Planet Blender

CloseHoles , global and local versions
Tinker Code - 2012-09-08 00:39:01

Hi all Closing a mesh has never been a trivial task, many research has been spent and as a result several approaches exists, with advantages and disadvantages, the price we have to pay for an unlimited complex world is that nothing is perfect but that is amazing in its own way too! Back to subject, [...]

Blender 20 Years Ago: Traces
BlenderNation - 2012-09-07 18:00:15

Before there was Blender, there was Traces. Ton managed to fire up his old Silicon Graphics workstation at the Blender Institute this week and give a demonstration. The similarity to Blender 2.49 is amazing! You’ll be able to try it … Continue reading →

Dream BIG
BlenderNation - 2012-09-07 14:00:10

By David McSween. David writes: “Kids can be annoying, they allways get under your feet. They should go outside and play… shouldn’t they?” I have been working on and off to complete this short film, before my kids grow up … Continue reading →

Snail
BlenderNation - 2012-09-07 12:00:42

By Stock. Stock writes: Heeey, I’m newbie on this forum, i want to show You some of my Blender 3D scenes and animations. All constructive critics are welcome : ) Cheers! Link BlenderArtists Thread Stock’s website

Blender Wins 3D World CG ‘Software Update’ Award 2012
BlenderNation - 2012-09-07 10:00:24

Blender has won the 3D World CG ‘Software Update’ Award 2012. As far as I can tell, there’s no prize attached to this other than the honor of being recognized by the industry. About...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Sketchfab PRO offers increased storage space
BlenderNation - 2012-09-07 07:26:35

3D File embedding service Sketchfab now offers paid ‘Pro’ and ‘Business’ versions that offers larger storage space and hosting of larger individual files, among other things....

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

PaintHoles tool and Shell command
Tinker Code - 2012-09-06 21:29:27

PaintHoles is a LC based new tool that allows to accurately draw and paint holes over surface meshes, and used in combination with the new Shell command, a missing feature, allows interesting sculpting possibilities Hope you like it! EDIT: OOOOOPS!!!!!!!!!   ,Extract as Skin tool in the VoxTree perform the same action as an artist [...]

Assassin’s Craft III – E3 Cinematic Trailer
BlenderNation - 2012-09-06 14:00:45

Avemagnadude is back with another awesome mashup – this time Minecraft and Assassin’s Creed 3. Also check out Battlecraft 3 and Team Fortress 2 – Meet the Pyro. I was wondering about the person behind these videos so I asked … Continue reading →

A small but nice addition
Tinker Code - 2012-09-06 12:59:02

Hi! Here’s a small addition to VoxLayer tool: Invert… it does, well, what it says Another rough test

Part II is Up! Composition
Fax on Blender - 2012-09-06 11:09:41

Following up on my previous tutorial for BlenderCookie.com, the second part of the series is now available. In it I start talking about Composition and cover simple tips on Framing your images and a couple of important principles of design (Balance and Contrast).

Tristan Lock Modelling Reel
BlenderNation - 2012-09-06 10:00:42

All modeling done in Blender by Tristan Lock. Tristan writes: Did you do the animation also? No animation. I did a little bit of texturing and lighting in some shots. But nothing worth pointing out. What was used for the … Continue reading →

Belgium: 16-part Blender Workshop
BlenderNation - 2012-09-06 05:15:13

A 16-part workshop for beginners for only €60 in De Panne, Belgium. @l@in writes: One semester (sept – jan) of Blender lessons! Next week a course of 16 lessons for Blender is starting at the Cervo...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Interview: Francesco Siddi from Tears of Steel
BlenderNation - 2012-09-05 18:00:54

BlenderDiplom interviews Francesco Siddi about his work on ‘Tears of Steel’. Gottfried Hofmann writes: Francesco Siddi was 3D artist and animator for the upcoming Open Movie “Tears of Steel”. He is also in charge of the project’s website and created the … Continue reading →

Review: Venoms Lab 2 – Training DVD
BlenderNation - 2012-09-05 14:00:05

Terry Wallwork reviews Pablo Vazquez’s latest training DVD. Terry writes: I recently got myself a copy of Pablo Vazquez’s “Venoms Lab 2″ DVD, and since I had some spare time I decided to give it a look and see what … Continue reading →

Kid Dances on Roof Top (Camera Tracking)
BlenderNation - 2012-09-05 09:15:15

Ready for a good laugh? All fake, of course ;-) Blenderfan93 writes: Just our everyday goofing off….. Video Effects All done with Blender 2.63

Blender 2D: Growing Plant
BlenderNation - 2012-09-05 09:14:09

Albinal shows the creation of this growing 2D plant. There’s no explanation, but the process is straightforward enough:

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Curiositas
BlenderNation - 2012-09-05 07:23:03

By Paulo Cristóvão. Paulo writes: Hi all. I finaly finish this short animation developed over the course of 1 year, at home in my spare time with blender 3D. It’s a gag about curiosity… Hope you like it :) Cheers

Blender Add-on ‘BreakPoint 2.0′ Released
BlenderNation - 2012-09-04 22:00:31

A new tool for Blender Python development. Christopher Barrett writes: Good Spirit Graphics has released an update to the ‘BreakPoint’ ‘addon’ for the software package ‘Blender.’ This tool now has...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

New Citizen Resource Week Giveaway at Concept Cookie
ThruDreamsgate's Blog - 2012-09-04 19:06:38

Tim is spoiling us again with a whole week of resource giveaways. The first Resource Week Giveaway contained some seriously fun and useful stuff for studying and improving your concept art. This 2nd Resource Week Giveaway is going to focus on anatomy. Something we should all be practicing. Today’s resource is legs, which goes very [...]

Scribe
BlenderNation - 2012-09-04 14:00:35

By Malefic.Max. Malefic.Max writes: This work is 3d-remake of Keith Tompson’s “Scribe” work. Comments are welcomed. Link BlenderArtists Thread

Free download of a bathroom scene for Blender Cycles
Blender 3D Architect - 2012-09-04 13:54:44

One of the best ways to learn something related to rendering or lighting scenes in 3d is by reverse engineering. I just love to open the source files of a project made by other artists and try to analyze and find out how that particular project was made. And for... Related posts:

1. Free download of physically based metals for Cycles One of the best places to find references for Blender...
2. Rendering a bedroom with Blender Cycles In the near future we will have a great addition...
3. Another comparison between Cycles, YafaRay and Blender Internal render Here is another study comparing the results of a render...

Tutorial: Mastering Lighting
BlenderNation - 2012-09-04 10:00:57

In this videotutorial, Blender Guru Andrew Price focuses on lighting techniques. Andrew Price writes: I created the tutorial in an attempt to demystify the topic of lighting and break it down into...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Cycles Dispersion Glass Shader
BlenderNation - 2012-09-04 08:27:17

A great looking glass setup for Cycles. Harry Collis writes: This glass shader is based on Kirado’s technique to simulate dispersion in cycles. I wanted to make a version that could be applied...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

BlenderArt Magazine Issue #38 Available
Reyn's Blog - 2012-09-04 01:59:00

Issue #38 ('Power of Compositing') of the BlenderArt Mag is now available for everyone to feast on! http://blenderart.org/2012/08/31/blenderart-mag-issue-38-now-available/ Read on and happy blending! ^_^ -Reyn

Deadlines, deadlines…
Morevna Project - 2012-09-03 16:05:33

( читать по-русски | Russian translation )

This weekly report I will start from an announcement that as of September 1st our vectorization “competition” is over.

And here’s the final results:

• Jcome: 26
• LoboZamora: 17
• Pixelgeek: 4
• Animtim: 3

It’s obvious that absolute leader in that competition is Jcome! Congratulations! ^__^

The vectorization competition was started on July 22 and finished on September 1st. During that period the community successfully vectorized the amount of 30 keyframes. It is a really significant help for the project. The results of such community involvement are evaluated by me as a big success and valuable experience. We plan to continue extending and improving such practices as part of our future activities.

My big thanks to all participants and congratulations to the winner!

_____________

While the vectorization call is over, the call for soldier models is still open and we received another submission from Marco Antonio Real Adame (Chotio Productions. Here it is:

Now Marco is willing to proceed with animating this one in the same way as he did for previous model.

_____________

…And I guess many of you remember that the 1st of September is also a deadline for our “Vectorization and Tweening” stages. Sad news here – we didn’t managed to finish everything in time. The current status can be found on the image below. As you can see there is still few major shots pending, as well as some minor works.

We hope to finish everything on this week and proceed to the next stage as soon as possible.

That’s all for today. Let’s keep working hard!

Gimp 2.8 for OSX Released
BlenderNation - 2012-09-03 10:00:55

I’ve waited for this for YEARS: the Gimp is now finally available as a native OSX app! (Before, it was a clunky X-11 implementation). Even though most of the windows are non-standard and look a little awkward, this is a … Continue reading →

Developer Meeting Notes, September 2, 2012
BlenderNation - 2012-09-03 07:32:28

Development updates! Thomas Dinges writes: Here’s the notes of today’s meeting in irc.freenode.net, #blendercoders: 1) Upcoming Blender 2.64 release status Bug tracker at 308 open bugs, fixes welcome. Sergey will finish up Open Color IO work and merge to trunk … Continue reading →

Book review: Troubled by Scott Nicholson
ThruDreamsgate's Blog - 2012-09-01 19:23:40

I love Scott’s books, things are never as they first seem. A young boy arrives at a group home for children where strange experiments are being conducted on the children and it would appear the ghosts of former residents of the home are being affected as well. Troubled is an excellent title for this story [...]

Hello World!
Tinker Code - 2012-09-01 12:40:51

Hi everyone! I’m back again on Kiev!!!!! I have many good news and things to tell from this 8 offline months in cuba and hopefully many things to share, this is just a quick post because I still need to update myself and put an order on all the things I have left here! I’m [...]

Seattle User Meeting, September 1st.
BlenderNation - 2012-08-31 22:00:06

Blenderheads in Seattle are meeting on September 1st. Oscar Baechler writes: After our break in August, it’s time for another fine Seabug to commence! Saturday, September 1st at the AIS North campus, room 102 (subject to change), from 2 to … Continue reading →

Blenderart Mag Issue #38 now available
ThruDreamsgate's Blog - 2012-08-31 21:02:51

Welcome to Issue #38, “Power of Compositing“ Compositing can be a powerful tool in your artistic arsenal. It is a huge time saver for rendering and allows you a greater degree of control over your final result. In this issue we take a look at some great uses for Blender’s built in node compositor. So [...]

Blenderart Mag Issue #38 now available
BlenderArt Magazine - 2012-08-31 21:02:45

Welcome to Issue #38, “Power of Compositing”

Compositing can be a powerful tool in your artistic arsenal. It is a huge time saver for rendering and allows you a greater degree of control over your final result. In this issue we take a look at some great uses for Blender’s built in node compositor.

So grab your copy today. Also be sure to check out our gallery of wonderful images submitted by very talented members of our community.

Table of Contents:

• Big Bang Compositing
• Optimizing Production Workflow Using a Lightgroup Approach in Blender
• Stained the Game
• A Logo Animation
• A Closeup Potrait
• Create your own video game

And Lot More…

Reminder: Submissions for issue #40 due October 5^th,

Call for Content #40

Aftermath
Blender Minutes - 2012-08-31 17:52:58

And I have again reason to open my celebration bottle of Ardbeg Single Malt. Now after almost 2 months of the release of Ara’s Tale, the movie and it’s production is again creating some fuzz.

Soon after the release of Ara’s Tale, I was approached by Ian Hall from the Foundry, who asked me, if I was interested to do a case study for Mari.

I was interested

Now, this week the article was first featured as production focus on the main site of cgsociety.org. This came as a very pleasant surprise to me.

And today the case study itself is published on Mari’s website. It is an incredible feeling to see one’s project listed on the same page with those huge blockbusters as Avatar, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Hugo …

The aftermath will last be a bit longer though, as I am submitting the movie to several film festivals and hope to get it accepted at at least a few ones. The first one will be the Suzanne Animation Festival at the Blender Conference 2012, where I plan to go there this year.

And there is still work to be done on the making-of , which will be shown together with the movie at a local cinema ( Leokino in Innsbruck) at 30th September.

These are still interesting times, but a lot quieter now than during production …

And then it will be time to let go and turn towards new projects.

Blender Conference: last day with 10% discount
Blender3d.org: Latest News - 2012-08-31 13:29:00

Get your ticket now for the the 2012 Conference, celebrating 10 years of Open Source Blender.

Blender Java Source Code Released
BlenderNation - 2012-08-31 10:00:06

Jason LaDere reports on the progress of his Blender Java port. Jason LaDere writes: Blender Java is back and the source code is now available. A Google code project has been created and we are...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

’3D Portrait of my Niece’
BlenderNation - 2012-08-31 05:50:49

By David Zaxis. David writes: I focused this animation test around realism. I still have a ways to go, but its close enough for me to consider done. :) I photographed my niece (360 degrees) and used 123d Catch to … Continue reading →

Mastering Lighting
Blender Guru - 2012-08-30 18:45:25

The Variable Cross
BlenderNation - 2012-08-30 07:38:26

Dolf Veenvliet [Macouno] has created another web-based interactive gadget. This time, you can configure your own piece of jewellery and have it 3D printed in silver. Dolf writes: The ShapeWright.com website has had a new Blender based item added… The Variable … Continue reading →

Model: Austin Mini Cooper S
BlenderNation - 2012-08-29 06:00:17

By Jaxy Jaxy writes: This is a model of the mini cooper i made in my free time. i am still new to blender and use it often….. this is my first upload ever so if there is any problem … Continue reading →

Probability
Reyn's Blog - 2012-08-29 02:03:00

(click to enlarge) “Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.” -Dale Carnegie Made with: Blender 2.63 and GIMP Rendered with: Cycles BlenderArtists thread: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?264975-Probability Texture references: flickr users: David Wright, Raphael Quinet

Process to Go – Pandeia Episode 20
processdiary.com - 2012-08-29 01:37:48

Amazing – on a break, and yet I can’t miss an opportunity to record should it come up!

Just a general chat on progress: Chapter 3 script is nearly completely outlined. I’m re-drafting key scenes, and some have been re-drafted five or six times. The redrafts are worth it, tho.

During this process, I came up with a new character for a future chapter:

I’ve got an idea for some names, but was wondering if I should create another contest? This time, I’ll be creating some original art to give away, and the winner gets to have their chosen name in the comic!

Just one month to go, and I need to have the next couple of chapters scripted. Hoping I can jump onto 4 soon.

Download audio file (TPD_P2G_PanE20.mp3)

Suzanne Animation Festival Submissions | BlenderNation
ThruDreamsgate's Blog - 2012-08-28 16:19:13

Suzanne Animation Festival Submissions | BlenderNation. Its that time again, get your animation submissions ready for the Suzanne Festival.

Suzanne Animation Festival Submissions
BlenderNation - 2012-08-28 16:01:51

It’s time to submit your animation work for this year’s Suzanne Animation Festival! Ton Roosendaal writes: “De Balie” has a real cinema with excellent projection facilities....

