Profile: Cassandra Green. Part 1

I like to start a post wit something visual, it's not particularly useful with her being in a space suit, but I've found the imagination paints the bes pictures.

Character profile. This profile details her life before the events of the first of my books, so there aren't any real spoilers.

Cassandra
Name: Cassandra Green
Age: 37 (in book one) 39 (in book two)
Hair colour: Green
Eye colour: Emerald green
Height: 170cm
Adaptation: regeneration, extra senses, precognitive, strong, fast, very clever, can ignore pain,
Temperament: childish, very curious, likes to experiment, silly, show off, likes to cook,always aims to please others.

Three years after River was viable, Helen and Ernest completed their second clone. River spent a lot of time watching her grow and subconsciously communicating with her telepathically. This has led to a very strong connection between these two, and later Anna as well.
Cassandra spent most of her early life playing and learning with her family. She relished all Ernest, her father, could teach her in his field of bionics. Before she was five she was already a great help to him in his lab.
When she was eleven her mother, Helen, was killed by an anti-genetics activist. Cassandra was mortified and fell back on her three remaining family connections with her father and sisters. Even though she was only two years older, River became almost a replacement mother to her.
Cassandra continued to assist her father which helped him to overcome his loss. The murder of her mother made her feel more scared of the world beyond the walls of their house and its extensive grounds. River and her started to teach themselves combat techniques, becoming very adept in unarmed, melee and ranged combat, Anna was more willing to rely on River's protection, but she was encouraged to learn some skills with her two older sisters. Ernest encouraged the girls with their training, as he was afraid for their safety when the wanted to start going out without him.
Around her eighteenth birthday Ernest reluctantly started letting her go out with River. They would often go to pubs and nightclubs, attracting a lot of attention for their appearance as well as the way the liked to dance together. Of course most of the attention was from the men at these places who would often make passes at either or both of the girls, which were either successful or painfully unsuccessful, mostly depending on what River's mood was at the time.
Cassandra became sexually experimental with many partners of both genders. Neither she nor River settled into stable or lasting relationships until later.
Cassandra enjoyed helping people, often going far out of her way to please even a complete stranger. This would occasionally get her into awkward or even dangerous situations, fortunately River's training and help kept her safe from any more harm than she found enjoyable.
In her home life she was the main cook of the family, and enjoyed trying recopies she found on the internet as well as experimenting on her own. Her heightened senses of taste and smell became a great asset in this.
Ernest would often enter various technologies at a major scientific competition funded by the military. Cassandra, River and Anna all helped him with his shows on stage. The three girls became popular amongst this small group of elite scientists.

And that's the set up for her character at the beginning of the story.
I hope you enjoyed watching the video and scrolling past the tedious pros. All comments and questions welcome.

Water test

I've tried using blender's fluid physics emulation in the past without much success. I realised this morning that I could probably emulate the desired effect using the wave modifier. Please tell me what you think.

Yay for doom finger!

My favourite, okay third favourite, pet has had a couple of happy victories this week.
Firstly I finished the first cut of a video featuring her.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbryouzkvko

And secondly she made it to the weekly top ten on 3Dvia!

http://www.3dvia.com/blog/2009/03/10/3dvia-top-10-models-017/#

Blender basic animation tutorial.

There are many different ways to do an animation. I'll tell you the one I find easiest.

1. Where it says "SR:2-model" (on the bar near the top.) click the arrow button and select "SR:1-Animation". Three more sub windows will appear.
2. On the sub window below the 3d view click the red circle button a drop down list box will appear beside it. click its arrow and choose "Add/Replace keys"
3. If you move, scale or rotate an object (by object I mean object, camera, lamp etc.), a lines will appear in the far right window, the "IPO curve editor" The object is now set to be at that position, scale and rotation for the currently selected frame. The current frame is shown on the "buttons" window and the "time line" window as a number (probably 1 at the moment) with an arrow either side of it. It is also shown as a green line on the "ipo curve editor".
4. Move forwards a few frames, the left and right arrows go backwards and forwards (respectively) by 1 frame, the up and down arrows, by 10.
5. move, scale, or rotate the object again, to set its ipo curves for the new frame. You should see that the "curves" are no longer straight lines, but curves, constrained to two points.
6. keep doing this until you've told the object how it's meant to move for the entire animation.
7. if you want to change the length of the animation change the number in the "start:" or "end:" buttons.
8. you can click the play button, or press Alt and A to play back the animation. To get the best idea of ho it'll look rendered, set the view to camera before hand.

Ipo curves can be selected and edited in a similar manner to meshes.


Rendering an animation.
1. In the "render" menu at the top there is an option, render animation, click it. A window will appear and render each frame of your animation. the frames will be saved as jpegs in the default directory. if something's not right, press Esc to quit the animation.
2. to change, or find out, the directory it saves the renders to go to the "Scene" tab in the buttons window (or press F10). The first directory selector in the little panel on the left shows where it saves the renders.
3. To save the animation as a video file rather than a series of pictures, look to the little panel on the right of the buttons sub window. Where it says Jpeg, click the arow and change it to a video format. I tend to use AVI Jpeg.
4. Now if you render the animation it'll save it as a single video file in the selected directory called something like "001-250.AVI", you're now ready to do what ever video processing you want, or just upload it straight to you tube.

There are far more complicated things you can do with ipo curves and animation, but this should be enough to get you started.
If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask.
Good luck.

Hercules walkthrough

This is pretty much the finished version, though I did fiddle at various points, so I might re-render some of it.

turret tests.

I wanted to see how the blog's video feature compared to youtube.

Staff1.0