Blender Animations --> Screensavers

[LHammonds]

I needed to create an animated logo today and display it as a screensaver.

 

There are probably no less than 1,000 ways to do it but I thought that I'd share how I managed to do it with free resources!

 

1. Use Blender to create 3D Text (Video Tutorial)
   
2. Animate the text by making it spin, scale from small to large and back again...just make sure it looks good in a loop.
   
3. Optional: On the F9 panel, you can load a custom TTF font but it needs to conform to PostScript standards.
   
4. Compile the animation as an AVI video (I used 1024x768 as my render size)
   
5. Upload the AVI to www.media-convert.com and convert it to a Flash SWF video and download the .swf file.
   
6. Download the ActiveX version of Flash Player from here and rename the file to "install_flash_player_10_active_x.exe"
   
7. Download and install InstantStorm from www.instantstorm.com
   
8. Copy "install_flash_player_10_active_x.exe" to the install folder (default = C:\Program Files\InstantStorm) - This will package Flash Player with the installation just in case the PC does not have it installed.
   
9. Configure the Title and Main SWF file on the General tab
   
10. On the Publish tab, select "Create screensaver installer (recommended)" and click "Create"
    
11. Double-click the newly created screensaver installer and see if everything works as desired. Feel free to experiment with the other options InstantStorm offers.

 

NOTE: I was able to create a "Standalone SCR file" but it only worked on the PC that had InstantStorm installed on it. I even tried it on a Windows 7 PC that already had Flash installed but it did not work for some reason.

 

LHammonds