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Blender 2.5 ~ 2.6 Showreel
BlenderNation - 2012-08-28 14:00:24

A promo video by AcAnimate. AcAnimate writes: Behold, the awesome powers of Blender! I made this showreel mostly to show the incredible powers of blender! I really like this video, even if it’s a little heavy on the fluids. Also, … Continue reading →

Shoe Product Creation Tutorial Series
BlenderNation - 2012-08-28 10:00:16

Blender Cookie presents a three-part videotutorial by Claas Kuhnen on modeling, texturing and rendering a shoe. Watch the full series.  

The Butcher
BlenderNation - 2012-08-28 07:36:05

By Sergio Cajazeiras. Sergio writes: The Butcher Inspired by the character Butcher, game Diablo. All making in Blender3D Modeling, sculpt, UV,  textures and render.

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Thank you, BlenderNews.org!
Reyn's Blog - 2012-08-28 07:01:00

Thank you so much to BlenderNews.org for featuring my work 'Lost in Stereo' as the Render of the Week awardee. It's such an honor and I'm very very humbled and inspired. For more info, please head over to the following link http://blendernews.org/xe/Feature_Articles/2209 Thanks for reading. :) -Reyn

2012-Aug-27 Photos
Reyn's Blog - 2012-08-28 02:16:00

It's been awhile since I last did this. And I can tell, you it feels great when you finally get the opportunity to do what you love again. (click to enlarge) (click to enlarge) (click to enlarge) (click to enlarge) Thanks so much for viewing! :) -Reyn

Weekly progress
Morevna Project - 2012-08-27 16:47:21

( читать по-русски | Russian translation )

Hello, my dear reader! It’s only a few days left before the 1st of September, which is not only the Knowledge Day (in Russia), but also is a deadline for our “Vectorization and Tweening” stage. We are working very hard to get everything done, but looks like we are going to get an extra week to have everything finished. On the other hand, we are ahead of schedule with 3D works, which is good. The rest of September will be dedicated to  backgrounds painting and 3D works, as planned.

Few words about our  community call for soldiers models. For some reason it is not gained much popularity, but we got a few interesting submissions. One of them is made by Marco Antonio Real Adame was mentioned in one of my previous reports. But besides making soldier variation, Marco decided to go for second stage and created an animation for it, which will be used in shot 07. Here it is:

Due to lack of submissions for soldiers community call we have analyzed our schedule and decided to extend the deadline until the September 20th.  Everyone who wants to have some fun with soldiers and get the mention in the credits is welcome to participate!

And of course, here’s the usual statistics for the vectorization call:

• Jcome: 26
• Pixelgeek: 4
• Animtim: 3
• LoboZamora: 14

That’s all for today, we are getting back to work. Have a great week!

Blender Conference: Call for Papers Deadline
BlenderNation - 2012-08-27 15:22:27

Reminder: the deadline for the Blender Conference call for papers is August 30th. If you’d like to speak, be sure to send in your talk in time!

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Rendering Contours with Nodes
BlenderNation - 2012-08-27 14:00:42

Daniel Kreuter demonstrates how to set up contour rendering. Daniel Kreuter writes: Rendering contours in Blender had always been kind of a challenge for me because there are no tools for this...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Sapling Tree Generator Tutorial
ThruDreamsgate's Blog - 2012-08-27 12:58:22

Ever wondered what all those settings in the Sapling Generator add-on were for? Well wonder no more.  Peter Baumann (graytrace) wrote a 41 page pdf explaining it all in depth for us. You can download the pdf at the following link: BuildingTreesWithBlender_02b I think it is time to model a forest, or at the very [...]

Using an Android Phone as a Virtual Camera
BlenderNation - 2012-08-27 12:04:53

Michael Gschwandtner uses an Android phone to control a Blender camera in real time in this proof of concept. Michael writes: This video shows a proof of concept implementation of an Android app and a Blender addon that allows you … Continue reading →

Developer Meeting Notes, August 26, 2012
BlenderNation - 2012-08-27 08:07:58

OpenCL is still causing headaches.. Thomas Dinges writes: Hi all, Here’s the notes of today’s meeting in irc.freenode.net, #blendercoders: 1) Upcoming Blender 2.64 release status Sergey Sharybin and Campbell Barton will work on the bug tracker when they are back … Continue reading →

graphicall: @carlosdesa Upgraded carloshenrique! Gracias! :)
Twitter / graphicall - 2012-08-27 06:22:45

graphicall: @carlosdesa Upgraded carloshenrique! Gracias! :)

There’s an app for that…
ThruDreamsgate's Blog - 2012-08-26 17:49:26

I think I have become an app junkie. It totally amuses me to see the number of available apps for all our “beloved can’t leave home without them” devices. And I seriously have a very active, all be it, odd imagination. So it is more than cool to be thinking one of my odd random [...]

Node Editor Copy & Paste
BlenderNation - 2012-08-24 18:00:26

A cool new feature by Lukas and Campbell. Thanks guys! Boris writes: Most of your readers are likely also reading the Project Mango blog, but they had an interesting piece of news a few days ago: Copy+Pasting in the node … Continue reading →

[violence] Mission Of Crisis
BlenderNation - 2012-08-24 14:00:16

A cool game intro by congcong009. congcong009 writes: I’m happy to release my new animation for our studio’s new game: mission of crisis. The game is a strategy game and you will control soldiers to kill all incoming zombies. Hope you … Continue reading →

Blooming Rose
BlenderNation - 2012-08-24 10:00:09

By Josh. Josh writes: Hey guys, This is an animation of a rose blooming I made in blender. It was rendered in Cycles at 100 passes per frame (about 2 minutes). The total render time was around 8 hours. The whole animation … Continue reading →

Improving Blender Renders with Photography Techniques
BlenderNation - 2012-08-24 06:00:47

Learn how to apply classic photography techniques to improve your Blender work with this videotutorial by Blender Cookie Tiago Nunes writes: This Blender tutorial covers simple notions photographers always consider while taking pictures of their subject, but which are often … Continue reading →

Interview With Sunil Chavan
BlenderNation - 2012-08-23 19:30:30

Alan Brito from Blender 3D Architect interviews Sunil Chavan. Sunil writes: Hello everybody. My name is Sunil Chavan and I am from India. I learned 3D by myself. It took me about a year to acquire the basic knowledge and … Continue reading →

Gnome Subtitle Editor for reviews!
Tube - Epic Production Notes - 2012-08-23 18:38:48

As we are steadily pushing through to finish animation, Thomas has been creating rough mockups of the sound design, so we can iterate early and come to some conclusions before the final minute. Each time, we discuss some things about the sound, how to improve it, etc.

This time, I was getting annoyed going back and forth between a text editor and blender- clicking on one and then the other (focus follows mouse would be much, much better here!) and different hotkeys etc. Plus, text in a text editor requires me to estimate the frame/time of the note each time.

Then I had a little brainwave and downloaded gnome subtitle editor, and writing my comments as subtitles. It goes much smoother now and is a nice tip for teams who need to give feedback on videos. It’s also possible to use blender, but there the workflow would be a bit more tedious with markers (though grease pencil in the sequencer- if grease pencil could be used to display text as well as drawing, and could be rendered would be even better for me)

so here’s a little screenie in action. I paused it at a familiar shot so I wouldn’t show spoilers…

there’s actually many choices here – you can use video editors or blender (but then you have to render) or any number of subtitle editors. I just thought it was a neat use of something for the (wrong?) purpose.

Review: Roland Hess – Blender Production
BlenderNation - 2012-08-23 18:00:01

Terry Wallwork reviews Roland Hess’s new book “Blender Production – Creating Short Animations From Start To Finish“. Terry Wallwork writes: I was recently sent Roland Hess’s new Blender book “Blender Production – Creating Short Animations From Start To Finish”. As … Continue reading →

Monster Rig
BlenderNation - 2012-08-23 14:00:38

By Siarhei Chekolian. Siarhei writes: Feel free to use this rig for educational and commercial purpose as long as you give credits to us. Also i am giving away animations for this monster. Use it only for non-commercial work. You can … Continue reading →

Measuring Tornado Intensity Using Blender
BlenderNation - 2012-08-23 09:00:01

An interesting grassroots-science application of Blender’s motion tracker by Ian Elsner. Ian writes: It’s difficult to precisely measure tornado wind speed without actually going inside a tornado. Armed with Blender’s new motion tracking features, I attempt to fix that.

Blender Basics Tutorial Book Has a New Site
BlenderNation - 2012-08-23 06:00:08

Quick update: the popular ‘Blender Basics’ book has moved to another location. Jim Chronister writes: For those that have looked for the Blender Basics Tutorial Book over the past few weeks, the link has been broken. The Central Dauphin School … Continue reading →

Competition: Movie Moments
BlenderNation - 2012-08-22 19:44:40

Blender Guru has announced a new competition. Andrew Price writes: There’s been some great movies released recently. So I thought it would be fun to see what the blender community could come up with in terms of fan art. The … Continue reading →

Beats headphone + DJ mixer
BlenderNation - 2012-08-22 18:00:03

By Paulo Ricardo S. Ribeiro (Blender Internal renderer).

sculpt_startup.blend
thisroomthatikeep - 2012-08-22 16:58:00


Everything should happen in the 3D View

Following what I said in my UI proposal some time ago, and with Dyntopo having its options in the Tool Shelf, I've made some adjustments to my default Sculpt layout.
Only the 3D View with an open Tool Shelf is needed to start sculpting now, removing even more unnecessary choices and making access to Sculpt Mode in Blender easier.


Ctrl+UpArrow shows the full layout which contains the 3D View, an Outliner set to 'visible layers', and the Properties window.


With this layout you can sculpt various objects without having to leave Sculpt Mode, selecting them from the Outliner.

Here's a demo video of a few objects sculpted with Dyntopo and the current layout:


We could switch a few more things to the 3D View to make the two extra windows redundant.

Matcap or Material assignment.
In past GSOC projects, a Matcap selector was coded and added to the Properties panel of the 3D View. While I liked it, and it was quite handy for sculpting, it could have been a bit more flexible, allowing to assign a different matcap to each object for example, or even using materials instead of matcaps.

Selection.
Paweł Łyczkowski proposed in a recent mail to bf-funboard to use Ctrl+Shift+Click (or some other combination of keys) for switching between objects regardless of the mode you're in, that could be a good solution.


Changes from Blender default settings:

Default Cube with three levels of subdivision already applied.
Lamp and Camera moved to a hidden layer.
Display set to 'Only Render'.

Book Review: Blender 3d Basics by Gordon C. Fisher
ThruDreamsgate's Blog - 2012-08-22 16:46:56

I recently received a e-copy of Blender 3d Basics from Packt Publishing and was asked to give it a read and tell everyone what I thought of it. I am going to look at three different aspects of Blender 3d Basics. Content, Formatting/Layout and my Overall Impression of the book. So, let’s get to it. [...]

New BlenderCookie Tutorial, By Me
Fax on Blender - 2012-08-22 14:07:05

Hey guys! Just to let you know that BlenderCookie.com just published a tutorial I authored on how to improve your renders by applying simple photography notions. It covers why you should always play with the focal length before settling with your camera position, other things that influence the Depth of Field aside from the aperture […]

Mini Giant
BlenderNation - 2012-08-22 13:00:18

By Endre Barath. Endre writes: This is a test anim, using lowpoly game assets and a bad rigged giant character. :) Render time: 30 secs per frame on a dual core 3GHz CPU! It can run in the game engine, … Continue reading →

NuremBUG: Saturday 25th of August in Nuremberg, Germany
BlenderNation - 2012-08-22 09:00:19

Blenderheads in Nuremberg, Germany are meeting this Saturday. Gottfried Hofmann writes: Hello Blender community, the Nuremberg Blender User Group (NuremBUG) is meeting once again! Party starts on Saturday the 25th of August 2012! Meet fellow Blenderheads from the Nuremberg area … Continue reading →

Twenty-four
Reyn's Blog - 2012-08-22 07:01:00

(click to enlarge) My birthday gift to the love of my life and my bestfriend, Carla. This is a cartoonified version of her and I'm hoping I'm successful with that. ;) Made with: Blender 2.63 and GIMP Rendered with: Cycles Screenshot: (click to enlarge) Thanks for viewing! :)  -Reyn

BlenderCourse Basics V2, a free 120 pages e-book
BlenderNation - 2012-08-22 06:00:16

BlenderCourse have updated their extensive free Blender e-book for beginners. Bas van Dijk writes: BlenderCourse.com has released BlenderCourse Basics V2, a free PDF e-book which teaches you the basics of Blender 3D. More than 120 pages offer you a step-by-step … Continue reading →

Process to Go – Pandeia Episode 19
processdiary.com - 2012-08-22 01:16:51

On our way to a local collectibles fair, I decided to put on the recorder, pick up my tabling friend, Daniel De Lafoix, and chat about printing, producing indie comics, and what we might expect the day to bring.

SPOILER ALERT: Sales weren’t great, but the overall experience was encouraging. The collectors were used to old stuff; were looking for bargains and nostalgia, and so seeing independent new stuff at shelf price must have seemed a bit unusual.

We’re keen to try it out again in November – the table cost was small ($75 for 6ft table) the day was short, and apparently, November is much bigger. So I can’t pass judgement on one experience.

Daniel’s own title, Morlok, has just started. Also being a new dad, and running his own business, he finds little time to work on new stuff, but he is aiming to get issues 2 and 3 out by next Supanova. You can bookmark the website now: http://morlokcomic.com/ and stay tuned for updates. If you like historical supernatural horror/thrillers, this is a comic for you.

PS: Thanks to Nathan, Tara and Sorab for swinging by the table and saying hi. It was so nice to see some familiar faces!

Download audio file (TPD_P2G_PanE19.mp3)

Legacy
BlenderNation - 2012-08-21 22:00:28

By Tamás Török. Tamás writes: Hi! After my Leopard my next target was a tiger. I plan a nature image with the tiger but at first I wanted an image like this with a message.

Indianapolis August BUG meetup, August 23
BlenderNation - 2012-08-21 20:21:42

Blenderheads in Indianapolis are meeting this Thursday. Nicholas Rishel writes: Indianapolis Blender users are once again meeting up on the 23rd of August, featuring the presentation “Gingerbread in Space!”. From the presenter Joel Fant, we will be presenting, “An overview … Continue reading →

Luigi the Mad Cook
BlenderNation - 2012-08-21 18:00:06

By Fishsnack. Fishshnack writes: Hi BlenderArtists this is my latest project. It’s for the German blendpolis community challenge “Center of Power”. It was a Cycle challenge, so we were just allowed to use Cycle for rendering. It last 3 weeks … Continue reading →

Blender / Arduino LED Control
BlenderNation - 2012-08-21 14:00:07

One of the more surprising news items this week :) Thomas Eldredge writes: This is my first step in using Blender as a lighting design/control tool. For now it’s just USB/serial interface but over time I plan to integrate DMX/Artnet … Continue reading →

Interview with Sunil Chavan from pixel3d
Blender 3D Architect - 2012-08-21 13:33:16

Here I am back with another great article related to the use of Blender as a tool for architectural visualization. Today I will post an interview with a really talented artist from the YafaRay user forums. His nickname there is sc20 and he posts some really nice architectural renders made... Related posts:

1. Another comparison between Cycles, YafaRay and Blender Internal render Here is another study comparing the results of a render...
2. Quick visualization with Blender and YafaRay for architecture Even with the entire buzz around Blender Cycles these days,...
3. Rendering a bathroom with Blender and YafaRay Even with the release of Blender 2.6 and the option...

