StokeBloke.com

Archive for the ‘Blender’ Category

Blender and the Space Navigator under Gentoo

Saturday, May 22nd, 2010

I have used Blender for some years now and I recently began to think about buying a 3dconnexion Space Navigator.

I read that Blender and the Space Navigator worked under Linux and managed to borrow a Space Navigator from work over this long weekend.

I downloaded the 32bit drivers (3DxWare for Linux (i386)) from http://www.3dconnexion.com/service/drivers.html as well as the “Blender plug-in for Linux i386 (beta)

Installing the Space Navigator driver

I extracted the 3dxware-linux-v1-4-3.i386.tar.gz file to /tmp/3d/

tar -xvzf 3dxware-linux-v1-4-3.i386.tar.gz -C /tmp/3d/
cd /tmp/3d/
sudo ./install-3dxunix.sh

I then recieved an error saying libXm.so.3 was missing.

/etc/3DxWare/daemon/3dxsrv: error while loading shared libraries: libXm.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I pressed CTRL-C to abort the script.

After a little checking I found that I have libXm.so.4 but not 3, so I created a symbolic link from libXm 4 to 3.

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libXm.so /usr/lib/libXm.so.3

I then re-ran the install script again.

This time it all worked.  I did not configure it to auto start though.

Now I simply started the driver via

sudo /etc/3DxWare/daemon/3dxsrv -d usb

and was greeted by the blue lights on the Space Navigator and the messages

3DxWareUNIX = V1.4.3
Device      = SpaceNavigator
Firmware    = V3.17

there was also a minimised window called 3DxWare 1.4.3, which appears the be the settings dialog (like the Windows Control Panel control)

I then ran the xcube example from /tmp/3d/ and the space navigator worked great.  I changed a few settings as I prefer pressing and pulling to be zoom in and out.

Installing the Blender plugin

I was a little surprised by this, as the forums said I should have a ~/.blender/ directory and I didnt.

I decided that creating the directory couldn’t cause any problems so I created a directory

mkdir -p ~/.blender/plugins/

and copied the 3DxNdofBlender.plug file into it.  The new NDOF icons appeared at the bottom of the viewport.  See http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-246/ndof-support/

New Lego Camper Van Blender Render

Friday, March 13th, 2009

I have been playing with Blender again and I spent a few days trying to render my Lego Camper Van.

I managed to create this.

Image of a Lego Camper Van rendered and created with blender download the grudge 2 movie

I’m still not 100% happy with it.

Blender Box Rendered Wallpaper

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

I was playing with Blender and its DOF and Radiosity at the weekend and made these hi res desktop backgrounds/wallpaper.


blue boxes 02

green boxes 02

download life less ordinary a dvd


red boxes 02


yellow boxes 02

Some more here

New Blender Lego Renders

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

Well I finally got some time to play with the new version of blender.

I also generated some slightly higher resolution STL files from Modeling.

I then managed to render these two new versions which I’m quite impressed with.

More are available here.

Blender Hair Particle Tutorial

Monday, January 28th, 2008

Well after lots of searching I found a very good tutorial for blender. Its a tutorial on how to do hair with the new particle system.

Its called Tutorial, Fur with new particles and its over at cgtalk.com

See http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=303334

Here is the results I managed to get after about 1 hr of tweaking.

One warning, when I turned on GI with yafray this render took ages. I expect I got something wrong though.