Moving into the world of 3D animation

Hi All,

As you are aware it has been a while since our last update and there is one main reason for this....blender! I will come onto this subject shortly however; first I would like to talk about Aaron's effort since our last blog.

Aaron has finished the camera controls as well as rewriting the initial libraries. We now have a full 3D world with a full rotatable camera with a zoom function. On top of that thanks to Aarons rewriting of the libraries we have concise and understandable code. As mentioned in a previous blog Aaron and I have high standards of cleanliness in code which will only help us for the duration of our project.

Now to blender, for those that haven't heard blender is a free Open Source application for the creation of 2D and 3D objects. Over the past month my sole aim for the project was to learn my way around blender and start creating units. A simple task most would think, however those who have used blender would agree that the learning curve for blender is very steep. Most of the past month has been sitting in front of my laptop reading tutorials and making mistakes!

At this point I would like to mention the site we have been using to learn blender. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro is a fantastic and easy to use site that I would not have got very far. I would also like to mention Dan Squire, a colleague who has also helped us with getting to grips with blender.

After finally getting to grips the workings of blender we have found the creating of objects surprising simple, so much so that I am now spending my evenings pushing my imagination for creating a new and original kind of unit. At the moment I have created two units (both tanks as these seemed the easiest and most sensible place to start), and screenshots will be up on facebook shortly (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=90603989414)

Hopefully by the next update we will have videos of selectable and movable units rather than just photos. This should be in the next couple of weeks at which point there will be another blog update.

Thanks for keeping up with our project and feel free to add any feedback or ask any questions

Nick