Blender continues to amaze.

I had no idea it was so easy to set up a fluid sim in Blender and create something like this:

Yes, there are a couple of glitches and to be able to remove those, that's the question! I thought that some fluid simulator developed at a university had been incorporated, but it was a Google Summer of Code project. By Nils Thuerey. Wait, just one programmer? Ah, he intergrated his PhD thesis work into Blender. Nice!

No, we have not switched to Blender in the advanced animation class I teach, but the simulated mesh can be imported into Lightwave using a plugin.

And WOW! Someone created this in Blender:

We are not alone...

And now for something completely different: here are dolphins with bubbles up their nose:

[via BoingBoing] - Now back to our regular programming: mashing a banana.

Stanford Celebrity Meltdown

Yes, I really needed to create this to show how to use particles to melt an object. I originally used the full mesh with 34k points, but even though after being non responsive for an hour and a half Lightwave did finish the calculation of a particle system, working with 3.5k points turned out to be more practical

I was really preparing a lecture on facial animation though....