Modifier Contest Winners
BlenderNation - 2012-08-21 10:00:23

BlenderDiplom have announced the winners of their Modifier Contest.

Cartoons on Major Dutch News Site Made in Blender
BlenderNation - 2012-08-21 06:04:08

Dutch designer Metin Seven creates 3D cartoons for the large Dutch news site Nu.nl. He recently switched to Blender, and I talked to him about his work. Can you introduce yourself? My name is Metin Seven, a.k.a. Sevensheaven. I’m a … Continue reading →

Craniofacial Prosthesis with InVesalius and Blender
BlenderNation - 2012-08-20 18:00:34

Cicero Moraes uses 3D CT-Scan data and Blender to model a medical prosthesis. Cicero writes: Our Blender is a tool for artists, maybe not for scientists. But, it is possible create prosthesis with a help of other free software like … Continue reading →

How to Be a Good Member of the Blender Community
BlenderNation - 2012-08-20 14:00:42

Jonathan Williamson has written a good opinion article on the negative effects of Blender fanboyism. Jonathan writes: In short, the Blender community has a lot to be proud of. However, the community has one big downfall, it’s users. The majority … Continue reading →

Weekly progress
Morevna Project - 2012-08-20 12:32:50

( читать по-русски | Russian translation )

Do you hear the ground trembling? Yes, the release date of the Demo is approaching. The critical mass have been reached and we suddenly made significant a break through.

Can you believe? For main characters it’s less than 10 shots left to do!  All the rest is just background characters, 3d models and polishing. Of course that’s a lot of work too, but hey, how sweet that feels when you see something suddenly turns from random  pieces into solid whole!

The vectorization competition is going on and it’s a big help for us. Here’s the current statistics:

• Jcome: 20
• Pixelgeek: 4
• Animtim: 3
• LoboZamora: 13

Good new for all participants – we have no more foot closeups to vectorize! I can imagine how much you all “liked” such tasks. ^__^

When we working on Morevna Project we always learning. And everytime when we find new trick, new workflow or new effect – we always feel happy. The discovery of the last week was the Luminance blend method for shadows. Previously we used Onto blend method, but this week we have found that Luminance can give a much better look in many cases. Compare yourself:

Unfortunately, for dark colors Luminance gives a it weird results. Right now we are combining both methods, depending on the situation, butI’m starting to think on creating the new blend method which will combine the best of two worlds. Still, i can’t tell for sure if that possible…

And yes, this week we have an exceptional number of screenshots to show. Enjoy!

Change HIV story – campaign video
BlenderNation - 2012-08-20 12:00:25

By Miklós Falvay. Miklós Falvay writes: Almost a year ago I posted here my camera mapping scenes created for the documentary Motalko. It was great to read your comments and congratulations, thank you for everyone. This summer I was asked by … Continue reading →

Model: Miki
BlenderNation - 2012-08-20 10:00:55

By kaisaki1342. kaisaki1342 writes: Miki is a 3d Anime Style Model my fourth of this kind. This is a 3d model based on another person character design. This character design is not mine but the model is created by me. … Continue reading →

Developer Meeting Notes, August 19, 2012
BlenderNation - 2012-08-20 07:11:43

Bug tracker count is on the rise – the beast is untameable! Still, BCon4 (release candidates) is planned for early september. Ton Roosendaal writes: Here’s the notes of today’s meeting in irc.freenode.net, #blendercoders: 1) Upcoming Blender 2.64 release status Bug … Continue reading →

Ivan and Morevna models – Community call results
Morevna Project - 2012-08-19 17:30:16

OK, people, today we are ready to announce the results of our community call for Ivan and Morevna models.

One month passed by since we published the call and during that period many artists worked to create the models of the two main characters. It was an exciting for me to meet so many enthusiastic people and see everyone was working so hard to deliver the best results. But in we end we can accept only one model of Ivan and only one model of Morevna. So, on August 15th we got final submissions and defined the models to be used in production.

Our choice

Our choice is a work by Linil Komban and Somnath Karande. They worked together as team and managed to create both models during the call period! Here they are:

Marya Morevna

Ivan Tsarevich

Without a doubt I can say that it was a big luck to have Linil and Somnath participating in the call – they have worked with an awesome speed, staying in touch during the whole period and highly responsive to fixing every issue. I really like the way they work and will be happy to collaborate with them again.

By the way, the latest versions of Ivan and Morevna models are always available in our repository under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

Honorable mentions

Although the main two models are chosen, I want to mention two other awesome submissions, that really deserve to get their fame too:

Ivan by Erik Castillo Download (3.1 Mb)

Morevna by Eric Lopez Download (3.2 Mb)

Note: All works provided under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

What else can I say? It was a great month, full of great discoveries, amazing events and most importantly – with awesome results. My big thanks to all participants – I was happy to work with you all. Thank you! ^__^

What’s next

You could notice that the images of the main models are Freestyle-enabled rendering without any colors. Right now we have draft black-and-white textures – that’s why some lines may look ugly. The next step is to vectorize texture drafts in Synfig and apply the colorcharts. That will make 3D models to inherit the colors from the main colorchart files in the same way as this is done for 2D shots. And Remake will make sure that textures will stay up to date when colorchart is changed.

Also, as you might guess, now we seriously going to migrate for Freestyle-enabled Blender. I need to prepare Freestyle-enabled Blender builds to allow other project participants painlessly install it and build the project sources in the same way as I am.

For standard Blender packages I used to take official binaries from blender.org and bundle them into rpms and debs. But if I want freestyle features, then I need to arrange all compile procedures by myself. That’s going to take some time. (And yes, I can’t use prebuild binaries from graphicall.org, because they have no ffmpeg features enabled). Time to shook the dust from my build scripts. Eh, where are my chroots?

Model: Photo Studio Objects
BlenderNation - 2012-08-19 07:51:18

By nukkio. nukkio writes: some objects from a photo studio, tripods and lights, with basic cycles material. Link Photo Studio Objects (Blend Swap)

How to Be a Good Member of the Blender Community | Blender Cookie
ThruDreamsgate's Blog - 2012-08-18 22:58:57

How to Be a Good Member of the Blender Community | Blender Cookie. Excellent article by Jonathan Williamson on the dangers of “Fanboyism”, and how it affects us as a community.

New Starship Deckplans for the Second Extreme Future Spaceship Guide
Starbright Illustrations (blog) - 2012-08-18 21:14:07

I’ve created another supplement for the Extreme Future role-playing game. These starship deckplans cover four decks of the Seeker-class Exploration Vessel. The image for the vessel is a render of a 3D mesh created for the cover with Blender.

All areas of the spaceship are mapped in detail with descriptions of equipment, systems, and internal spaces (rooms, airlocks, and corridors), and, along with the deckplans, there are tactical maps of each room and corridor. The tactical maps are full-color, to a scale of 1m per square and represent areas such as; crew cabin, droid storage locker, bridge, ready room, sick bay, shuttle bay, observation deck, main airlock, etc, etc, etc.. These tactical maps are intended for use with the Seeker-class spaceship, but they can be used to represent an almost infinite number of similar spaceships, just like dungeon tiles. Full and detailed stats are provided for the Extreme Future game, with notes, allowing the spaceship to be easily converted for use in many other Sci-Fi games, of either space opera, or hard science types.

The new supplement is available from RPG Drivethru, so visit the deckplans download page and take a look.

GSoC BGE Fixup Status Report Week 13
Moguri's Blog - 2012-08-18 08:36:15

Well, this is it, my last report for GSoC 2012:   What did you do this week? I cleaned up the Pre Z code a bit more. For now I’m only doing the Pre Z for GLSL Materials since the goal is to minimize time spent on fragment shaders. However, this means that Multitexture and [...]

MacGyver’s Jeep – Modeling Done
Fax on Blender - 2012-08-17 23:50:36

So remember me talking about the new project I had, modeling and texturing Mac’s Jeep Wrangler? Here’s what I had to say when I just started: (…) it shouldn’t be as hard to model given its mostly blocky structure (it does have lots of details but I noticed the most time-consuming task when modeling a […]

Latest commercial work
sanders3d | digital janitor - 2012-08-16 19:55:00

I was the CG Supervisor for this one, and also the "Particle Monkey". We made 16 small sponsor spots for Toyoto Aygo.



I'm lazy... so the text below is pasted in from http://vfxsverige.com/ :)

Client: Toyota, U.K.Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi, London

Blender Siggraph Showreel 2012
BlenderNation - 2012-08-16 08:57:17

By the Blender Community, edited by Paul Caggegi. Paul writes: The Blender Siggraph Reel for 2012 saw over 140 entries submitted – all quality stuff. After trawling through all the entries, downloading, labeling, compressing and getting the team to select … Continue reading →

Blender SIGGRAPH Reel 2012
Reyn's Blog - 2012-08-16 07:04:00

Hi, everyone! It's here, finally! The Blender SIGGRAPH Reel 2012. This will speak for itself, and needs no further introduction from me. :) -Reyn

Blender SIGGRAPH showreel 2012
processdiary.com - 2012-08-16 02:12:01

I had the honor and the privilege of editing the Blender 2012 showreel of work for SIGGRAPH this year. I jumped aboard an international team which included Mike Pan, Jonathan Williamson, Reynante Martinez and even Ton himself! Our goal was to take submissions from anyone who felt their work was of high enough standard to show Blender’s capabilities in an eye-catching and impressive way.

Jonathan set up a submission form via wufoo, and the call was put out across Blendernation, Facebook, twitter and google+ for people to submit their work via links. Over 140 submissions were entered. As editor, I had the wonderful task of downloading each and every link, often contacting those who’s links didn’t work, or linked to private pages for a resubmission. I tagged and filed them; compressed and uploaded low resolution versions to a shared Dropbox where the team could select the entries they felt wee best.

We tried to be as unbiased as possible (and I think I succeeded there, not looking at names, but rather at content) and in the end, some 24 artists made the cut. Thanks to Hjalti Hjalmarsson, I was able to source a fantastic soundtrack by Ensimi.

Ton allowed us access to the blender FTP to access necessary files, and set up a temporary mailout which we could all subscribe to and communicate about the showreel.

Once all the entries were selected, it took little time to get it together (editing is about 90% dull, boring, organization of files) and i had a first draft rendered out for the team to look at in about an hour. Second draft included some last minute entries, and while I was hoping for an animated logo to be ready in time, I had to made do with the official .eps file to top-and-tail the video.

While I’d love to say it was edited in an Open Source package, I brought all my studio tools to this, so it was done in Final Cut Pro.

Ton and the team loved the reel, and as they were setting up the booth, I received one request from Jonathan to add a credits board, which I quickly did, recompressed, and re-uploaded to the FTP. A short time later, the video was being played at the Blender booth in LA.

I’ll be cross-posting this on Blendernation, and the others will no doubt share the video as well. Of all the entries, these that made showcase really exemplify Blender’s capabilities as a robust, fully-featured 3D software package. I really hope you enjoy this selection out of several fantastic entries.

Next to NASA pitching a car-sized rover at another planet and hitting the mark, this is perhaps the most exciting use of technology ever.

Los Angeles Meetup: August 16
BlenderNation - 2012-08-15 22:00:35

Blender heads in LA are meeting on Thursday, August 16. Sam writes: A couple of guys here in L.A are planning to start a meeting group for the local people so we can share ideas,works,tips or just some laughs in … Continue reading →

Dartstorm
BlenderNation - 2012-08-15 10:00:02

By Nicolas Dussart Nicolas AKA Fathom45 writes: Hi! I made this image for the Blender Clan contest. The model is about 4,000,000 polygons. It was made with Blender 2.63 and Cycles. I’m working on the transformation at this time, I … Continue reading →

Huron Sculpt Timelapse
BlenderNation - 2012-08-15 07:09:00

A timelapse by Max Maurel Max (aka Blackschmoll ) writes: I made a sculpting timelapse video. I wanted to test out the new Dyntopo tools from N. Bishop( thanks to him ) for the sculpt mode.

Wisp
Reyn's Blog - 2012-08-15 02:14:00

Like most all Blender-related stuff, it all started with a Cube. I fired up Blender 2.63, created a few objects, and decided to play around with the Smoke Modifier and a few days later, I realized I was already into it so much I can't stop the test and decided to give it some final feel to it. This is my second (if I can remember well) serious test with Blender's smoke modifier, the first one,

Call for Content: Blenderart Magazine #40
BlenderNation - 2012-08-14 18:00:26

BlenderArt Magazine is looking for content for their new issue, with theme ’3D printing’. Sandra Gilbert writes: It’s time again to start thinking about articles, tutorials and images for Issue # 40 of Blenderart Magazine. The theme for this issue … Continue reading →

Blender fire testing + .blend files
BlenderNation - 2012-08-14 14:00:48

Three good looking fire scenes – a result from MiikaH’s Summer of Code Smoke project. MiikaH writes: Now that Google Summer of Code 2012 is almost over it’s time for heavy testing and final improvements of my Blender smoke project. … Continue reading →

Slowmo video Windows builds available!
BlenderNation - 2012-08-14 10:00:51

SlowmoVideo is a slow motion video editor that allows for slowing down footage by large factors, calculating intermediate frames using optical flow. Initially only available for Linux, there’s now also a Windows version available. CGEffex writes: Some of you probably … Continue reading →

Blender Theme for 3DS Max
BlenderNation - 2012-08-14 07:05:16

Dutch designer and illustrator Metin Seven has created a Blender theme for 3ds max including the familiar layout, color scheme and hotkeys. Metin writes: Blender UI scheme for 3ds Max (latest update: August 13, 2012) Zip archive containing a 3ds … Continue reading →

Mango Pre-Premiere Party: August 28
BlenderNation - 2012-08-13 19:17:43

The Mango Tears of Steel crew is throwing a ‘pre-premiere party’ on the 28th of August in Amsterdam (the real premiere will be online). If you have pre-ordered your DVD, then you’re invited! Check out the blog to see how you … Continue reading →

Weekly progress
Morevna Project - 2012-08-13 17:22:56

( читать по-русски | Russian translation )

What can I say about the last week? Well, we still have a lot of fun with vectorization! The production sheet is slowly clearing up and the amount of white spaces on it is not that depressing anymore. Still it’s not a time for relaxing – we have only 2,5 weeks left for this task. Of course, we keep receiving help from the community and here’s the current stats:

• Jcome: 17
• Pixelgeek: 4
• Animtim: 3
• LoboZamora: 4

Also, there is a lot of work have been done on 3D models. The deadline for Ivan and Morevna community call is approaching and this week on 15th August I’m going to announce the results.

