Oh by the way, they’re still in school, but only for a few more months. Kenny & Fuego graduate this year.
Today, I’ve started using Blender as my main 3D program. I gotta say, it runs a lot faster than Second Life(not surprising, considering SL is primarily an online game/environment), and as soon as I learn how to do everything in it, it’ll be MUCH faster to use than Second Life(No chat! Yay!). I really only did the walls and lighting in this comic’s backgrounds, but that’s pretty much what I do with Second Life. The desk, drawers and chair in the first panel came from Scopia, who has a bunch of free 3D models at resources.blogscopia.com. The second panel’s background was made in Second Life because I couldn’t figure out how to make the curved tunnel wall correctly in Blender, although it wound up not looking curved anyway(update a few months later: I had been looking for the function to make a cylinder hollow, which Second Life has, but as it turns out, real 3D programs make it hollow right from the start!). Still, I was able to place that particle accelerator set behind Kennyland so people can see it in full. The third panel’s background was made in Blender, and was dirt-simple. I almost feel bad for covering up so much of the background with Fuego’s sleepy head because Blender did such a great job of shading. That’s another benefit of using a “real” 3D program; the shading. I look forward to finally using mirrored surfaces that actually reflect objects.
I’m still very new to Blender, despite having it for a few years now. Second Life was just too easy. I liken its building tools to training wheels, though, so it’s high time to get back to Blender, whether I make time for tutorials or not. I’m learning a lot just by diving right into it. That’s how I learn most programs, anyway. I got an introductory tutorial to Blender years ago, so I’m not flying completely blind. I’ll try to read more tutorials as time goes on, but the main thing is that I’m not going to wait until I’ve taken the tutorials, because that’s gone nowhere.
Update(Aug 2011): Btw, not ALL new sets will be built in Blender. There were a few new things that were beyond my Blender skills after this comic, so I don’t want those to be representative of what Blender can do. An easy way to tell if it was done in Blender is to see if shadows were cast. Although I’ve cast shadows in Second Life before, too(takes a setting change that didn’t always work), so the clearest way of knowing is if I mention it in the comic’s description, usually by giving credit when somebody else is the one that made a model.
