The Open Source Creative Podcast
I’m bringing back my podcast. It’s important.
Jason van Gumster on monsterjavaguns.com
Recent content in Jason van Gumster on monsterjavaguns.com
Latest posts
On Burnout
This one may qualify for the “oversharing” descriptor that I put to describe my blog…
Putting Ideas to Bed
Sometimes you have a great idea… that only works for you. A post mortem on Tablescraps.
A Jason of One
I think it’s time to have fewer silos in my life…
Pun in the Sun
I’ve started something new. Seriously… I think I need to be stopped.
Inktober 2025
I did Inktober again!
New Rules for Social Media
Social media isn’t social any more. At least, not the way I see it.
Designing a Tattoo with Blender
In far too many words, I describe how I designed myself a travel tattoo… in the nerdiest way possible.
I wrote an app to help published authors
It’s called Tablescraps and it’s here to help published authors monitor their book stats.
Announcing Fulcrum: Season One
Here we go, I’ve got some post-apocalyptic technofantasy for you right here.
If You Aren't Technical, You Aren't an Artist
Let’s dispell with the myth that creative folks aren’t technical.
Functionally Homeless—A New Adventure Begins!
Look out horizon… here we come!
Announcing Orange Turbine!
Getting that awesome Blendery juice into production pipelines.
[Mostly] Helpful Snippets
I’m not a programmer. However, I have been known to crank out a few [hundred] lines of code every now and again. Most of the time, these are little utilties to help me work faster and weed out tedium from my workflow. If I find myself doing any task more than three times in a row, you can be sure that I’ll hack together a script or small program to ensure that I don’t have to…
Jason van Gumster
I really enjoy sharing knowledge. I spent some time teaching in a classroom at the college level and that was great, but I’ve found that books are an excellent way to serve artists and creatives in our pursuit of taking what’s in our heads and getting it out in whatever medium we choose. So I’ve written a few over the years. Hopefully you find them helpful.
Pretty (and Not-so-pretty) Things
I won’t go so far as to say that this is a portfolio, but it is a smattering of visual art that I’ve created over the years. 3D Sculpts and Stuff # I like working in 3D. It’s the space I’ve been active in for most of my professional career. Animating is one of my biggest loves… whether in 3D or other media, but I sometimes do still images and designs in 3D, too. Of…
Ernie Vance
In case I haven’t done a great job of showing it, I’m kind of a goofball. I like bringing a smile to your using humor and absurdity. Under the Ernie Vance pen name, I write humorous stories and absurd lies worth sharing. Right now, the lies are the biggest thing coming out of Ernie Vance. A year’s worth of them have been compiled into a book.
J.J. Vega
Everyone has their dark side. We’ll say that J.J. Vega is mine. Under this pen name, I write stories that I’ve labeled as “dark technofantasy”. What the hell is that? These are stories with fantasy elements, but they’re set in a grim future where things have gone all sideways. The first of these stories, Fulcrum, is out and ready for you to read.
The Birth of Ernie Vance
M.J. Guns is dead. Long live M.J. Guns!
Making Art From a Free Table
I found a free wooden table sitting on the side of the road while I was walking my dog. Now, it’s no longer a table. It’s a big ol’ carving of a lion’s head."
Blender for Dummies, 4th Edition Is Out
The latest edition of Blender For Dummies has officially been released…
3D Printed Carving Mount
I’ve been carving a lot more, both with the bent wood rings that I make, but also in general. For carving the rings, though, I need a stable mount to do that detailed carving work. Engravers have something like this, but they’re expensive and quite overkill for my needs. So I went about designing and 3D printing my own…
I Made Merch!
A few folks have suggested make the “It’s Vertex Not Vertice” shirt available for sale. To that I say… OK!
Social Media for Creative Curmudgeons—Part 3: What if I Hate People?