And yes, we have finally announced official release date of the Demo. We defined this date in early March already. It was just almost random – I’ve said to Nikolay: “We’re going to release in November, but maybe it would be good to set particular date?” And then we decided it to be 10th of November. And when the invitation to participate in FSCONS  come up, we suddenly realized that this event concurs with our release date. So, we decided – hey, why not? Let’s get the first screening at the conference in Sweden! And yesterday, after receiving the confirmation of our participation accepted, we were happy to tell aloud about our evil plans. That’s the story.

So, it’s all my news for today, need to get back to work. Have a great week, everyone!

Model: Raspberries
BlenderNation - 2012-08-13 14:50:44

  By Guismo. Guismo writes: Raspberries study in cycles using the array modifier. The first layers are the instances. The first of the second group are the flattened objects (cycles would not...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Eat Sheep – iOS Game Built with Blender and Unity 3D
BlenderNation - 2012-08-13 09:15:57

CG Cookie have created a free iOS game using Blender and Unity 3D. It looks awesome and it’s great fun! CG Cookie writes: We are proud to announce that our Eat Sheep game is now available for...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Reel: Arnaud Travert
BlenderNation - 2012-08-13 06:11:35

See also his stills and video portfolios.

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

graphicall: All http://t.co/WaEAwRAd services should be up and running again! Thanks to moguri fr his assistance!
Twitter / graphicall - 2012-08-13 00:42:47

graphicall: All http://t.co/WaEAwRAd services should be up and running again! Thanks to moguri fr his assistance!

Developer Meeting Notes, August 12, 2012
BlenderNation - 2012-08-12 19:56:12

The bugcount still doesn’t want to go down, but a new testbuild is available for download. Also, next week is the last week of the Google Summer of Code and we have 2 videos of projects. Thomas Dinges writes: Hi … Continue reading →

Demo release date
Morevna Project - 2012-08-12 18:31:45

( читать по-русски | Russian translation )

It’s time for an official announcement.

The Morevna Project Demo will be released on November 10th, 2012.

The release event, as well as the first public screening will take place
at Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit
(Göteborg, Sweden).

Everyone is invited to come.

As part of this event me and Julia Velkova are going to give a talk “Open animation projects: state of the art, problems and perspectives”. Well, in fact, I still need to find funds to cover my travel costs to Sweden. But anyway, release date and place are defined and aren’t going to change. Chances to see you there! I’ll keep you updated. ^__^

P.S. Errr… I guess we need to mock up a good poster about this? ^_^”

Rendering clouds with the Mie phase function
Matt Ebb - 2012-08-12 08:30:45

One of the things I’ve been wanting to investigate more since rendering clouds on Happy Feet 2 is using more physically based phase functions for volume lighting. The volume phase function describes the direction of scattered light relative to the incoming light’s direction – either isotropic (scattering light evenly in all directions), or anisotropic – scattering mostly forward, or mostly back, or some more complicated distribution altogether. Many volumes, such as smoke, are generally pretty isotropic, but clouds have quite a particular scattering behaviour, determined by the size, and distribution of microscopic water droplets that comprise their form. On HF2 we used a combination of two henyey-greenstein distributions, which was good enough for the task at hand, but after spending so long back then researching atmospheric optics, I’ve been curious to try something more realistic.

Antoine Bouthors’ excellent Phd thesis, Realistic rendering of clouds in realtime, spends a few pages on the Mie phase function – a good fit for many types of clouds. Clouds are highly anisotropic – at each scattering event, over 90% of the energy gets scattered in roughly the same direction that it enters (the strong forward peak), which is what gives the characteristic ‘silver lining’ when looking through a cloud towards the sun. Of the remaining energy scattered in other directions, diffraction and interference create some interesting optical effects such as the fogbow, or glory.

As part of Antoine’s work, he used Mieplot to generate scattering data for a general purpose droplet size distribution found in clouds, and published the data online – the relevant files are Mie0.txt and MiePF3.txt. The scattering distributions are divided into two to make it easier to sample – I imagine because the forward peak is so strong, attempting to importance sample it would barely leave any samples in the sideways or backward directions, so it helps to sample the rest of the function independently from the peak, and combine with weighted probabilities. In a traditional lighting pipeline where the phase function is just being used to weight lighting contribution and not sample new scattering vectors, we can ignore this and combine the data into a single set. To verify the results I wrote a little python script using pyglet to add the split data together and graph them on a log scale, as in the thesis – It’s pleasing to see it matches up perfectly. I also normalised the data to sum to 1.0 over the RGB channels.

For rendering in Houdini, the original plan was to copy the data in as a VEX array, and lookup/interpolate the data based on the input angle, but I think I may have hit a limit to the size of arrays VEX lets you define – arrays of a handful of float items worked fine, but using the full 1800 values introduced compilation errors. So as a more portable alternative, I brought the data into blender to generate an 1800 x 1 pixel OpenEXR image containing the scattering values. This is a lot more convenient to look up, and is easy to then reuse in a renderman shader for example. To sample the image using the U coordinate, the angle between light direction and eye direction needs to be fit to a 0-1 range. This is trivial to do in VOPs, replicating:

U = acos(normalize(I) . normalize(L)) / pi … and feeding that into a color map node.

You can download the EXR file here: mie_phase_function.exr
and hip file: cloudphase2.hipnc.zip

Because this phase function is so heavily forward scattering, by default the volume may seem dark from any other angle than directly in front of the light. For best results:

• Set up your scene to be more physically plausible, with a high dynamic range in lighting, viewed through a tone mapping transform (or at least a gamma curve). This way, with enough intensity in your main light, you’ll be able to see the backward and sideways scattered light, even though the light in the strong forward peak will be very intense. The tone mapping should bring the peak back into a more acceptable range while still leaving the other angles visible.
• Render some form of multiple scattering additional to the single scattering, to fill out the overall light in the volume. This can be faked in any number of ways – in Houdini one way could be to add in an additional weak isotropic phase function (higher orders of scattering tend towards isotropic scattering after light has bounced around randomly for a while), perhaps with a blurry deep shadow map, or however you like to fake multiple scattering effects. Even adding in a constant ambient term can help substantially.

Digital Painting Part II
sanders3d | digital janitor - 2012-08-11 22:58:00

I've started a new practice project. I hope I can get it out as I saw it in my head :)

Using colorcharts in Synfig
Morevna Project - 2012-08-11 16:13:40

Here’s a little video I have prepared on how we do coloring using colorcharts in Synfig.

The colorcharts is very cool feature for animation projects – you have all key colors defined in one file and when you change this file, all colors are changed in the whole project. So you can dynamically tweak colors for your characters with a single click.

Colorcharts are natively supported in Synfig through the linking feature. Many people know that you can link parameters in Synfig within one file, but very few know that you can link to parameters from other files. And this is how colorcharts work – we just link all colors to the exported values in another file. See video below for detailed explanation.

Apologies for my English. ^__^

CheBlender 2012: Buenos Aires, Córdoba
BlenderNation - 2012-08-11 11:21:03

The Argentinean Blender Conference ‘CheBlender’ has grown to no less than 5 days, spread over two cities. Martin Eschoyez writes: We are just preparing our meeting, this year to come in...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

galatasaray
Matt Ebb - 2012-08-11 08:15:04

GSoC BGE Fixup Status Report Week 12
Moguri's Blog - 2012-08-11 04:31:11

What did you do this week? While I fixed a couple of bugs, I spent way more time on optimizing this week. I spent some time with AMD’s GPU PerfStudio 2 on an AMD card. After a lot of profiling and toying around, I found that fragment shaders were really slowing down the Necrosys map. [...]

Blender fire testing + .blend files
MiikaHweb blog feed - 2012-08-10 20:00:13

Now that Google Summer of Code 2012 is almost over it's time for heavy testing and final improvements of my Blender smoke project.

This week I have been experimenting with different fire simulation and render setups to find out new ways to improve simulation quality. While testing out new code I also prepared three fire scenes for download so you can start playing with fire too without having to do days worth of experiments. :p

Check out the renders here:



Unfortunately there still isn't a single click "Make awesome fire!" button. Setting up realistic scene still takes lots of tweaking for both simulation and render. However simulating fire in general should be now much easier with these GSoC changes.

Burning Plane

This scene is an extreme example of texture controlled emission. A cloud texture with animated z-offset is used to generate additional turbulence to fire. This gives a huge visual improvement over a plane that emits fire evenly across whole surface.

Download: burning_plane.blend

Burning Sphere

The basic idea of this scene is very similar to previous one. However this time texture is tweaked with a color ramp to emit some fire even from darkest areas of the texture.

Download: burning_sphere.blend

Fire Pillar

This is a very basic scene I used to test high fuel/flame emitter. Notice how I have unticked "Absolute Density" checkbox from flow, making it "additive" instead. This way fuel can smoothly increase to very high amounts creating long lasting tall flames.

Download: fire_pillar.blend


Please note that to use these .blend files you need a Blender "soc-2012-fried_chicken" branch build of r49779 or later. All scenes are also quite heavy so it's better bake the cache. :)

Update: My smoke code has now been merged to Blender trunk. So any trunk revision of r51259 or later will do. :)

Alex Delderfield in Designer Spotlight at Shapeways
BlenderNation - 2012-08-10 10:00:09

Our very own AD-Edge (who used to write for BlenderNation) is featured on the Shapeways homepage this week with his Minecraft models. He talks about the history of his project and how they went viral. My favorite quote: How did … Continue reading →

Digital painting
sanders3d | digital janitor - 2012-08-10 09:58:00

I extended my 3d doodle and started to use it as a reference for a painting. It was a nice try and I'm quite happy with the result.

REVERSION
BlenderNation - 2012-08-10 07:06:23

In the aftermath of a disastrous incident, a biological research facility in the African Congo harbors a dark secret… William writes: The Magic Movie Machine presents REVERSION, the first 11 minute short film from hobbyist writer and director Giancarlo Ng. … Continue reading →

Blender Viewport Optimization
Reyn's Blog - 2012-08-10 02:08:00

Hi, all! Just wanted to share another neat trick to make your 3D Viewport more responsive.  Most useful when you're designing interactive assets and environments (games, walkthroughs, etc.). Often (if using a not-so-high-end machine), during texturing, modeling, or other tasks involving realtime view of textures and shaders via the GLSL shading option on medium to large scenes, we experience a

Call for Content: Blenderart Magazine #40
ThruDreamsgate's Blog - 2012-08-09 18:22:29

It’s time again to start thinking about articles, tutorials and images for Issue # 40 of Blenderart Magazine. The theme for this issue is “3d Printing” With the growing popularity of 3d printing and the lowering cost of both 3d printing services and 3d printers themselves, now is an exciting time to take a closer [...]

Call for Content: Blenderart Magazine #40
BlenderArt Magazine - 2012-08-09 18:20:40

It’s time again to start thinking about articles, tutorials and images for Issue # 40 of Blenderart Magazine.

The theme for this issue is “3d Printing”

With the growing popularity of 3d printing and the lowering cost of both 3d printing services and 3d printers themselves, now is an exciting time to take a closer look at 3d printing and Blender. We are going to take a look at what it is, what it takes to print something in 3d, the services/materials available and some of the more popular 3d printers on the market.

What we are looking for:

• Do you have a 3d printer?
  • What kind?
  • How does it work with blender, what do you need to keep in mind during the design phase
• Do you use a 3d printing service?
  • Which one, what has been your experience,
  • what have you had 3d printed
• Designing for 3d print
  • what do you need to keep in mind
• Using 3d printers for rapid prototyping and product design

*warning: lack of submissions could result in an entire issue of fuzzy bunnies, puffy hearts and a galley filled with random images off my hard drive …. …… goes off to check number and variety of images on my hard drive …. just in case.

Articles

Send in your articles to sandra
Subject: “Article submission Issue # 40 [your article name]“

Gallery Images

As usual you can also submit your best renders based on the theme of the issue. The theme of this issue is “3d Printing”. Please send images of both your 3d model and the actual printed object for comparison. Please note if the entry does not match with the theme it will not be published.

Send in your entries for gallery to gaurav
Subject: “Gallery submission Issue # 40″

Note: Image size should be of 1024x (width) at max.

Last date of submissions October 5, 2012.

Good luck!
Blenderart Team

Blender Podcast Episode 19
BlenderNation - 2012-08-09 18:00:23

Blender Podcast Episode 19 has been released. Thomas Dinges writes: Hey, I visited Amsterdam last week and so Campbell and I interviewed the Mango Open Movie team! Have fun! - Thomas I love this podcast, good job guys! Link Episode … Continue reading →

Ten Awesome Tips for Blender
BlenderNation - 2012-08-09 15:25:31

Alex Telford shares 10 videos with some useful tips. Alex Telford writes: Hi guys! So I have come up with ten awesome tips for blender users to really help speed up your workflow! The official text/video tutorial list is here. … Continue reading →

Blender Foundations: Two Years Later
harkyman.com - 2012-08-09 12:39:52

Just about one year ago, Tiago Nunes finished his trek through Blender Foundations. He worked through the whole book, blogging about his progress along the way. You can read it here. It’s actually neat to follow his development, and I have to say that his style of learning was truly the ideal target for the book: curious and self-motivated.

Anyway, with Blender Foundations just over two years old now, I shot him an email with two questions. First, with a year’s distance on the other side of his learning experience, how well did he feel that material prepared him for his further work using Blender? Second, how well did he feel that the book’s content was holding up against the current Blender version?

You can see his response here.

Process to Go – Pandeia Episode 18
processdiary.com - 2012-08-09 10:46:14

Announcing three winners of the Process Diary social media competition:

Congratulations! I shall be posting out a signed copy of Pandeia Issue 2 to each of you this week.

Download audio file (TPD_P2G_PanE18.mp3)

Good news on the Pandeia front: I’ve found a potential local printer who’s prices are about the same with having prints done by Ka-Blam and shipped to me. The turn-around time is days rather than weeks, so preparing for Supanova means I can potentially be producing three more issues by next June! Which means that Pandeia Book I could be done by end of 2013!

Even though I took on board a couple of small jobs recently (setting up Anthology8; the Blender Siggraph Reel), I have now completed my part in those two projects and can once again focus entirely on Pandeia. This is my goal for the next few months. I want to finish this first story arc and tap into the momentum that is building at the local level so that new fans won’t be disappointed.

Speaking of local momentum: I was kindly invited back to talk sci-fi with the presenters of Kapow! and the episode has just gone live on the channel.

I have a blast hanging out in King’s comics with Sonya, Al and Ray. Ben (who produces the show) is a professional as they come, and his resume reads like a list of “OMG you produced THAT SHOW!? I loved that show!”. Even had a bit of chinwag with the store owner about our mutual favourite sci-fi novel, Hyperion.

I’ve been writing like crazy – outlining the stories for the next few issues, but mostly re-drafting key scenes for issue 3. The biggest hurdle is getting all the points about Marcus Blair out in front of the reader, and this is beginning to mean being choosy about what is revealed now… and what is saved for later. my deadline for writing/concepting is end of September. I aim to have issues 3 and 4 scripted by then, with a view to have issue 5 well on the way.

