YouTube - Blender3D Hairy Softbodies

It was nice to see you at the office today, and now I know what you were up to in there! Dennis, educate me: the video is cool, but what about it makes you want to stay up late for its release? Is it work or play?

Both work and play.

Blender 3D is one of the tools I will be teaching in "New Media Projects." It's a fantastically powerful animation program. But more important for my purposes, it's a tool that has a huge and powerful user base -- there are tons and tons of tutorials, study groups, galleries, and discussion groups created by people who love this tool. My goal is to walk students through the first few stages of using this tool, so that they can make a spinning 3D logo or just something cool that they want to share. Then they will have to go online on their own, looking for tutorials that will help them take their work to the next step. This process -- becoming an active part of an online community, rather than waiting for the instructor to tell them what page has "the right answer" -- is a vital new media skill.

I don't expect that students will ever have a client ask them to make video about hairy cubes bouncing in the grass, but if they can use the internet to teach themselves how to do something *that* obscure, then certainly they'll be able to teach themselves the next desktop publishing package or video production tool or holographic cranial implantation design kit or whatever else the future holds.

It's also a creative outlet for me -- and I was happy that I finally had the time during the workday to use my office computer, which is much faster than the four-year-old laptop that I tinker with after the kids are in bed.