Tip: How to select colors from a non-active layer in the Gimp

If you’ve done much painting with the Gimp, you may be familiar with the paint tools ability to ctrl+left-click a portion of the image and select the color from that area. This is really useful when painting, except when you’re trying to grab a color from another layer through a transparent portion of your current one – it only samples colors from the active layer.

I haven’t found a *good* solution yet, but I was able to work around it recently when texturing a certain model.

edit: It turns out there’s a much easier way to do this. Simply select the color picker tool, go to the tool options, and enable “Sample merged”. Thanks Blendenzo!

Tip: How to make your high-poly workflow run much faster!

If you’re doing high-poly work in Blender, things can get sluggish rather quickly. You can get a significant speed boost, however, if you turn off the object outline.

In the 3d window, go to View>View Properties>Outline Selected

Have fun!

A bunch of unfinished work

I’m sure everybody who draws or does 3d art has tons and tons of unfinished work. Some of it may actually be pretty nice, and although I don’t claim that mine is, you can view it over on the Blenderwars.com forum.

How to change ALT+Right click behavior in Gnome

If you’re a Blender user on Linux (and are using Gnome), you may have noticed that the default behavior of alt+right click brings up a window menu in Blender, instead of selecting an edge ring like it’s supposed to. This is easily solved by going into a command prompt and typing

 gnome-window-properties

In the resulting window, change the movement key from “alt” to “super”, and you’re done. Note that where you used to be able to alt+left click to drag a window, you must now “super”+left click

Because everyone else is doing it…

…here’s a “first blog post”!

Welcome to my blog. Here I’ll be writing about my attempts to be an artist, and what’s more to be a Linux artist (anyone who has tried this will understand the difference ). My interests are varied, though, so expect all sorts of things to pop up.

Expect rampant confusion and chaos!