Finally – I have to take a brief hiatus from the show due to a work commitment, but I’ll be back in early September, hopefully with a bunch of updates and news about Pandeia. Onsite work allows me to work on script and concepts while commuting, and there is a lot of stuff which needs working on, so i’m looking forward to having that time available!

Until then, guys, thanks for listening.

Tumblr, Here I Go!
Reyn's Blog - 2012-08-09 07:01:00

It took me a couple of personal persuasion and repetitive comebacks before, now I have a Tumblr account. http://www.reynante.tumblr.com Nothing much to show now, but hopefully I can get the hang of it. See ya!

Video: Paris Blender Conference (French)
BlenderNation - 2012-08-09 06:00:49

A 2.5 hour video registration of the French Blender Conference last May in Paris. In French, of course. e5dy writes: A full conference/workshop in french (sorry for non-french speakers) 2h35 mounted by CoyHot (François Grassard) This conference was done at … Continue reading →

Videotutorial: Model a single nut with Blender
BlenderNation - 2012-08-08 12:23:17

By Blender360. Blender360 writes: In this video I show a simple way to make a nut or a screw head. With just a few modifications. The advantage of this method is that we can control the Number, of vertices that … Continue reading →

How to Make a Successful Portfolio or Demoreel
Blender Guru - 2012-08-08 12:04:32

Espresso Cup
BlenderNation - 2012-08-08 10:00:48

Edouard Gautier created this espresso cup in Blender. e5dy writes: The ceramic 3D printing interested me since a long time and this summer I’ve decided to pass the gap. I use Blender since 4 years and experienced the 3D printing during … Continue reading →

Cycles + Ocean modifier
BlenderNation - 2012-08-08 06:39:27

A nice ocean setup for Cycles by Joao Yates. You can download the .blend here.

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Warmth
Reyn's Blog - 2012-08-08 04:48:00

(click to enlarge) Shot during my stay in my older brother's residence in Rosales, Pangasinan. -Reyn

Pixar releases OpenSubdiv
Blender to RenderMan - 2012-08-07 16:32:00

In a surprise move recently, Pixar has released open source code called Open Subdiv.

Directly from the website :

OpenSubdiv is a set of open source libraries that implement high performance subdivision surface (subdiv) evaluation on massively parallel CPU and GPU architectures. This codepath is optimized for drawing deforming subdivs with static topology at interactive framerates. The resulting limit surface matches Pixar’s Renderman to numerical precision.

OpenSubdiv is covered by the Microsoft Public License, and is free to use for commercial or non-commercial use. This is the same code that Pixar uses internally for animated film production. Our intent is to encourage high performance accurate subdiv drawing by giving away the “good stuff”.

The source code for OpenSubdiv is located on github and is entering open beta for SIGGRAPH 2012. Feel free to use it and let us know what you think through the github site.

https://github.com/PixarAnimationStudios/OpenSubdiv

Platforms supported: Windows, Linux, limited OSX.

Roller
Vimeo / Blender 3D - 2012-08-07 15:27:04

At the exhibition Gangarten on 3. August 2012 at Einstellungsraum Hamburg I presented amoung other installations an interactive DVD with 12 (very) short videos, mostly animations. This a one of it, made with Blender.

Cast: Malte Steiner

Tags: Blender, animation and 3D

Stab
Vimeo / Blender 3D - 2012-08-07 15:26:44

At the exhibition Gangarten at Einstellungsraum Hamburg I presented amoung other installations an interactive DVD with 12 (very) short videos, mostly animations. This a one of it, made with Blender.

Cast: Malte Steiner

Tags: Blender, 3d and animation

causeway
Matt Ebb - 2012-08-07 09:07:08

Bacon Wrapped Eggs
Dalai Felinto - 2012-08-06 21:52:53

Yummy! This was trending on Google Plus so I decided to give it a go. It’s very simple to do, it looks great and it tastes accordingly. I couldn’t find pre-cooked bacon so I had to pre-heat it before putting the eggs. It’s a bit tricky because I pre-heated them in the muffin molds already, so they started to loose their ’roundness’. Use chopsticks to get them out of the molds

The Blender Network Launches!
BlenderNation - 2012-08-06 19:17:18

I’m proud to announce the arrival of the Blender Network – the official Blender Foundation partnership program for professionals! The Blender Network will support these professionals by...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Blender Network launched!
Blender3d.org: Latest News - 2012-08-06 18:51:00

Today the networking & partnership website for Blender professionals launched at...

Just three more weeks to go!
Tears of Steel - 2012-08-06 18:16:17

Time is flying like crazy, and we only have 3 more weeks to go until pre-premiere.
So we do a little bit of time-travel and go back 1 week in time when we have a whopping 4 weeks left until premiere and do some interviews and random stuff to give you some impressions from the studio.

And now it really is crunchtime!

Weekly progress
Morevna Project - 2012-08-06 17:04:56

( читать по-русски | Russian translation )

Last week was extremely productive – we have finished a few complex shots. Although I still do some vectorization, my main task is to stitch vectorized keyframes together and tween them. Working with such complex shots with a lot of action I can feel my skills growing, I can feel how expands my understanding of timing, I challenge myself to get better results with very few keyframes – and that’s really exciting. I see I can do animation tasks faster than before and that’s a good sign. Right at the moment I can estimate our progress as about of half of the work on vectorization done  – we still lag behind the schedule, but the skills are growing and that gives me a hope to get this task finished in time.

Nikolay works all at his rage on vectorization – he is so enthusiastic that he did not  have any scruples to rework his artwork right in the process, bringing the real creative touch to some shots.

I can say our vectorization competition is going very well – thanks to the contributions of the community we have almost finished shot 34 (only last keyframe left which I should vectorize by myself) and shot 31 is finished as well.

Here’s the score stats for current participants:

• Jcome: 14
• Pixelgeek: 4
• Animtim: 3

Also, Julia Velkova finished reviewing the English translation. Now it’s pending for my final review to get this task marked as “done”. Yay!

Finally, we got some help with 3D truck from Umesh Marappa – we asked him to improve the low-poly model we had. As result, he did a full rework from the ground and now we have shiny new detalized model. Thank you, Umesh!

That’s all my news for today. Stay tuned and have an awesome week, everyone!

Blau
Vimeo / Blender 3D - 2012-08-06 15:25:43

At the exhibition Gangarten at Einstellungsraum Hamburg I presented amoung other installations an interactive DVD with 12 short videos, mostly animations. This a one of it, made with Blender.

Cast: Malte Steiner

Tags: Blender, 3D, architecture and visualization

Model: Medieval Kind of Seaport
BlenderNation - 2012-08-06 12:59:44

By Tokabilitor. Tokabilitor writes: Some houses inspired by Anno 1404 pc game. Textures have been made with blender itself respectively own photographs Link Medieval Kind of Seaport

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Improved acceptance policies, full speed ahead
Renderfarm.fi - 2012-08-06 10:08:04

 

Developer Meeting Notes, August 5, 2012
BlenderNation - 2012-08-06 07:54:08

Even with SIGGRAPH happening, the Developer Meetings just keep continuing! Thomas Dinges writes: Hi everyone, Here’s the notes from today’s meeting in irc.freenode.net #blendercoders. 1)...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

CG Cookie at Siggraph 2012
Blender Cookie - 2012-08-06 00:52:08

Jonathan and Wes will be fortunate enough to be attending Siggraph this year. These two will be helping out at the Blender booth and walking around the conference with their mouths and eyes wide open in awe of the talent and inspiration there.

To help celebrate this event we are offering the below coupon code to be used on the shop which is valid through the duration of Siggraph 2012! Save 20% on any order or combination on the items in the Cg Cookie Shop!

Save 20% on the CG Cookie Shop : Use “s2012” at checkout.

Visit the Shop

If you happen to be at Siggraph this week be sure to come by the Blender Booth and say hello!

With Jonathan and Wes at Siggraph please bare with us with on the site. We may be a bit slower to respond to e-mails, comments and tickets. We’ve left Tim (Concept Cookie) alone at the office to fend off evil spiders and keep things moving at the CG Cookie Studio by himself.

Keep an eye on the Blender Cookie Twitter feed and Facebook updates of the travels and shenanigans.

BLENDER COOKIE TWITTER FEED

Blender 2.63 Dyntopo 2
Vimeo / Blender 3D - 2012-08-05 16:42:51

Cast: Roberto Roch

Tags: Blender 2.63, Blender, Dyntopo, Sculpt, Sculpting and Timelapse

Weekly – August 3
Tears of Steel - 2012-08-05 12:11:14

Roughly 3 (Three!) weeks left! Unfortunately we weren’t able to stream the last weekly, but here is the usual random selection from the weekly folder. Also, this week Thomas Dinges and Campbell interviewed the entire team for the Blender Podcast, which will hopefully be online soon!

Development updates on August 5
Freestyle integration into Blender - 2012-08-05 11:40:04

Since the last blog update, the Freestyle branch made a slow but steady progress.  Here is a brief summary of new elements and user-visible changes in the Freestyle rendering engine and its user interface. General usability improvements 1. New options for specifying unit line thickness has been added in the Post Processing tab in the […]

Femto-Photography
Aligorith's Lair - 2012-08-05 11:35:00

I just came across this video on one of the blogs I occasionally read.



This is some pretty awesome stuff. Finally, we've managed to catch photons "in the act" so to speak (did anyone notice the SSS reference in the vid? ;)

Interior Architectural Visualization in Blender Training DVD Series
Blender Cookie - 2012-08-04 21:48:07

Interior Architectural Visualization is now available on DVD via Blender.org!

We are pleased to announce that our very well reviewed training course on Architectural Visualization is now available on DVD through the e-shop at Blender.org. This is excellent for anyone wishing to have a hard-copy or are unable to stream the Citizen version. Another benefit to purchasing the DVD is most of the proceeds go directly to supporting Blender and the Blender Foundation projects.

Interior architectural visualization is an ideal use of 3D rendering; it can help portray exactly what an interior could look like after being built without ever setting foot in the space or picking up a tool. Through this course, Jonathan Williamson will give you a complete run-through on how to create an interior architectural visualization completely within Blender 2.6. This course makes use of the Cycles render engine to achieve an excellent sense of realism and mood. To gain access to this course you can signup as a Citizen member of the CG Cookie network for just $10 USD per month. This is an incredible deal, the course contains just over five hours of training; covering modeling, shading, lighting, rendering, compositing, and post processing. You can sign up for a Citizen account from our membership page HERE.

Purchase the DVD HERE

As a Citizen member you get access to the complete streaming course, including all project files and the ability to download each individual video. All the source files and videos are also included on the DVD.

Go to the series page!

 Watch the trailer:

ANNOUNCEMENT: User contributions area open
Makehuman - 2012-08-04 10:22:43

Lost in Stereo
Reyn's Blog - 2012-08-04 08:40:00

Update: Production files available at http://reynantem.blogspot.com/2012/09/lost-in-stereo-production-files.html "The one who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd.  The one who walks alone, is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been." -Albert Einstein Initially inspired by a modeling exercise I did, partly by the song 'Lost in Stereo' by All Time Low,

Video Blender (di) Indonesia | 2009-2012
Blender Army Indonesia - 2012-08-04 07:51:30

Kompilasi animasi Indonesia yang dibuat dengan software utama Blender 3D. Animasi dibuat sejak tahun 2008 s/d 2012 berupa animasi pembelajaran, TV serial, TVC, web series, tugas akhir, film pendek, showreel personal, dll.

GSoC BGE Fixup Status Report Week 11
Moguri's Blog - 2012-08-04 05:45:23

What did you do this week? Recently I’ve been profiling the BGE’s VBO code, and I’ve been rather disappointed with it. Even after some cleanup/optimization (including a nice speedup to skinned meshes and other frequently updating meshes), I could not get VBOs as fast as vertex arrays with display lists. I’ve also come to find [...]

Bedtime Doodles
Aligorith's Lair - 2012-08-04 03:59:00

Just some random sketches made at the end of a long week (of frantic but productive hacking). For now, no hardware+software combination quite matches the immediacy and control of a humble pencil and paper.

A few simple characters/objects, starting from a characteristic curve or two as usual...

If only there were more buildings of sculptural beauty in town in future... (pity, the architects, engineers, and stingy property developers here probably can't figure out how such things can be built :P)

Blender Foundations, One Year Later
Fax on Blender - 2012-08-03 17:23:24

Remember how this all started? I followed the Blender Foundations book from start to finish, actually doing everything step by step, to get myself familiarized with Blender. I was done mid-May last year, just a little over one year ago. Back then I exchanged a few e-mails with the author, Roland Hess, both when I […]

New York: Blender Training for Teens
BlenderNation - 2012-08-03 14:00:55

The Digital Arts Experience in Whiteplains, NY, is offering an intense Blender workshop for teens. Cristina Calabrese writes: I’d like to submit our course for 3D Animation using Blender to...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

New Blender Cookie Tutorial: Modelling an Ancient Greek Temple
BenSimonds.com - 2012-08-03 10:08:37

I’ve got a couple of new tutorials up on Blender Cookie, on modelling and rendering an ancient Greek temple. You can find them here. You’ll need to be a CG cookie member to download these particular ones, but if you don’t fancy that you can check out some of my other tutorials up there that are available to all, […]

Videotutorial: Removing Cycles Fireflies
BlenderNation - 2012-08-03 10:00:04

Nahuel Belich shows how to get rid of Cycles ‘fireflies’ (white noise). Nahuel writes: The last week i run into some white pixel on a Cycles render, i confront face to face the famous...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Photorealism Competition Results
BlenderNation - 2012-08-03 06:11:21

Andrew Price announces the winner of the BlenderGuru Photorealism contest. This image, by Bruno Borgiani, is one of the runners up. Andrew Price writes: At the start of June I posed a challenge:...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Blender Realtime Proportional Edit
Reyn's Blog - 2012-08-03 04:57:00

NOTE: This is purely a result of an accident and I'm not yet sure if this is already published elsewhere or tested before already. Just discovered something nifty in Blender and I thought it might be worth sharing (to those not aware yet); when editing meshes in Edit Mode and with Proprtional Editing on, you can press the keyboard shortcut 'SHIFT O' to switch between Falloff types (smooth,

Modeling a Greek Temple in Blender
Blender Cookie - 2012-08-03 03:59:48

Hello and welcome to this Blender modeling tutorial by Ben Simonds!

In this two-part video tutorial you will learn how to create a Greek temple in Blender 2.6. Ben will show you how to model this temple with smart techniques that make for very fast modeling, quicker and more efficient rendering and great results.

What you’ll learn:

• You will learn how to model the columns by starting with a curve circle and later converting it to a mesh.
• After modeling the columns learn how to easily replicate the columns with DupliFaces, allowing Cycles to render them much faster.
• Learn how to quickly replicate a single tile mesh for the roof to create the whole surface with variation in a matter of minutes.
• Find out how to set up a simple lighting environment to render the scene in Cycles with a background sky

The techniques Ben shows in this tutorial can be applied to many, many other projects, enabling you to quickly created detailed structures with great variation in very little time.

