In an effort to keep this forum alive...

[Tobias Reiper]

I've decided to post one of my CG monstrosities. He has his tongue out, but when I scaled it down it looked more like a trickle of blood or misapplied lipstick.

[Sparko]

I've decided to post one of my CG monstrosities. He has his tongue out, but when I scaled it down it looked more like a trickle of blood or misapplied lipstick.
Interesting. What 3D program did you use?

[Tobias Reiper]

Interesting. What 3D program did you use?

Blender, with the "Make Human" script (other than textures, most add ons to Blender are done via Python scripting). You can find it at www.blender3d.com (http://www.blender3d.com), and the make human script can be found by searching the python forum at www.elysiun.com (http://www.elysiun.com).

EDIT: I forgot to mention that I converted the images to a GIF with The Gimp. (http://www.gimp.org)

[Piebald]

That's weird! How long did it take to make that?

[Tobias Reiper]

That's weird! How long did it take to make that?

The rendering and conversion to GIF was the longest part. All I did was loaded up the Make Human script, then moved the sliders around until I ended up with a fat man with his toungue sticking out. Then I inserted a vertex key (allows you to animate the movement of each vertice), moved to the next key frame, adjusted the "brain" parameter, inserted another key, and duplicated the mesh.

I then deleted random vertices from his eyes up, and moved that mesh to layer 2. Then I made a single vertice mesh for a particle system, created a plane and gave it the same material as the man, parented it to the particle emmitor, and adjusted the parameters to have an explosion with random debris movement as opposed to a stream of planes going in one direction.

Then I moved to the frame where there were enough particles to cover the top of the head, moved back one frame, inserted a layer key for both meshes, then moved up a frame, moved the whole mesh to layer 2 and the edited one to layer 1.

The particles didn't turn out perfectly, because parts of his head fly out too soon, but other than that the results were satisfactory.

I wanted to do confetti, but when I tried to parent more than one colored plane to the emittor it only produced one color. I guess I could have done it with multiple emmitors, but I don't think I'll revisit that project.

Oh, and to answer your question, the setup took ten minutes, the rendering took ten minutes, and compiling the images into an animated GIF took 40 minutes, give or take a few.