LightningIsMyName’s Website

Today, I stumbled uppon an article which I strongly recomend any beginner artist to read, especially if they are 3D artists.
This article is about the process which is needed to become a great artist. Most of us when we get a new program, Try to learn just a bit and then they are off to start some grandiose work which will usually fail because of the lack of expirience.
Every beginner artist makes some mistakes, and those mistakes can sometimes lead to giving up on art.  

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There are lots of cases where you want to squeeze a picture’s filesize. Sometimes a small picture can be 250+ KB while a bigger picture can be only 10KB. This is because of the different filetypes.
Today I’m going to teach you, how to choose the optimal filetype for your picture.
Although this tutorial uses GIMP (all the instructions about plugins and menus are for GIMP), this should help users of other programs that have basic understanding of their program.

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In this tutorial, you will learn the Path Tool (aka Pentool) in GIMP. The Path Tool is used to create complex shapes and curves. Many people don’t use it since it’s too complicated, However today I’m going to show you that it’s not.

This tutorial was moved to my new website, and there it has an updated version (July 2010): http://lightningismyname.blogspot.com/2008/06/gimp-path-tool-aka-pentool-tutorial_15.html.

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Here is what we are going to make:

Click to view fullsize

In this tutorial we are going to model a soccer ball (aka footbal, BuckyBall). I have searched the web and I have seen many great ways to do it, but they all had one problem - it’s impossible to do them in blender.

I recently found a way to do this using the blender deafult shapes and the subsurf modifier. Most people use the smoothing abilities of subsurfing, however I’m going to use the geometrical ability of the subsurf to create the Soccer Ball.

Note: As someone pointed out, I discovered this is not an exact model, the number of hexagons is not 20 as it is in a real soccer ball. Nevertheless, it’s good for backgrounds and other places where accuracy isn’t to important.

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