Oh, hey, I made a thing here. Actually, two things.

Thing One is a pinky purpley mesh blocky thing. After reading through some really helpful TEXT and STILL PICTURE tutorials from Tufts University last night, I sat down and made a random shape via extrusions at lunch, in about 15 minutes start to finish. Woo. And then I assigned a material to it and uploaded to my standalone grid, using Kokua because Firestorm-OS crashed to desktop.

And hey, IT WORKED. What a bumblefrack it was, though. Sorry that it’s disturblingly blocky and unnatural, yet evocative of a certain much-mocked object (rhymes with “ploppy bong”). It just worked out that way.

So then tonight, I fought and snarled and tussled with a very rough model of Kipling Rock that’s been sitting on my hard drive for months while I found other things to do. So just as a test, I did a little rough modeling on it, playing with tools and mostly losing them and not being able to find them again. And then I spent about… 3 hours or more trying to assign a material, assign a texture (slot) to the material, open and apply a texture, and then, I DON’T KNOW, SCREW AROUND WITH ASS AND ELBOWS until somehow I got the texture to apply on the 3D model. Uh, yay if only I knew what I’d done (other than the “lightbulb” moment when I realized which button the “Viewport Shading > Texture” button was, and which header the button was on, no it was not on the top header, that was a duplicate window that was mostly hidden, you goof).

I struggled with the UV-Unwrap thing, not knowing what I was doing and not really following the well-written and illustrated instructions from KatsBits and Blender.org.

Well, hell, it’s a rock, but I made it and in fact, the texture on it is a tileable one I made today too. Not very good, very badly done, didn’t bother to mark seams, just slapped the sucker on there without trying to figure out shadows. My glacial progress continues, much like the journey this rock made tumbling downslope over the millennia until it ended up in the Clackamas River, being used as a handy fishing platform by Rudyard Kipling.

And now, it’s 2am and I’m going to bed. I’ll save my rant about inworld Blender class instructors who refuse to conduct classes in text, refuse to give out class notes, and refuse to give desktop-share links to people who arrive late, yet repeat their classes only once. I’m not an auditory learner, I’m a textual learner. Pictures are helpful, but I have to go back again and again to get some of the little tricks and quick shortcuts, because I miss them so easily if I’m trying to take notes AND watch the screen.

Oops, I ranted.

Anyway, there’s the rock, sitting in a little river with a boat nearby and some fishing stuff – it’s just to prove to myself that I can doooo eeeet. Now I can start to refine the thing, make the physics model better, figure out better texture mapping, and Dhughan can put down his little parkland in time for Spring.