New Stock Image Site: BlendedSkies
BlenderNation - 2012-08-02 14:00:01

BlendedSkies is a new stock image site that offers tracked footage, 360 degree panoramas and backplates for Blender. Sam Schad writes: BlendedSkies.com, a new site being offered to the Blender...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Process to Go – Pandeia Episode 17
processdiary.com - 2012-08-02 13:10:15

Progress of Pandeia Issue 3!

Designs for Al-Kmer, DVNR-1 and first concepts for a Cadian outpost/bar:

Script has gotten to the point where I’ve redrafted enough, explored enough, and just call it a day on the opening scene. The main issue I have writing is putting too many plot-points in a scene to pick up on later. I’ve stripped some back, and focussed on one character. There’ll be enough time to go back to another character later on. It’s important to stay focussed on the point of the scene, and in this case: it’s to outline some facts about Marcus Blair. The set up is important, and serves as background for when we finally meet him.

One week to go before I announce the winners of my first Process Diary competition! Have you spread the word about Pandeia? All you have to do is one of the following:

• Tweet with the handle @Pandeiacomic and the link pandeia.com
• Leave a review of either Issue 1 or Issue 2 Pandeia eBooks you may have downloaded/purchased in the eStore
• Like the pandeia facebook page and announce it in a status update
• Use G+ and include mention to my G+ page (name:+Paul Caggegi)

Blender SIGGRAPH reel is almost done! It looks FANTASTIC, but that’s due to the wonderful entries. I cannot wait to release the finished edit, and boy – will you guys know about it.

Until then – see you all back here next week!

Download audio file (TPD_P2G_PanE17.mp3)

Model: 1933 Ford Hot Rod
BlenderNation - 2012-08-02 10:00:52

By Conner Addison. Conner writes: A slightly older model of a ’33 ford deuce hot rod, V8 exposed and everything. Modeled in Blender 2.55 but rendered in Cycles in 2.63. Link 1933 Ford Hot Rod

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Cycles Girl
BlenderNation - 2012-08-02 06:00:35

By Georg. Georg writes: This is a human portrait test in Cycles. The ears needs more work, I think. I hope to see hairs implemented in Cycles someday. Some of the hairs in her eyelids are curves...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Blender 3D Basics Upcoming Book Review
Reyn's Blog - 2012-08-02 02:07:00

I've recently been asked by PacktPub to review their recently-released Blender book for beginners titled   'Blender 3D Basics' by Gordon Fisher. More info on the book here http://www.packtpub.com/blender-3D-basics-complete-novices-guide/book. I'll start reading it soon and will let you know what I think about it, so stay tuned. -Reyn

Kunjungan Al Fath ke Blender Institute
Blender Army Indonesia - 2012-08-01 23:44:28

Al Fath, mungkin merupakan Blender Army Indonesia pertama yang telah mengunjungi Blender Insitute di Amsterdam. Blender Army Bekasi yang kini kuliah di Binus jurusan Animasi telah mendokumentasikan kunjungannya yang pertama di Blender Insitute.

Q: Beberapa waktu lalu saya lihat anda dalam sebuah foto sedang berpose dengan Ton Roosendal di Blender Institute. Mungkin bisa diceritakan bagaimana bisa sampai ke Blender Institute?

A: Hallo Blender Indonesia. Saat itu, memang jadwal perjalanan saya ke Madame Tussauds Netherlands http://www.madametussauds.com/ yang kebetulan di Amsterdam, jadi saya bisa sekalian mampir ke Blender Institute yang ga jauh dari tempat itu dan saya juga di temani oleh Indah yang memang sudah lama tinggal di Belanda sekitar 4 tahun.

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Q: Sebenarnya dalam rangka apa anda pergi ke Blender Institute? Apakah saat anda sedang berlibur ke Belanda kemudian berinisiatif untuk mampir?

A: Sebetulnya saya hanya ingin bilang ke pak Ton Roosendaal minat pemakai FOSS di Indonesia ini sudah manjadi trend, termasuk Blender, istilahnya menjadi kabar baik untuk mereka hehe. Tapi kalau di tanya dalam rangka apa? Saya ingin mempererat hubungan silaturahmi sekaligus menjadi jembatan penghubung antara Blender pusat dengan Blender Indonesia ^^ hehe,

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Q: Adakah proses birokrasi yang harus dilalui untuk bisa mengunjungi blender institute?

A: Sama seperti di Indonesia, saat kita mau silaturahmi, pasti izin dulu dong. Jadi 2 minggu sebelum keberangkatan ke Belanda, saya sudah konfirmasi ke pak Ton Roosendaalnya by email. Hebatnya, beliau sangat welcome dan menunggu kedatangan saya ^^

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Q: Saya dengar anda sampai berkesempatan untuk mengikuti meeting tim mango. (mungkin bisa terjawab dari pertanyaan pertama), sebenarnya apa saja yang anda lakukan saat di Blender Insitute?

A: Yup, rencana awal saya ingin ke Blender Institute tanggal 28 juni, tapi pak Tonroosendaal menyarankan untuk 29 juni aja, alasannya karena ada weekly meeting manggo open movie dan saya di sarankan untuk melihat project dari Blender artist yang akan di tampilkan saat weekly meeting. (di durasi 00:23 dalam video itu, para Blender artist sedang mempersiapkan projectnya yang akan di tampilkan saat weekly meeting tsb). Sayangnya saya ga bisa terlalu lama karena harus prepare perjalanan ke Jerman. Jadi, ya terpaksa harus saya batalkan. Ketika disana saya di perlihatkan ke semua tempat yang ada di dalam Blender Institute dari mulai studio sampai warehousenya, saya juga sempat diskusi sama beliau (bisa lihat di video)

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Q: Bagaimana kesan anda terhadap para blenderhead yang ada di Blender Insitute?

A: Luar biasa, mereka semua welcome dan sopan saat kami tiba disana. Mereka terlihat tekun dalam setiap pekerjaannya. Apalagi saat kami masuk ke ruangan Blender Development, tidak ada iringan lagu apapun, alias sunyi. XD

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Q: Adakah pesan-pesan dari Ton Roosendal untuk para komunitas Blender di seluruh dunia, khususnya di Indonesia?

A: Hehe.. lucu kalau saya yang harus menulisnya, lebih baik di tonton videonya saja. Karena mungkin setiap perkataan dari Pak Tonroosendaal dapat menjadi pesan motivasi untuk kita semua ^^

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Q: Adakah rencana untuk mengunjungi Blender Insitute lagi?

A: Jika Allah berkenan Insya Allah saya akan ikut dalam Blender Conference tahun ini atau tahun dan tahun yang akan datang ;D

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Berikut video kunjungan ke Blender Institute sekaligus wawancara dengan Ton Roosendal

Photorealism Competition Results
Blender Guru - 2012-08-01 18:29:09

The Photorealism Competition was one of the biggest competitions ever, with 270 entries.

I know I say this a lot, but the quality of entries this time round was incredible. Every artist strived for photorealism and quite a few people pulled it off!

All Entries

- 2012-08-01 18:08:29

I was recently sent a e-copy of Blender 3D Basics by Gordon C. Fisher  and asked to share my thoughts on it. Which I most certainly will do, just as soon as I finish reading it. I only received it today, I’m a fast reader, but you will need to give me a minute or [...]

Videotutorial: Modeling a Toilet Bowl
BlenderNation - 2012-08-01 14:00:15

Learn how to make a golden toilet bowl in this tutorial by weeliano!

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Pre-premiere & wrap-up party: 28 August, De Balie
Tears of Steel - 2012-08-01 12:27:46

Tuesday evening 28 August at 20:30h we’ll do a first official screening of Tears of Steel in De Balie in Amsterdam. This pre-premiere is for invited guests and (DVD) sponsors only! After the screenings (we’ll show it a couple of times) there will be a wrap-up party with the entire crew in De Balie cafe, to enjoy the past 7 months of work here and to say goodbye to Roman, Jeremy, Kjartan, Sergey, Campbell and Nicolo. Four artists – Ian, Sebastian, Andy and Francesco – will be staying during September to prepare the film for the official premiere (online) and the master the DVDs. The online premiere data is not known yet.

If you want to join us this evening; just send me an email with your DVD order number, you then will be added to the guest list. A sponsor can bring 1 guest, but let me know please. :) We have 150 seats, so don’t wait too long.

ton at blender.org

LuxRender 1.0RC3 Released
BlenderNation - 2012-08-01 10:00:17

The LuxRender team have released their third release candidate for 1.0. The first RC was in April – these guys are taking their testing seriously! Lord Crc writes: Changes since v1.0RC2: GUI supports loading “queue files” (.lxq) directly, they’re simple … Continue reading →

graphicall: http://t.co/u0lyk3BS is back online. Did you survive your 1 day old Blender builds? #thehorror
Twitter / graphicall - 2012-08-01 07:54:16

graphicall: http://t.co/u0lyk3BS is back online. Did you survive your 1 day old Blender builds? #thehorror

Two Cool Rigging Demos
BlenderNation - 2012-08-01 07:00:37

Papagaio Pirate, by Carlos Fernando Fanboy by Taito3d (via Kvetoslav Novak)

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

BAM #39 submission deadline is approaching…. Are you ready?
ThruDreamsgate's Blog - 2012-07-31 17:57:13

Submission Deadline is approaching: August 5th, 2012 Have you turned your submission in yet? It’s time to get things all wrapped up and ready for submission. Call for Content: Blenderart Magazine #39

Model: Digital Watches
BlenderNation - 2012-07-31 06:21:09

By Keep_It_Random (Blender & Cycles ready). Link Digital Watches

Comfort
Reyn's Blog - 2012-07-31 01:59:00

(click to enlarge) “A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for.” -William Shedd Composition inspired by an image from CGSociety. Thanks to Andrew Price (http://blenderguru.com) for sending the link. The production process had been a huge learning experience as well. Made with: Blender 2.63 Rendered with: Cycles

Creating a Realistic Head in Blender – part 07 – Clothing
Blender Cookie - 2012-07-30 21:30:35

Hello and welcome to this tutorial series on creating a realistic head in Blender 2.6!

This is a complete tutorial series explaining the creation of a realistic human portrait with Blender. The entire process will be covered from base mesh modeling, detail sculpting, texture painting, hair growing and styling, sub-surface scatter shading, and compositing. Some of the more time-consuming tasks will be time-lapses with commentary like modeling, sculpting, and texture painting; the other parts will be mostly real-time.

Part 7 is a shift of gears to modeling clothing for our bust.  First, we will generate a stand-in mesh to represent the upper torso, which then allows us to retopologize on top of this geometry  to better separate the artistic and technical portions of the process. We will also generate our base meshes for a shirt, jacket, and tie, then we’ll sculpt wrinkly cloth detail onto these base meshes.  To finish the tutorial we will quickly lay out UVs to prepare for texturing.

DISCLAIMER:  We cannot redistribute these references, due to the license, but we can use them under Fair Use laws for educational purposes. They’re not available for commercial use, though.

Music:  “Summertime” by cdk (http://ccmixter.org/files/cdk/13112)

Music Demo
Tears of Steel - 2012-07-30 19:39:48

So Joram has been doing some crazy great music- and we figured it’s about time you guys heard a bit more of it! (the teaser also featured his music)

Performances from Sergio Hasselbaink, Derek de Lint, Rogier Schippers, and Jody Bhe.

The visuals are our current WIP for the week, so I’ll try to post an update soon!

Blender Tutorials in Turkish
ThruDreamsgate's Blog - 2012-07-30 19:04:59

Having realized that there are very few Blender tutorials in Turkish, Hakki Rizza has decided to start creating Blender tutorials for the Turkish community. His first one is already uploaded to vimeo. And there will be more following as he gets them created. Ev modellme dersi- bölüm 1 

Voronoi Cage
BlenderNation - 2012-07-30 18:00:47

Learn how to achieve this effect with this quick tutorial by Blender Sushi Blender Sushi writes: There is this particular “Voronoi” effect I have been wanting to do for years. I have tried to achieve this particular effect using other … Continue reading →

Weekly progress
Morevna Project - 2012-07-30 14:36:27

Another week passed by. The activity in the project increasing and there are lots of things I want to share today.

First of all, we are happy to get two participants joined our community call for vectorization. Don’t be distracted by the small number of participants. I should say – even one person can make a significant difference and even a little help with such a big job is significant. I want to give a special mention to Yu Chen – he is working very intensively. We are very happy he is joined our efforts.

This week we got first submission of soldier variation by Marco Antonio Real Adame. He is joined our soldiers community call on July 21st and yesterday have presented his work (see soldier-2.blend file in repository). Now he took the task to animate his model for shot 07. Let’s see how this will turn out!

Isn’t that guy is charming one? ^_^ Still I haven’t played with render settings yet…

Also the work on Ivan and Morevna models is still on the way and we already got some awesome results. But I should handle myself to announce final decisions on August 15th.

Nikolay did a great work by vectorizing all keyframes of Ivan for shot 20. Now they are pending for my review. I have been doing some vectorization too, as well as administration routines. Also, I managed to do one more important thing (that surely should have been done earlier) – set up the colorchart for the main characters. Now its possible to use common colorchart files for vectorized artwork (I hope to to post video about that soon).

And finally, good news for everyone who got “more than $100″ rewards from our donation campaign – the promised goodies are finally packaged and sent! My apologies for taking it so long. The tracking numbers will be provided by e-mail on personal basis.

That’s all for today. Have an awesome week, everyone!

Blender Production digital content
harkyman.com - 2012-07-30 14:11:54

Here’s a heads up about the new book. Reader Pete Robie pointed out to me that the website (blenderproduction.com) listed in the book is empty. Focal Press has the content available here, but the blenderproduction.com address was supposed to take you directly there. At the moment, it does not. Focal Press very recently changed hands, and according to my editor they are having problems with the domain registrar and taking possession of the domain. It was bought by their old parent company, and the new parent company is having difficulty getting full control.

Until then, a direct link to the content can be found here:

http://cw.routledge.com/textbooks/9780240821450/

New Blender DVD: ‘Compositing in Blender’
BlenderNation - 2012-07-30 14:00:48

Blender Cookie announce their upcoming new Blender DVD: ‘Compositing in Blender’ by Bartek Skorupa. Jonathan Williamson writes: We’ve just announced pre-orders for our latest training series by Bartek Skorupa. Bartek is a compositing genius and is the author of the … Continue reading →

Blender Production Now Shipping
harkyman.com - 2012-07-30 12:34:11

Last year, I began work on a new edition of the outdated Animating with Blender. It’s a guide to the short animation creation process. There is a lot of Blender-specific stuff in the book, but non-Blender readers have also found it useful as a general guide. Well, the Blender-based portions have been rewritten, in some cases completely, and we’ve updated the title: Blender Production.

What do you get? In this book, I’ve detailed the time-tested process of producing a short animation, from story creation and story boarding through sound capture, the actual 3D work (modeling/animation/etc) and finally on to editing and post-production. While the book does get technical and Blender-specific in many places, it always keeps its focus on the production process. So, while we have a piece on character creation, it isn’t a modeling tutorial. You can find those in plenty of other places. In this book, we focus on how incorporating different technical aspects and approaches into your model can help to make it more suitable to a larger production that might use a small (or even large) team of talent.

