Update on class: 3D Data Visualization for Science Communication

I am still here, I promise! Been away from work and prepping for the upcoming GLPA conference.

In the midst of all that, I’ve been taking the Coursera class mentioned last month. Although the instructors emphasize Houdini because that’s what they use for cinematic rendering, they do mentioned Blender frequently. I have installed the apprentice version of Houdini (yay for Linux version!) but haven’t had time to learn it. Thus I am doing the assignments in Blender.

Solar System render from specific assignment parameters using textures provided.

The instructors are doing a great job of breaking down concepts and using those concepts as they explain how and why they decide on approaches to their work. The quizzes are challenging and thought provoking.

In my own work, I mostly create science illustrations rather than visualizations. Even so, I find myself putting more focused thought into my work now. And I like that. I like that a lot.

3D Data Visualization for Science Communication class on Coursera

It’s not solely FOSS stuff, but I’m taking this course:

The instructors are part of NCSA’s Advanced Visualization Lab team, and they are pretty amazing at what they do. I’ve met them both previously on several occasions and each time they’ve been happy to talk shop and answer my nerdy questions. 
I’m pretty excited about this, and will let everyone know how it goes.

Another great resource for learning Blender 2.8

First Steps with Blender 2.8

I’m half-watching these and listening as I do other things, pausing to note differences from 2.79 that I know will trip me up.

From the official Blender YouTube channel

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLa1F2ddGya_-UvuAqHAksYnB0qL9yWDO6

And don’t forget the series by Ron Proctor:  Introduction to Blender 2.80

Blender Beyond Beta – 2.80rc1

Blender 2.80 Release Candidate 1 is out today.


It’s looking mighty fine and the UI has been redesigned to work the way users of most commercial software packages expect. 

Give it a try! 

Download it from www.blender.org.
Extract the downloaded file, then run Blender straight from the extracteed folder.

Godot Engine on a rainy day

A year ago I started looking into Unity and quickly put it aside because other things came up and the frustration in learning did not motivate me to get back to it.

Here I am a year later, playing with Godot Engine on a rainy day. It is open source under the MIT license.

I must say that Godot is very clean and is working great both on my Windows 10 laptop and on my Linux machine. I’ve never used GDScript before, but the built-in editor is super helpful.

I’m in the Hello World stage of learning, but the early tutorials are already making so much more sense than I’d expected given my troubles with learning Unity. To be fair, it doesn’t necessarily mean that Godot is better than Unity. But it does mean that I can recommend the online tutorials in the Godot Engine documentation.