vb_y_juoksu.mov - 735 kB

The first playable demo from the Apricot Project is available to download. Now you can try out a test level of the game, and play around with Frank. If you want to try the demo, visit this link and...

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vb3.mov - 1.9 MB

Homepage started!

http://www.etyekfilm.hu/averylittlewarrior/

Now some really interesting... images! :)

My goals with this short film:

-learning of: making story and storyboard, animation, rendering, compositing
-creating a professional look render and animation
-creating a cute and beautyful short film
-maybe selling the result somehow (tips wanted)
-popularize Blender :-) and using mainly free programs
-one man project (yes, I will make everything)
-creating a good reference for me

Technical goals:
-very fast render (1-2 minutes per frame at hd resolution at my AMD4600 dual core CPU), no raytrace, using only shadow buffer lamps, using baked  shadows  sometimes
-making content that easy to use in real-time render (for example in a game): lowpoly subdiv models with normal maps and using standard (not complex) shaders

This is a development blog about the making of my short film called "A very little warrior". This film is a cg (computer generated) 3d film that I make with Blender (a free, open source program, see blender.org).

My goals with this blog:

-showing de phases of the development
-get help from you (advices, tech help)

Just like the earth spins around the sun, the Blender World Cup comes around once each year. And just like Global Warming, each year the competition is fiercer than ever. This year the topic is wide...

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How is everything there? Following the style of the previous tip… Did you know that Blender lets you copy text values, numbers and colors using CTRL + C and CTRL + V? We can change the names to a chain of bones or we can copy the color of a diffuse material and application to speculate the color of other material. We can also copy any numeric value, for example, the dimension of an object and paste to another. Well, now. How i can do it? Very simple!: You just have to put the cursor on the value to copy (whether text, number or color) and press CTRL + C (without clicking or make a selection), then place the cursor on another box and press CTRL + V (without clicking) and go!, Blender brings many things hidden waiting to be discovered!

Just a simple cartoony run with my new exercise character.

vb2.mov - 2.2 MB

I just received an acceptance as a media representative for BlenderNation from SIGGRAPH to cover this years event. Like last year, I'll cover all of the Blender conferences and interview your...

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For a while now we have been close to being able to release a playable demo and I’ve been itching to get something online that shows the gameplay coming together since its really fun to play Franky here in the studio and videos don’t cut it anymore for an open, interactive project.

Chris made a small test level for playing Franky, with a range of asset that can be used as modules for making your own levels too!
Pablo (VenomGFX) is working on animations and characters and I have been learning blenders game logic to get Franky to a playable state as well as a few bugfixes and logic brick additions.

Download the OGG Video (13meg)
Download packed Blendfile (57meg, Incompatible with 2.46, see below)

Special thanks to Brecht for his amazing GLSL shader work and Benoit Bolsee for writing a new game logic state machine. Thanks also to Mataii for optimizing Franky’s mesh and removing ~1700 triangles .

The response from the last post was overwhelming, We wanted to include peoples wacky animations but I’m afraid this would have set us back yet another day so we will have them included by the next update.
If anyones interested in making their own levels, this is not so hard, just edit the existing terrain, or add a “ground” property to any mesh and use the existing blocks to jump on.

Playing the Game
For this test level you collect and throw nuts, climb up the ledge, glide and run around.
This demo requires a modern graphics card (for Nvidia, 6+ Series for GLSL to work), Blender Apricot-Branch revision 15389 or higher - grab one from www.graphicall.org

Keys

• Up, Shift+Up to walk, Pressing Up while hanging climbs.
• Left/Right - Turn or Shimmy when hanging.
• Spacebar - Throw when you have collected a nut.
• K - Kick (no kick objects in example level yet)
• Z - Jump, Press twice to double-jump, hold to glide.
• F10 - Reset

What We Have

• Actions - Jump, DoubleJump, Run, Walk, Hang, Shimmy, Throw, Glide
• Collecting items.
• Armature driven ShapeKeys in the Game Engine (Thanks to Benoit)
• Blenders Shaders in the GameEngine.
• Game locic state machine to separate groups of logic into states (more on this later).
• Linked Set Scenes from external files to manage game logic in one place.
• Simple Camera system that detects obstacles.

Whats Missing

• Loop the loop, Climbing tree’s
• Enemies
• Water
• Interactive objects to jump on
• Group Instances dont work in the game engine yet
• HUD Has to be merged with the new state machine logic
• Blenders Bullet physics library needs updating to get anisotropic friction with the ground to work right. Now were working around the problem but side effects are you can run through walls.
• Optimizations, Level of Detail
• Wont run the the Blender Player yet because its missing Blender.Mathutils module
• Sounds haven’t been added into the game logic
• Testing on different graphics cards and hardware.

Notes

• the franky in this demo has rotated wrists, please use THIS rig for animations.
• Their are reports of the game engine crashing with ATI cards, we need to look into this.

Rocketman has been working lately on an impressive online comic using Blender and several other open source programs. The comics follow a small group of robots, throughout several humorously...

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Blender includes, as everyone knows, a file browser with preview, which can be accessed via the File menu and then on the option Append or Link (Image Browser). This option allows to view the files as icons with preview. Nothing new here, however interesting may be able to use the preview Image Browser every time you have to select an image to apply a texture, or to implement as background imagen for the viewport or even to load a texture in the UV editor images. Well …. this is possible!

