I remember the very first time I saw a computer-generated image that actually looked awesome. It was in Scientific American, I think, probably in the late 1980’s, and it was a scene with a simple sphere and a single light source.  The article discussed the “ray-tracing” software, a mind-blowing concept at the time. I think it took like a million hours to render the image–and it was AMAZING.

Fast-forward to the future, which we now live in. My son and I have been taking a class at Madison College to learn Blender, which is an incredibly robust open source 3D design software. We are going to make some projects to send off to be 3D printed at Shapeways, but Blender can also be used for animation and all kinds of 3D projects.

Look, I made a coffee cup! I love living in the future!