Open Sourcing

As promised I do have an update today. I don't have an animation, but Captain Blender is now fully posable as you can see in these quick renders.

I think he looks pretty good now. Tony has a chapter next about teaching basic animation with a bouncing ball, which will be good for me to go through as I haven't done any sort of animation as of yet (minus the gingerbread man). Getting the basics down before I start to make CB jump and run is probably a good idea!

I also played around last night with some toon shading. I saw a picture on Blender Artists yesterday (can't remember which one) that made me think of my sheldon model. I dug him out and played around a bit with different toon materials and edge settings.

This is what I came up with for a basic toon style. It took a bunch of trial and error to come up with this, however I'm sure there are tutorials out there on it. I ended up adding a lot of lights and dropping the hardness down all the way to make it look more flat. I also added a specular color that was a little bit darker than the actual colors and dropped the spec setting down to zero. Next, I played around a bit with the Ref and Amb settings to make everything a bit brighter. Finally, I added an edge with the edge detect system in the render buttons. He still looks a bit 3D in this view, but this could be because of the shadows too. A straight on shot would probably make him look very flat.

And just for fun because I like composites: