First play with Blender

After seeing the latest fan made WP7 video by Brandon Foy at the start of the 2nd day keynote at Mix11 (the original one got him noticed by Microsoft), I was curious as to how videos like that could be created. I've edited simple 'screencast' style videos in the past, but didn't really know where to start regarding creating videos within videos including 3D shapes and animation.

After asking a few people and having a quick search online I cam across Blender, having heard its name before in reference to 3D modelling I was pleased to see references to it regarding video editing. It's a free open source tool for 3D rendering, animation, video editing and a few other things too, so I downloaded it and started looking at a few basic tutorial videos online of how to get started and WTF was going on with the UI.

After having to hard reset my PC twice, and having spent a good few hours poking around in Blender last Saturday night I came out with this:



The video isn't great, but does show a 3D model of a WP7 device being animated with some previously captured video footage laid on as a texture as well as some lighting. As I say the video isn't great but I was happy with it as I had proved to myself that doing something like this wasn't beyond my grasp. Expect to see more exciting promotional videos for future VerySoftware apps.