Thursday 27th July –

Yet again I headed off to the doctors to see if anything could be done to help my back.  I had good news and bad news.  The good news was that my sore back issue was purely muscular as opposed to skeletal.  The bad news was that it could take up to six weeks to improve! Great!  However, yet again I was not to be beaten.  I decided to try out the Blender tutorials from yesterday.  I wanted to augment some bouncing and rotating cubes that were covered in the same material as the picture that they were augmenting from (the target image).

I was surprised at how easily I managed to follow the tutorials and I had quite a lot of success.

What Did I Learn?

I learned how to both animate and set the material of an object in Blender.  I then learned how to export the rotating object as a .png series with a transparent background.  I also learned that Blender is an amazing feature rich program but its menus are both weighty and complex.  I will certainly not become a blender whiz kid any time soon, but I have enough knowledge to be able to watch videos to help me achieve my goals.  I will probably use this program again.

What Did I Actually Achieve?

I was really pleased because I managed to augment yet another page of my Barcelona Graffiti book using a mix of Blender and augmented reality software.  Please see below for the video I created today.  I particularly like the way that the cubes stand out from the book.  I managed to successfully use Blender to animate a cube along with material from my book.  Using the augmented reality software I managed to assign behaviours to the cubes so that they could perform a bouncing motion and on occasion an orbit.  As planned the augmented reality is becoming increasingly complex as I move through my book.

I am happy that I now pretty much understand my augmented reality software of choice.  I’m also pretty confident that I am now using the best software to achieve my aims.  I leave today excited to continue augmenting my book.  The next challenge is to think about more creative ways of augmenting and animating my work and how this might feed into the third book in my Barcelona Graffiti series.