The project that accompanies the book is completely new for this edition. It’s the Snowmen Will Melt Your Heart animation that you saw completed here in January (shortly before the book was put to bed). I swear right now on a stack of Bibles that I will not ever again simultaneously write a book whilst producing a full-fledged animation project.

The real goal of the Blender Production though is simple, and easily identified by anyone who has ever tried to make a short animation: just get it finished. If you’ve never attempted a short animation before, the job is much larger and significantly more complex than your intuition tells you it’s going to be. I’ve seen teams put a year of time into a short animation project, only to have it die because they went in without a plan. They didn’t feel like they were wasting their time, but… they were. This book tells you the plan, and shows you how to execute that plan in our favorite 3D application: Blender.

Amazon Link: Blender Production: Creating Short Animations from Start to Finish

FYI, Amazon has the “Look Inside This Book” feature enabled, so you can get a preview right there. If you have the previous title (Animating…), and have really internalized the information it had, there’s probably no reason to get this newer edition unless you are some kind of Blender bookshelf completest. Everyone else who is considering working on a short project though, would do well to at least check it out.

Boolean Buddhas
BlenderNation - 2012-07-30 10:00:21

Is it rendered? Is it real? Read on ;-) David Hirmes writes: I’ve created a series of sculptures called Boolean Buddhas by taking advantage of Blender’s recently improved boolean functions and fabricated using a Makerbot 3D printer.

Developer Meeting Notes, July 29, 2012
BlenderNation - 2012-07-30 08:49:35

Even though the bug count goes down very slowly, it looks like we’ll have a 2.64 test build next week (just in time for SIGGRAPH)! Ton Roosendaal writes: Hi all, Here’s the notes from today’s meeting in irc.freenode.net #blendercoders. 1) … Continue reading →

Model: Greyhound
BlenderNation - 2012-07-29 07:16:24

By Zero4mike. Zero4mike writes: Inspired by the “Greyhound” music video by the awesome Swedish House Mafia, this project took me around 30 hrs. to complete(I know I’m slow). Blender Internal rendered...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Quick tutorial for cycles and vertex colors
Oenvoyage's Blender Blog - 2012-07-28 15:36:25

Here is a quick less than 5 minute tutorial that will teach you how to mix 2 shaders using vertex color map. This is a “<5min tutorial”. I plan to make some more of those. They are quick and expect some background knowledge so not well suited for beginners, more like intermediate/advanced users here is […]

Weekly – July 27
Tears of Steel - 2012-07-28 14:40:51

Yesterday’s weekly meeting we had visitors from Chile, USA and Germany! Always great to get fresh feedback on your work… they all confirmed they were absorbed with what goes on at the screen – even with unfinished greenscreen shots and without (good) sound.

Below the usual random selection of past week’s work:

-Ton-

Let’s Break Some Stuff – Winners!
BlenderNation - 2012-07-28 06:50:09

Winner: SK with his collapsing bridge. This was by far the most ‘complete’ entry – not just a tech demo, but a short video with a ‘story’ and nice sound. Good job! Read...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

GSoC BGE Fixup Status Report Week 10
Moguri's Blog - 2012-07-28 04:40:00

What did you do this week? I managed to finally get Nvidia Nsight and started profiling some OpenGL usage. I cleaned up some of the BGE’s OpenGL usage (eliminated some glGet and glIsEnabled calls), which got me a few fps in the Necrosys map. I’m hoping for more gains, but I’m still learning how to best use [...]

HeMan….
ThruDreamsgate's Blog - 2012-07-27 19:10:20

And no I am not talking about the cartoon character that runs around waving a sword while wearing fur undies. I am referring to the image I drew based on Tim Vonn Rueden’s Stylized Character Concept Art – The Software Brothers tutorial on Concept Cookie. I love watching Tim’s tutorials and while my results rarely [...]

Ara’s Tale Production Files Available
Blender Minutes - 2012-07-27 17:50:57

After a lot of tinkering and various attempts, I am glad to be able to announce the availability of the production files for Ara’s Tale.

To be able to host those files, I had to make some restrictions, which I think will have very little impact for the interested.

I have split the project into several parts:

• base production files (1GB): everything but the textures and simulation cache files.
• texture files (1GB): all textures but reduced to half the resolution of the real production  textures.
• Simulation cache files: One zipped simulation cache directory for each shot, typically ~140MB per file (total 6GB). With this it is easy to recreate a render and further compositing for a single shot.

No render outputs are packed into these files, you have to recreate them yourselves . In case there is real interest into the full resolution textures I will gladly try to find a way to host these additional 5GB.

All these files are hosted on goggle drive. This has proved to be a working solution for the movie files themselves, so I hope this holds true for the production files as well . If you encounter any problems please tell me.

Here is the link to the shared folders for the production files and be sure to read the _README_ first:

Base production Files

Simulation Files Part 1

Simulation Files Part 2

As I have mentioned on other occasions, having only these files at hand will not help you very much. That was my experience with all the assets from the Open Movies so far. I am willing to do a series of in depth explanations/making of’s/howto’s to bring to you the ideas behind all these setups. Some are just crude workarounds, some may be usable for your own projects.

But to be able to do this in a sensible way, I would first ask you to provide me with wishes/suggestions, what topics you would like to have covered. It can be very specific like ‘How did you do the disintegration of the dragon’ to more broad topics like ‘How is the whole project organized’.

I really hope to have your feedback on this. After 3 years of me working on this project it is now time for a little of your time

Mango Weekly 27.07.2012
Tears of Steel - 2012-07-27 16:07:17

This week’s weekly will be presented via Twitcam. I just cannot get Google Hangout to work. We are just not very technically skilled… :)

OSCON wrapup
Tube - Epic Production Notes - 2012-07-27 01:18:46

Hey Folk,

Quick one since this isn’t really a production topic. I’m back from OSCON where I gave a talk about Tube. I talked a bit about the (very short) history of open movie projects, the motivations of making tube and some other topics that would in themselves make a nice post. I also showed some hitherto unseen work in progress shots, and demo-d a bit creating a crowd scene with the autowalking. Some of the ideas that I came to the conference with (about making open movies mainly) are probably best saved for their own post.

Due to the ‘giving a talk’ effect of preparing up till the last minute, I ended up missing pretty much the first half of the conference, and sat out most of the last day doing Tube stuff – I thus didn’t get to attend that many of the talks. Those that I did sit in were interesting – though some were not quite open source in topic. I was very interested by the panel on software patents, and I’m rather enamoured of Bradley Kuhn’s idea of a ‘free software patent troll’. I’m not sure this would work, but it’s fun to contemplate.

I also did an interview during the conference with Linux Format, and another with O’Reilly media:

During the week I met with several new and old friends, including some of the past and present Tube crew! Chris Webber (of mediagoblin fame) who coded reference desk (part of the mini-demo) and Oscar Baechler, who rigged a bit earlier in the project, and now returns as an animator. In the weekend following the conf, I took a train from Portland to Seattle, and met with our assistant producer and previous production manager Liz Ellis, who’s now launching a web series, also in the free culture vein, and with Oscar (again) and Nathan Vegdahl, who continues to be fabtacular.

I managed to destroy my achillis tendon (again) running a 5K, and then getting lost the next day and wondering around Portland for 3 hours. I took a lot of taxis after that. I also quite typically did not take a single photo of the conference itself, nor of any conference related activities. Here are a bunch of random snaps (mainly in Seattle, though a couple are in Portland). I’m not sure how I feel about that bus.

Process to Go – Pandeia Episode 16
processdiary.com - 2012-07-26 23:42:12

Competition time! Prize courtesy of fillim.com -

UPDATE: This event is now cancelled. :( I am so sorry!! I just got word from the organizers. So I have two options, but I think I’ll go with option 2.

1. Cancel this competition
2. Come up with another prize.

Do one of the following:

• Tweet with a link to the site, including my twitter handle @pandeiacomic
• Like my facebook page - www.facebook.com/pandeiacomic
• post a link to my facebook page, referencing the page so I know it’s been linked.
• Write a review for one of my eStore items. (you may have purchased already, or you can just download one of the free items and review)

Download audio file (TPD_P2G_PanE16.mp3)

Conférence Blender du 12 Mai 2012 à Paris en ligne !
CoyHot's World - 2012-07-26 22:01:00

Compositing in Blender Training DVD Series – Pre-order Now!
Blender Cookie - 2012-07-26 19:51:44

We are pleased to announce our latest Blender training series by Bartek Skorupa! Available for pre-order now

If you have ever wanted to know all the technical details and knowledge needed to produce stunning compositing, not just how to throw together random effects, then this is the series for you! In this series you will learn nearly everything you need to know to perform good compositing in Blender with the node-based compositor.

Learn how to Composite properly in Blender

This series will not only teach you how to get great results through compositing, it will also teach all of the technical details that need to be considered with compositing. This includes image levels, image colors, color management, handling proper alpha values, green screen keying, and much more. You will also learn many techniques for managing your renders in a smarter way that enables to perform many changes and make finer adjustments without needing to render again. An example of this can be seen in the images below with the car of multiple colors; this was only rendered once. All color is controlled with the compositing.

You will learn advanced masking techniques, how to work with all of the different render passes and even how to make your own render passes. Beyond that you will also learn how to properly handle ambient occlusion, environment lighting, shadows, reflections, refractions, and more.

View the complete training outline

Pre-order now for 20% off 

FAQs

How large is the download version?

The final download version is expected to be around 2GB.

When will the series be available?

We estimate the series to be ready and shipping by September 2012.
How much is the final price?

The final training series cost will be $48 USD for the download version and $54-56 USD for the DVD version.

Farm renders
Tears of Steel - 2012-07-26 12:14:39

Everyone’s busy… we’re on target to be finished end of August. That’s a mere 5 weeks! Doing interesting blog posts in crunch time is a too demanding; so I’ll just be slamming some stuff online to feed your curiosity :)

Here’s images I copied the past day from our renderfarm UI. It’s all WIP and tests!

Assassin’s Craft 3 – Reveal Trailer
BlenderNation - 2012-07-26 10:00:43

Remember the Battlecraft 3 mashup? Avemagnadude with a new mashup: Minecraft and Assassin’s Creed 3.

The Caliper is Underway
BlenderNation - 2012-07-26 06:00:10

Dolf Veenvliet’s crowdfunding campaign for the new caliper script has reached its first threshold. He reports on the progress. Dolf writes: I started work on the Caliper addon for Blender last week. You can find the current state of the … Continue reading →

Videotutorial: Swinging Pub Sign
BlenderNation - 2012-07-25 18:00:01

By Peter Draculic. Peter writes: This is a video tutorial showing how to combine Rigid Body Bullet Physics and Hook modifier,along with a Curve and Array modifiers for rigging and animating an old...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Sci-Fi City Animated Concepts
BlenderNation - 2012-07-25 14:00:38

By Tom Walks. Tom writes: A week of tweaks. 1080p Artworks here 1, 2. All done in blender, internal render. I made some corrections with GIMP for the to images.

Virtual Design Blender Clips – Politecnico di Torino
BlenderNation - 2012-07-25 10:00:52

The Politecnico di Torino, Italy, shares the results (40 videos in total) of their students in 2011 and 2012. Worth watching! Fabrizio Valpreda writes: Dear all, I am very proud to announce the availability of the results of the course of … Continue reading →

Blender Workshops at HSBXL, Brussels, Belgium
BlenderNation - 2012-07-25 06:13:25

Hackerspace Brussels, Belgium, is offering six free Blender workshops in August and September. ZipionLive writes: HSBXL (or Hackerspace Brussels) is an active and open-source loving hacker community in the heart of Schaerbeek, Brussels. We’re organizing workshops on a regular basis, … Continue reading →

random stuff
Pablo Lizardo - Blender freelance - 2012-07-25 05:06:22

Hi everyone!

I have been very busy lately, I move across some projects and studios, also working on soki and plizzz at home so i never make some time to write here. sorry for that again.

well. i will put here some stuff i did in this time, hope you like it!

Dynamo: Webseries with Blender CG
BlenderNation - 2012-07-24 14:00:17

Ian Hubert presents the first three episodes of his *other* movie project – Dynamo. Ian writes: Howdy! Over the past several months we’ve been working on another episode for an online series called Dynamo – featuring quite a bit of … Continue reading →

The Pool Table - a B-Mesh Case Study
BlenderDiplom - Blender Tutorials and Training - 2012-07-24 10:31:10

Model: Zombie
BlenderNation - 2012-07-24 09:54:09

By gabrielmda. gabrielmda writes: Character Study (based on the model “Grandfather” created by Dmitry Parkin) Link Zombie

Tyrant Monkey’s Modeling Jam – Iconic Movie/TV Car
Fax on Blender - 2012-07-24 09:21:06

Ayoh! After the success of the Corolla (check it out on the cover of BlenderArt Magazine #37!), it turns out I will pick up another car project sooner than I expected. Over at BlenderArtists.org Tyrant Monkey is organizing a workshop for anyone who wants to join. He’s calling it Modeling Jam 01, as he plans to […]

Car Sketch
BlenderNation - 2012-07-24 06:10:51

By Pavel Shabanov. I’d like to share a little test with Grease Pencil and Wacom.

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Daniel Barton talks Goober and Cindy
processdiary.com - 2012-07-24 02:22:05

Daniel Barton – not just another web-comic artist! He quickly cobbled together a couple of intro tracks using Audacity before we embarked on this cross-interview, and sent them over. Daniel is a fun guy. We just talked about a whole heap of stuff, but mainly each other’s work.

Goober and Cindy: a web-comic about a little girl and her adopted alien brother. The humor is off-the-wall. Sometimes I found myself laughing not knowing why. To get a taste, go to Dan’s favourites first.

This interview will be cross-broadcast on Dan’s site and youtube channel where you can see Dan in full-frame, and me as a still. He may edit the show a little differently, too.

Daniel also composes music! His stuff can be found at Alien7.nl

Download audio file (Dan_Barton.mp3)

Melbourne Blender Society: Meetings in July and August
BlenderNation - 2012-07-24 02:00:02

Blenderheads in Melbourne, Australia, are meeting this Thursday! Alex Fraser writes: There are a lots of meetings coming up in Melbourne – if you look far enough into the future! We are moving to a quarterly cycle of meetings; see … Continue reading →

Bat-logo Morph
Vimeo / Blender 3D - 2012-07-24 01:48:09

Just a little aside from other items in progress -- morphing from the 60s bat-logo through the Tim Burton version ending with the current Dark Knight logo.

Cast: dark foundation

Tags: Batman, blender and bat-logo

bug doodle try...
sanders3d | digital janitor - 2012-07-23 20:07:00

Not enough inspiration. Vacation is the worst... You have thousands ideas when you are working and can't do anything else than just work. And then when you are all of a sudden given all this free time... I don't have a single uniqe idea or inspiration to do any of my own stuff.