I’ve gotten a bit of feedback on the previous two parts in this series. One of the things that’s been brought up is just how much of a “rabbit hole” various social media platforms can be. It’s to unwittingly get sucked down into it. Hours pass while you’re scrolling through posts and you suddenly wonder where all that time went. You’ve got work to do, so you want to avoid letting that…
Social Media for Creative Curmudgeons—Part 2: Facebook
Yup. Facebook is just about ubiquitous now. It almost doesn’t even matter what thing it is that you do. Whether you’re looking to find an audience or build one, if you want to be in front of eyeballs, Facebook is a critically (and, on some level, disappointingly) big piece of that puzzle. Just about everyone and their mother has a Facebook account these days… often to the embarrassment of…
Social Media for Creative Curmudgeons—Part 1: Set Your Mind
You’re doing creative work and you’re interested in actually making a buck or two off of it. It could be that you’re looking to make enough to actually afford a cup of coffee at that little cafe you’re at all the time. Or maybe you’re really ambitious and you’re aiming to make enough to buy a new house. Whatever your goal, the result is going to be zero unless you get your work in front of some…
Analog Art: Wooden Rings
So I’ve found myself another fun and interesting distraction. Bent wood rings…
Rendering in Blender on a Machine with Multiple GPUs
So here’s the premise: For scenes that take around a minute or less to render, performance is actually worse if you render on all of the cards with a single instance of Blender. This is because (AFAIK) there’s a bit of additional time necessary to collect the render results from each card and stitch them together. That time is a fixed short duration, so it’s negligible on…
Getting the Render Path (or any Variable) from a .blend File
When doing my work, sometimes I need to get information out of a .blend file. For example, I sometimes need to do batch image processing (renaming, file conversion, etc.) on my rendered output. There’s not a nice way to just query the .blend file for that information. Sure, there’s BAM and even the old blenderaid tools, but they’re a bit heavy-handed if you don’t have them…
Junglebook: Simple Kindle Ebook Cover Analysis
I got myself good and distracted from my regular project work and ended up writing the start of a little script that I’m calling JungleBook. It’s makes images that are pretty and interesting… and might just provide a little bit analytical benefit.
A Busy Little Ape
OK, OK… I know that I haven’t posted anything new here since May. However, it only looks like I’ve been on a summer vacation. In reality, this has been a surprisingly busy summer for me. And the approaching last quarter of this year doesn’t appear to be slowing down. Not one little bit. So what have I been up to? Let’s scurry through the the list…
*Blender for Dummies*, 3rd Edition... Released!
So in the midst of my indie writing shenanigans, the 3rd edition of Blender For Dummies is officially out and in the wild as of today! Wheee!
Daily Tear-off Calendar, the Animation
One of the rewards for my Kickstarter campaign is a daily tear-off calendar, with a lie from Definitely True: Year One on each page of the calendar. It’s actually at the printer being made right now (woohoo!). One of the fun things about a tear-off calendar is that it’s built exactly like a simple flipbook. So I couldn’t resist adding a little animation to the bottom of each page…
Kickstarter AHOY!
Well… It’s started…
The Kickstarter Cometh
Assuming all of the approvals go through and there are no hiccups, then within the next 24 hours, I’m going to be launching my first ever Kickstarter campaign…
Clean Reader? I Dunno...
So this has been circulating the interwebbernets today a bit and it got me thinking. So much so, that it got me writing here. With any luck, it’ll get you thinking, too.
Definitely True—Pants on Fire Timelapse
You may or may not have noticed that I have a little graphic to accompany my daily lies (now being shared over on Definitely True ). Well… I made that in Blender. And for fun, I recorded a timelapse of the whole process. Of course, I didn’t have any epic music to lay over the video, so instead I hastily recorded a voice over to describe the various steps I took in the process. It’s quick n’…
Hunting for a VCS
Wherein I try to figure out what version control system is best suited for my needs on my personal projects. Really, it’s kind of a cry for help…
Creating 2D Animation with Blender and Krita, a Post Mortem
Note: This blog post was made back in 2014… quite a long time ago in Internet and software development time. While the techniques described here still certainly work, the updates to Blender’s 2D animation workflow and Krita’s animation tools have made the process much more simple. A couple months ago, I was contacted…
1-on-1 Blender Mentoring
Are you ready to take your Blender skills to the next level? Donut > Question mark --> Look, at the end of the day it doesn’t matter how many CG donuts you’ve created or how many different tutorials you’ve collected. Are you able to apply what you’ve learned? Can you build your own projects with that experience? For a lot of people the answer, sadly, is no. Maybe…
About Me
Sometimes folks ask for a more official PR-style bio thing. This… well, this is close to that. Very Short Version I write, animate, teach, and usually find a way to make a fool of myself while doing all three. Short Version I do a lot of things. You could say I’m an inventor. Sometimes I invent stories through words or moving images. Sometimes they’re still images. Other times I…
Blender Consulting for Studios and Toolmakers
Make Blender a seamless part of your pipeline. Blender’s popularity as a creative tool continues to skyrocket and it has no signs of slowing down. Even if your production pipeline isn’t currently built around Blender, just about every new artist you hire has used it. Let them hit the ground running in your productions with the tool they’re already used to. Of course, integrating…
Services for Blender Creators
Sell more of what you’ve already built. Are you trying to sell a Blender product, but the numbers aren’t moving the way you want? The problem may not be your product. I spent four years as the Director of Marketing at the largest marketplace for Blender products. I’ve seen thousands of products succeed and fail. More importantly, I know why . Most of the time, it’s not the…