, and Scale
• Keyboard, Mouse, and Tablet/Stylus shortcuts. (Nice table for reference included.)