Sometime ago a small group of artists met together regularly in Ottawa, the capital city of Canada, to practise 3D animation and modelling using a free open source software tool called Blender 3D.
The leader of the group is apparently still there while some of the others have dispersed around Canada, including myself, who is back home in Montréal.
We all learned a lot and these skills continue to build, as Blender has gone through many versions.
Its current 2.8 branch seems particularly cool, but when I was using version 2.82 it totally froze my Linux Mint system so I had to hard reboot. This happened several times.
Then I tried a daily build of 2.83 and it ran, but was crashing often on render. I turned off the newish Evee renderer instead using Cycles and voilà: it works!
I am no Blender expert but I can see its significant progress since I last met with the 3D Coop in Ottawa.
I use Linux Mint with a Blender Nightly Build which is currently an alpha release of v 2.83 ― while this doesn’t freeze my system at all Blender does crash so my simple advice is to Save often.
I always get a kick out of seeing a compositor in Blender as I worked at Autodesk using their high end compositor Flame which was always so expensive and here was a way to composite for free! Of course Flame is a specialized realtime system for professional finishing purposes and Blender is more multipurpose in my opinion, but it remains funny.
Check out the super simple composite pipeline below used to create the above image.
Blend on!
