The Adventures of the old man and the Blender Monster. Entry One.

 I blogged about my past adventures in life by covering them with blogs, of which there are four.  In chronological order they are:

1. Drift Away

2. Bleecker Mountain Life

3. Observatatin'

4. Swayze Acres Life

The first blog was amazingly popular, accumulating well over one million page views.  The same can be said of the second, which I started a few years after the first.  The third and fourth I've put no effort into.  As a writer, I need to feel the need to write.  I need to be in my happy place to be creative and write well.  Being much older now and living in an assisted living facility (partly due to the accident suffered in the second blog) my writing turned, quite honestly, sad.  Even I thought it was pathetic.

So, sitting in my room day after day, now year after year, I've looked for something I could pursue to be creative again, without the need to always be in my happy place. I found it in two places, actually.  Second Life and Blender.

Second Life is a virtual reality.  Most people tag "game" on to the end of that, but this is nothing like a game.  It is for everyone.  Even children, although they are relegated to their own areas away from adults.  It seems to me that the majority of its current residents are handicapped in some way, or prevented from leading a normal, sociable life.  Here in SL (second life) you can do anything you can do in RL (real life) and then some.  You can do things you can't do in RL, such as fly with or without an airplane of some sort.

What I do in SL, mainly, is build.  My primary focus has been houses which I will go into in detail at another time.  I also need things that go along with houses, such as lighting fixtures, cabinets, bathrooms and kitchens, and so on.  Complicated, complex curve things, for example, are difficult with the primitive way I'd been building.  

Enter Blender.  I'm sure you've seen CGI effects in movies, or even CGI movies, all generated by a team of artists and computers.  These are very talented people.  They used 3D graphics tools such as Maya and ZBrush.  Blender is such a program, with many if not most of the same features.  The difference is that Blender has been and is being developed by people with a love for modeling, and it is open source, and free.  I like free.

This blog will be about an old tech savvy man's attempt to learn something new and interesting.  Only 20% of those who learn Blender become proficient at it, with 80 % giving up.  It is a very complex piece of software.  I've had zero RL training in anything like this, and the learning curve is steep.  What I have going for me is my pig-headedness.  Stubborn as an ornery ol' mule.

I am taking a beginner's Blender course in SL, which is very good and has been tremendously helpful.  It began October 13, 2024, and held every Sunday afternoon for about ninety minutes.  I am not that patient.  I work at it seven days a week, six to ten hours a day.  My outside source of information is Youtube.

I will post examples of my work here.  You might consider this a portfolio of sorts, but I have no illusions of getting anywhere near to that level.  That's for the youngsters with college training.  I just want to get to the level where people can look at something I've created and say "Well... that hardly sucks at all."