New Explosion

  This is the same explosion as the last one (see last post) but, of course, used in a different scene. I animated the blocks using the Blender Game Engine. It took me a while to find a way to make the stack of blocks explode. I tried writing a Python script but it kept giving me an error whenever I added the "applyImpuse()" method. (I still don't know why ) The way I did it was when the missle object collided with the blocks, it would instantly turn invisible and grow to about five times it's original size forcing the blocks to move outward. It's not a very consistent method but it worked.

  Anyway, after that I just added the explosion objects to the scene. When it came time to render I calculated it would take about 15-20 hours to render the 600 frames on the computer I was using! So my brother offered to let me use his computer which is about four times faster! I accepted for obvious reasons. I don't know exactly how long it took to render because it started at 9:30 P.M. and I went to bed before it was done, but I had calculated it would take about 4-5 hours. When I woke up in the morning it was done.

Here it is:

• The explosion: Block_Explode.avi
• The explosion with a glow effect added by the Blender Sequencer: Block_Explode_Glow.avi

Here is a screenshot:

Game Update

  This is an update on the car game.

  I haven't done a whole lot of work on this game since the last time I posted about it (see above link). I've been thinking about totaly reconstructing the HUD to make it show a speedometer and stuff like that. In fact I even got to the point where I thought I needed to get or even make a new vehicle script. I didn't like the one I was using mainly because it didn't slide when you would go fast and turn sharply. Now this may sound pretty obvious, but the script had a property called "friction" set very high at "100.00"; I didn't think to turn that down, lol.

  So by way of more scripting I fixed the friction thing, got brakes, and even got gears for the car. Now I really need to get a more realistic looking car.

Later,

BlenderBoy