Create wrapped vines and wires in Blender

Long twisted shapes are necessary for a lot of scenes. Vines in a jungle, computer wires on your desk, pipes in a spacestation complex – all will add a lot to your scene. Unfortunately, these things are difficult to model using poly-by-poly or box modeling methods. In this tutorial, I will show you how to easily create these things, and how to wrap them around objects realistically.

Part of the inspiration for this tutorial comes from Meats Meier’s Animation Mother.

A solution to “I saved over that?!?”

Blender’s save feature is so convenient that I’ve gotten into the habit of saving every couple of minutes (or seconds, as the case may be). This is an okay habit, since Blender won’t complain at all if you quit without saving changes, but I’ve had more than one instance where I was experimenting with a file and saved over it when I didn’t want to.

For the longest time, this simply meant going back and doing hard work to undo whatever experiment I was trying. I recently got fed up with this and changed one simple option in Blender to fix it.

Finding the way out of Swamp DRM

My last blog post on “hostage gaming” was very sketchy and rough. Talking to several people about this plan and thinking about it more only rubbed in the fact that my initial proposal of a plan I hope (dream) could change how media is marketed is off to a bad start. Anyway, forget that last post. In this post I’m going to try and re-present my idea in a comprehensive manner and in a way that actually makes some sense.

Artists: Oppose the Orphan Works bill – don’t lose the rights to your work!

As you may have guessed from my previous post, I have some concerns about the way videogame manufacturers are currently marketing their products, however, the wrong sort of change could be severely detrimental to both artists and consumers. In case you haven’t heard, this is exactly the sort of change happening right now in the US.

The recently introduced Orphan Works Bill has been making leaps and strides at getting approved and made into law, damaging copyright holders’ ability to hold their copyright, and potentially losing them their ability to protect their work.

More information can be found on CGTalk.

Please, if you’re a visual artist, you need to click that link. Now.