The normal mode is activated simply by pressing the buttons Load with the left mouse click

On the other hand, if we open the Image Browser must press the CTRL key while you click left in the Load button.

Remember that this works in every instance where we have the ability to upload pictures!

Right now, I have both my laptop and desktop rendering away on the HD version of The Beast, with the main files housed on the laptop (they’ll be transfered to the workstation later). Both Blenders just hit the shot file over the network. Now, on to the Linux stuff. While both machines are on teh Internets via wireless, I made a cross-over cable (Cat5e) today and just wired them together for significantly faster network throughput. There’s no sense going both ways over the air and through the cheapo Linksys router if you don’t have to. I was pleased with the ease of setup of the multi-homing solution in Ubuntu. I was able to use the GUI tools and not drop down to command line level. So, cool.

However, the Connect to Server option available from the Gnome desktop isn’t reachable via command line, it seems, or really mounted anywhere, so I could access the other machine across the network with it. I had to go to the command line, where a “mount -t smbfs …” command did the trick. One for two. Oh well.

Anyway, I’ve found that I’m not only impressed with Blender’s rendering speed under Linux, but it also seems to make significantly better use of my graphics card (nVidia Quadro FX 550) than Windows ever did. Scenes that were frame skipping while panning in 3D on Windows are just cruising along. I tweak some of the first shot’s animation in Linux, and the response time when working was so much better, I’ll be booting into Ubuntu for animation work from now on.

From Montage Studio this new DVD (currently only available in download form) is set to be part of a series of exercises that will walk newer users through modeling, texturing and animating in...

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A new version of LuxRender, the unbiased open source render engine was released a few days ago. And this release presents a lot of new features. Here is a word from Tim Suess, about the release and...

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recently Aligorith developed the first version of 3dview notes functionality, which means the director or animators can make notes in 3dview as you can see in this screenshot



patch can be found here

Well, I must say, I love to write code in python!, But I must also admit, is complicated! … anyway I managed to leave a little more friendly ExtraInfo the script has a few more features but has some errors on purpose to let someone have mercy and correct jeje … Since we’re raising the doubt here: As I get the dimension of a mesh selected in python? (not the scale of the object, but the mesh size …)
Also left two codes more available, one is the original script that shows the keys pressed, and then the same script but with variations that I did so that they appear better and a few more improvements …
I hope you like them to serve their projects.
PS: The idea of the script ExtraInfo is showing useful information at all times, and especially to show the information into real units of measure, for example meters, or feet … Thing quite useful for those who give classes and we tell the student to realize something so many metres or so centimeters.

extrainfo

keypress_touch

keypress_original -> http://blenderbuch.de/daten/Dateien.php?dir=Entwicklung%2FShowKeypress%2F
Copyright Carsten Wartmann

Well if you've been around Blender for a long time, you may recall "The Official Blender 2.0 book put together by Ton and Carsten Wartmann several years back. I know that I wore out that...

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Frank, a main character in the upcoming Apricot game, has been finalized. He's rigged, textured and ready for some much needed animations. So the Apricot team have released him to the community...

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UPDATE: Tomorrow there will be an update with those animations we’ll be including. Thanks for all the contributions, you guys are doing awesome, keep going! There’s also been a few questions, and here are the answers..
1. Yes you can use 2.46 to animate. To view Frank with glsl you’ll need an apricot build though. You can get one from graphicall.org
2. There is no deadline really
3. You can modify any animations you’d like, even ones that appear finished, if you think you can make it better, but please don’t change anything on the skeleton.

Here is Frank, in all his glsl shaded glory. Pablo has pretty much finished his textures and one of the tricky parts was the tail. I created the tail with the shell method, which means the tail mesh is duplicated multiple times and fattened(alt+s) so that it’s slightly bigger each time, with each outer shell having an alpha texture that is a noise pattern colored by the base color map.

Now, here’s how you can help out. Frank has some animations that haven’t been made yet. We considered working with a few externals like Peach had done, but thought it would be more fun to release Frank to the community and see what you can come up with.

So the deal is, download the blend file here, make some animations, then post a link to the blend file in this post in the comments below. We’ll look at all of the entries and if your animation is awesome, we’ll include it in the game and you’ll get a spot in the credits. We won’t be able to be the director to everyone making animations, so only animators whose work we include will receive a reply. When you post your work, be sure to leave your name and email address. All work that’s sent to us and is included in the game will be released under the same license as the game, Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution.

Some animations we have are placeholders that need to be redone, so look through the actions list in the blend file and find one you think would be fun to redo, and do it. Here’s a list of some of the animations we really need though. As far as style for animation goes, we’re looking for fun and exaggerated animations.

Idle(fun stuff, scratching his ass, etc.)
Jump
Double Jump(front flip, wing flap for boost, etc)
Getting hurt(minor damage)
Getting hit(impacted, rammed into)
Shimmy left and right while hanging on ledge
Falling(dropping down from a high place)
Throwing nuts

SIGGRAPH 2008 Wednesday, 13 August, 8:30 - 10:15 am Petree Hall C In May 2008, the Blender Foundation released their second open-movie project: "Big Buck Bunny," a funny and furry 3D short...

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The artist's showcase is always a great way to see what other people are doing with Blender. If you like to show work during the Monday afternoon of the Blender Birds of Feather, contact Ton...

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I was intrigued about this animation by David Liger, it's his first animation and I enjoyed the use of the cartoon edges. An avid Blender user, he created this piece in celebration of the birth...

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