Phantascene

Censorship

We visit our favorite sites every day without thinking about it.

We go to our favorite video sharing site to watch a funny video or maybe a video that will help us learn how to do something new we want to learn.

We load all of our vacation pictures up onto picture sharing websites, probably have some special moment caught on video at the video sharing site.

We rely on the information that we can find online at community shared information sites, online encyclopedias of collective knowledge that help us write terms papers, articles, or learn more about people and companies we do business with.

We laugh at the things our friends say on social sites and smile at glimpses we get into the lives of people we see in movies and on television.

What if it all started to go away?

What if you woke up tomorrow and found that the site you store your children’s pictures on was no longer reachable?

What if you tried to watch your sister’s vacation videos only to be told it was banned from viewing in your part of the world?

What if you lost half of the Internet in the blink of an eye?

How much freedom would you be willing to lose?

How much freedom have you already lost?

Online piracy is a serious issue, but so is online freedom.

SOPA seeks to stop online piracy, but what is Congress asking us to give up if SOPA passes?

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Almost 50 years ago the United States Army Combat Developments Command Combined Arms Group gave my father, Billy L. Fikes, a citation for meritorious service as Senior Programming Specialist in the United States Army Combat Developments Command Communications-Electronics Agency at Fort Huachuca, Arizona.

Between August 28, 1963 and Auguest 5, 1965, my father was recognized to have distinguished himself by exceptional performance of duty and leadership, and use of his broad technical knowledge and extraordinary grasp of the technical details of computer operations to guide the conversion of the Combat Communications Simulation Model from magnetic tapes to one that utilized the disk file for mass storage.

Techniques that the Army stated would have significant and far-reaching effects on the economic feasibility of utilizing and Simulation Model for evaluating future communications-electronics concepts and doctrine developed by the Communications-Electronics Agency.

At the time my father worked on the programs he had no idea that one day his efforts would be part of the start of a communications network that would span the world with all the knowledge of human history and all our dreams for the future. He did, however, live to see what that tangled mess of code would become. And I know that he was awed and amazed by the world wide web and all that it gave to the world. He would be heartbroken to think that the same government that had fifty years ago given him a commendation for his part in bringing the world together might have laws in Congress that would want to black out entire sections of the web from Americans.

My father did not serve his country for over 21 years, and through three major wars, to have the freedoms of his children and grandchildren to utilize the web to its fullest stripped away.

Keep the web free, keep information free.

Stop piracy, but not at the cost of our freedom.

Blender 2.61 download

As part of my learning blender I have double checked the latest update and am now downloading Blender 2.61 to replace the Blender 2.59 that I had been using up until now. So, any information that I provide on how to do something will be based off of Blender 2.61 until I update again. I will let you know when that happens.

For now, installing into the same folder on my external drive as I have Blender 2.59 on replaces the old 2.59 with the new Blender 2.61 and I am up and going and ready to start Blending things.

My Introduction to Blender

My introduction to Blender was back in early 2006, around the time that Elephant’s Dream was being finished up and released. I found Blender as part of a search for programs that I could use to do stop motion animation. I started trying to learn it, got frustrated, looked around for help on what the program could do and found the short movie Elephant’s Dream. I remember watching about half of Elephant’s Dream (I had a pitiful computer back then and dial up connection), but even the little I watched of that renewed my interest in learning how to use the program and I dove back into it.

Things in life happened and I had to abandon my hobby of learning to make animated films for fun. A couple of years later, late in the summer of 2008, I found my way back to Blender, but before I could start focusing on how to use the program my mom passed away and I spent the next few years in a chaotic point in my life. After my father passed away in 2010 I was left in a bit of a daze from which I have now started to step back out of and as part of my look back on my life and what I wanted to do with it I have realized that my first love is still my deepest love.

When I was eleven my deepest dream was to be a filmmaker. I did not want to be an actress, I wanted to be behind the camera. I wanted to create the props that were used in the movies, or to build the scale models of cities and ancient civilizations. I wanted to be the person that sat behind the camera and looked through it, seeing the story unfold and knowing that what I saw was what others would see.

I clearly remember being crouched in a field as a little girl, and thinking as I studied a spider web covered in dew, that I wished I could make films so that others could see the wonders of the world how I saw them.

I’m over 40 now, and about to start my life for the first time. It is both odd and scary, but I think this time I will do it my way. I will make films that show the world through my eyes. It might take me a while to lessen the slightly jaded edge that has formed across my view of the world, but who knows, that jaded edge might result in some good work – once I figure out how to use Blender and assorted other programs to achieve the results I am seeing in my mind.

So, here I am, almost six years after my first introduction to Blender, and I am going to dive back in with a determination that this time I will learn it and make movies using it… and a few other free to get programs.

Blender 2.5 for Newbies

I have been working off and on trying to learn how to use Blender 2.5 to create a variety of things, and now I am going to get really serious about learning this program inside out and sideways. I know it can do what I want, if I can just work out how it works. So, I am going to go through it one piece at a time and learn everything I can about how that piece works. Since I learn best by writing things out, I will share my discoveries, secrets and failures with everyone here at Phantascene in a series of tutorial pages on Blender 2.5.

This is likely to be a slow bumpy ride, so grab a thermos of coffee and clear a few minutes out of your weekends to catch up on things here and learn some of the hidden secrets of Blender, starting at page one on the official Blender manual and working our way forward.

The manual I will be using for this is the official Blender 2.6 manual (there is no manual for 2.59), and you can find a copy for yourself on the Blender website, here:Blender 2.6 Manual

Other important sites will be listed as I locate them and deem them to be of learning value. For now, I am on page one of the introduction to the 2.6 user manual: Introduction: What is Blender?

My first 3D house

While I have not abandoned the Impala Project, those who remember it will know that it went onto a back burner for a while as I familiarize myself with all of the technical workings of how Blender works. I have created a few things since then, including the hydroponics bay for my Mars mission. I have also made a lot of test things that never made it to the stage of being saved, much less shared.

All that said, I have decided that the best way to get the hang of Blender is to keep on charging ahead into things that should be too complex for someone of my skill level with the program. No one ever said I took the easy route to learning things. So my newest project is something for my short film that will be a test film leading up to the Mars Station One 3D movie project. (Yes, I am smart enough to at least make some test mini-movies before I start in on a a full length production movie. lol)

I need an old fashioned wayside tavern and inn for my project and since I lack the funds to buy one, I am going to create one. I have started out with working on the creation of a blacksmith shop and I think it is starting to look reasonably well. I was going to share an image of it here, but my poor computer is having issues at the moment and crashed its display driver, so can not open Blender or Daz Studio until I restart it. I will share a picture later on though, I promise.

For my tavern I have decided that I will be working on my first professional level 3D model. It is going to play a significant part in my mini movie, so I need to do a really good job on making it. I am going to base it kind of on the General Israel Putnam house, first built in 1648 in Danvers, Massachusetts.