NuremBUG: Friday 27th of July in Nuremberg, Germany
BlenderNation - 2012-07-23 18:00:06

Blenderheads in Nuremberg, Germany are meeting this Friday. Gottfried Hofmann writes: Hello Blender community, the Nuremberg Blender User Group (NuremBUG) is meeting once again! Party starts on Friday the 27th of July 2012! Meet fellow Blenderheads from the Nuremberg area … Continue reading →

Weekly progress
Morevna Project - 2012-07-23 17:48:31

I will start today’s weekly progress from screencast demonstrating our “lazy tweening” approach.

This approach can be shortly summarized in following steps:

1. Vectorize each keyframe independently.
2. Use stickman to deform first keyframe to second and create tweening transition.
3. Repeat the same for second and third keyframes and so on.

We have spent the whole week testing how much this approach suitable for making different types of animation. And hey – it’s kind of all-purpose thing! (Except maybe some cases of close-up headturns…)

When we settled this approach, we found that even for complex animation it’s possible to vectorize each keyframe independently. That means we can break each shot into small tasks and ask for community help with vectorization. That’s how we started the last community call for Synfig users.

Does someone thinks that we plan to have a rest and wait when  all hard work will be done by the community? No way! The community call is just an experiment to find talented Synfig artists around and proof that we can collaborate with them. And we are still working hard to deliver most and the best!. ^__^ Last week we have hit very complex shots – I have spent much time on shot 34 and Nikolay worked hard on shot 19. The next challenge for us is shot 20 – the most complex shot of the demo. Nikolay already started to work on it today.

At the same time the work on Ivan and Morevna models continued. The modelling is mostly done and now we are waiting for rigging and textures. Also we have two artists willing to improve truck and helicopter model and three persons interested in creating soldier model variations. I can’t wait to see how all this turn out!

Videoclip: Paint that Picture
BlenderNation - 2012-07-23 14:00:13

By Oh Yeah Wow! Josh Thomas writes: Hiya Blenderers! Oh Yeah Wow (our Melbourne based studio) recently completed the post work on a music video called ‘Paint That Picture’ for folk artist...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Rigging and Animating a Book with Page Turning in Blender
BlenderNation - 2012-07-23 10:46:20

Learn how to achieve a page turning effect with this extensive, 5-part video tutorial by Blender Cookie. Jonathan Williamson writes: In this advanced tutorial by Stanislas Paillereau you will learn how to create a detailed animation of a book with … Continue reading →

Developer Meeting Notes, July 22, 2012
BlenderNation - 2012-07-23 06:41:25

Ooooh :) Ton Roosendaal writes: Hi all, Here’s the notes from today’s meeting in irc.freenode.net #blendercoders: 1) Blender 2.64 – upcoming release The bug tracker is still on 300 open issue, a too high total! Release notes: Sergey Sharybin started … Continue reading →

Blender 2.63 Dyntopo
Vimeo / Blender 3D - 2012-07-22 16:17:04

3 half hour doodles with Dyntopo in Blender 2.63

Cast: Roberto Roch

Tags: Blender 2.63, Blender, Dyntopo, Sculpt and Sculpting

Community Call: Vectorization help
Morevna Project - 2012-07-22 15:55:16

Today we’re taking one more step to attract the community to Morevna Project development. This time we will ask for attention from Synfig users.

Let me introduce you:

We are working hard vectorizing and tweening the keyframes made by Nikolay. Still, looks like efforts of two men are not enough here. We are asking Synfig users to help us with keyframes vectorization.

All keyframes should be vectorized using stickman template. This process is described in video tutorial here. We will provide a .sif file with everything set up in place (keyframes combined with stickman) and your job is to vectorize all parts according to “stickman workflow. All vectorized parts should be attached to stickman – this is mandatory requirement.

We have spent a lot of time thinking about the best way to organize this process. We’re on the hard deadlines, so we understand that we need to optimize it as much as possible. That’s why we have decided to turn this process into a game!

Here are the rules:

1. You contact us by e-mail (see below) identifying that you are willing to offer vectorization help.
2. We will assign the task to you and send you all supporting files – zipped sif file with keyframe image, plus some notes about coloring, line width, etc. One person cannot take more than one task at once.
3. We will wait 48 hours for you to submit the finished task. Possible cases:
   • The finished result isn’t submitted within 48 hours – the task is transferred to another person.
   • The finished result submitted within 48 hours – we review it and if accepted you get 1 point to your personal score.
   • The finished result submitted within 24 hours and if accepted you get 2 points to your personal score.
4. We contact you informing about results. The task is over.
5. Whether you succeed completing task or not, after the task is over you can contact us to get the next task and process is repeated. The higher your score – the more complex tasks are available to you.
6. The  game will be finished on September 1st.

We will appreciate your help very much. and of course everyone with at least one accepted work will get mention in the credits.

So come on, Synfig community! Join us! Join our little competition!

Mini-Contest: Let’s Break Some Stuff!
BlenderNation - 2012-07-22 11:12:45

I’ve been enjoying the numerous videos that use the new fracture add-on. So let’s smash some stuff to bits and get some cool videos out there with a mini contest! To participate, just add a link to your YouTube video … Continue reading →

Spectacular Sunsets
Aligorith's Lair - 2012-07-22 07:45:00





Such wonderful colours! And to finish off, I present, the "fireball cloud".

Light and Shade @ Sunset
Aligorith's Lair - 2012-07-22 07:41:00

Last week the weather was really nice - somewhat unseasonably so for this time of the year. Here are some shots I took after a day of intensive hacking earlier in the week.



Read more »

Weekly – 20 July
Tears of Steel - 2012-07-21 17:21:18

Here’s a collection of fun things we showed in last friday’s weekly:

An open source variable tooth bike sprocket
BlenderNation - 2012-07-21 07:40:59

Software developer Jason DeRose used open tools to realise his obsession: building a variable tooth sproket for his bike. He used only open tools to design it, and has open sourced the design. James Raymond writes: Jason DeRose is a … Continue reading →

GSoC BGE Fixup Status Report Week 9
Moguri's Blog - 2012-07-21 03:12:11

What did you do this week? I started off this week looking at multi-uv bugs to see which ones are actually fixed in Swiss. I’ve verified that bugs #18146 and #17927 are fixed in Swiss. #20281 and #37775 should be solved after I get a bit of clarification on some Blender code. There are also a couple of bugs [...]

Playing with shapes/ sound and colors
Vimeo / Blender 3D - 2012-07-20 21:37:27

Just a quick project playing with blender 3D/ color/ soundtrack pro.

Cast: Kylie Favre-Smith

Tags:

Blender and the "rendering problem"
sanders3d | digital janitor - 2012-07-20 17:42:00

Coming from a "commercial application" usage, you face quite a lot of problems when you try and adapt the OpenSource world into your production. And I would think that most of the problems could be solved if there was a more "mature" attitude towards the development.
Blender Foundation is trying to overcome this with producing a shortfilm every two years, which is great since it really boost the development of Blender. But at the same time a lot of the features that are developed are done in a rush, and implemented just to suite the film.

Anyhow, to keep this rant a bit short.

Rendering in Blender is no fun at all. Tons on rendering engines, but none that can really compete with the commercial options. And they have way to many issues to be used properly.

Blender Internal
Motion Blur and DoF that can't be used with good accuracy. And GI engine which is old and slow, and texture sampling that is worse than the Quake2 engine.

Blender Cycles
Almost not even born yet. Lacks too many features, and is still evolving. Also has a lot of noise issues.

Yafaray
Has lost development speed. Lack motion blur, which is a must. Also SSS is only in experimental stage.

LuxRender/Octane
I would call it a Maxwell clone. Useless for anything else than still images. In order to work with live action material you need to be able to use a lot of different passes.
GPU rendering is also useless if you use a lot of highrez texture maps.

Blender also suffers from being a game platform from the beginning. It doesn't handle big scenes or assets very well. And large texture maps is almost impossible to tweak and use. What people don't realize is that a 2K texture map is most of the time thought of as a lowrez proxy.

And the workflow is influenced from all the developers, not from a user design specification. So the different modules in blender has little or nothing to do with each other.

Harsh? Yes. But a reality. And it's this reality that make Blender not being used in larger studios. Sure we might use Blender for a specific task, but the reality is that we just can't bother... we need to get the job done, and we calculate the license fees into our budgets. We could calculate a programmers salary into the budget, but there are too many loose ends that keeps us from doing that.

Where does all this leave me? I still love Blender!! :) I have high hopes for Blender and it's future. I think it helps if people like me give the input and use the software on a daily basis. And I wish more 3D professionals would do the same.

Keep up the good work everyone!

X-Gift
BlenderNation - 2012-07-20 16:00:27

[post introduction here] Simone Tomasello writes: Hi, I would like to talk about the Reibe Studios and our second short movie, X-Gift: Reibe Studios was born 3 years ago, by an idea of our teacher and productor Giovanni Gallo (who … Continue reading →

Graphics Card arrived!
Blender Development - 2012-07-20 14:59:57

I just installed the new GTX 580 you guys donated me:

I’ll keep you updated on related Blender development! Thanks again!

Cell Fracturing Tutorial
BlenderNation - 2012-07-20 12:00:27

This is a long video tutorial about the new voronoi cell fracturing tools in the new Blender 2.64 test build. Daniel Kreuter writes: This video contains: Information about how to activate the features A demonstration of what it can do … Continue reading →

Blender Network Launches August 6th
BlenderNation - 2012-07-20 09:04:37

I’m currently working with the Blender Foundation to launch the Blender Network at SIGGRAPH 2012! The Blender Network will be a service for Blender professionals, aimed at connecting them and further driving their business. It is our belief that creating … Continue reading →

Blender Network launches August 6th
Blender3d.org: Latest News - 2012-07-20 08:30:00

I'm very happy to announce that the Blender Network now will finally happen! After more than a year of brainstorms and trials I've managed to find Bart Veldhuizen (BlenderNation) interested to build and manage the networking website for us.

In short: the Blender Network is the Blender Foundation's partnership program, an online directory and social network for Blender professionals at blender.org.

It will help us realising three main strategic goals:

1) SERVICES & SUPPORT
We want to improve visibility for the outside world that Blender's being used by professionals, and that there's services being offered around Blender commercially as well. For example for integration and customising, development support, training and courseware, pipeline consultancy and for CG artwork and animation in general.

2) CONNECT, SHARE & GROW
Companies and professionals in our community need to get connected better. There's a lot of activities around Blender already, it's really time to map this out well and help everyone to find each other efficiently for projects or work together. Further growth of Blender as a professional product only can be established by a strong network of professionals themselves.

3 OPEN BUSINESS
We should support and stimulate business for professionals, with everyone who's visiting the website. For that reason all information about Network Partners and their connections will be publicly visible, including contact details.

More details will be released soon, on the new network website that goes live on August 6, 2012 latest.

More information: whitepaper/proposal of 2010:
wiki.blender.org/index.php/Org:Foundation/BlenderNetwork

BlenderNation announcement, with discussion:
www.blendernation.com/2012/07/20/blender-network-launches-august-6th/

Amsterdam, July 20th 2012

Ton Roosendaal
Blender Foundation chairman

Model: Assault Craft
BlenderNation - 2012-07-20 06:00:55

By Kuhn0362. Kuhn0362 writes: So I decided it was time to work on my texturing skills (got some great brushes and advice from YAZJACK). Unfortunately, most of my stuff was too high-poly for the...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Process to Go – Pandeia Episode 15
processdiary.com - 2012-07-20 01:03:17

A long episode today. Lots of pandeia talk, but in the second half, some in-depth stuff about Anthology8.com.

Also, are you an independent artist? There might be something missing from your plan to get your stuff more noticed. But before you go out looking for that one-step solution, there are some things you need to get straight. I talk about the type of PayPal account you might need to set up, tax considerations, and where to go to get your book an ISBN.

Here are some links you might find useful:

• ISBN.org 
• Lightning Source
• Paypal info on Business accounts

Being independent allows you freedom to do your story your way, but in losing the middle man, we have to take on the responsibilities that guy was getting paid for. Anthology8 is part experiment in trailing a proof of concept for independent comic art. There’s a lot of stuff I know works, but I have no real idea I the concept will yield results to our satisfaction. I’m always in contact with artists across the spectrum from independent to commercial, and I am getting a great overall view as to what is happening in the print and distribution arena. Independent is not a word which gives you immunity from the larger processes. There are print companies waiting for you to make contact with them.

Download audio file (TPD_P2G_PanE15.mp3)

Workflow demo: Conversions
Tears of Steel - 2012-07-19 22:03:22

This will probably be the most boring video of the whole project, but maybe someone finds it interesting. It is a timelapse demonstration of how we convert the footage from the RAW Sony F65 footage into something more useful, which in our case is OpenEXR in ACES Color Workspace. For that first conversion we have to use the F65 Viewer from Sony, which only runs on Windows and OSX, and also is not the most pleasant software to work with. Anyway, once we have the ACES EXRs we convert them to rec709 linear with OpenColorIO, which is Blender’s native colorspace, and we stay there as long as we can.

The whole workflow is maybe not very elegant, but so far it works quite well.
We also have to deal with 3 different naming conventions, which is the camera’s naming of the clips, the shotnumbers used on set (seen on the clapperboard) and the shotnumbers that we use here in the studio. Therefore part of my job is to keep track of the framenumbers, shotnumbers, In-Points, Out-Points, foldersizes, and so on. I have to find out which shot is used in the edit, which part of the shot is used and how long it is, in order to export and convert only what’s necessary.

After the conversions are done, and linear HD proxies have been generated, we erase the ACES files. Because oftherwise we would run out of diskspace very soon. Each frame is 50MB.

(Visit http://media.xiph.org/mango/ for original F65 Raw and OpenEXR downloads)

Les Chapelles
BlenderNation - 2012-07-19 06:43:55

By Georges Mignot Aka Meltingman. Georges writes: Hi, I just finished this picture for the BlenderGuru Contest. Made with Blender 2.63, Cycle and Gimp :-). You can find the blender and gimp logo in the picture :D. And this is … Continue reading →

Animating a Book in Blender – Part 05 – Rendering in Cycles
Blender Cookie - 2012-07-19 04:20:02

Hello and welcome to this tutorial series on how to animate a book with flipping pages in Blender 2.6!

In this advanced Blender tutorial by Stanislas Paillereau you will learn how to create a detailed animation of a book with turning pages. This tutorial uses simple methods that allow you to easily add as many pages as you would like, while also being easy to control and modify.

What you’ll learn :

In Part 5 of this series, we will do a nice render of the book using the Cycles render engine in Blender. We will create the shaders for the cover, binding, mass of pages and pages using some methods to have different textures in both sides of the page. We will also learn how to change the textures on the same page when flipping a second time during the animation.

 

JSFL Rocks
Nyquist Art + Logic - 2012-07-19 00:08:00

I've always loved being able to automate repetitive tasks. Whether using AppleScript with Quark or Lingo with Director in the 1990s, to shell scripting Solaris and OSX, Illustrator with JavaScript, or Python with Blender.

For some reason, I've neglected JSFL with Flash (JavaScript automation for Flash Professional). It's been in the software since 2004. Recently I started looking into it, given the amount of documentation on the subject I think I know why I waited, but now I wish I didn't. The thrill of being able to type a few lines of code to save you time and drudgery is addictive when it hits.

I just had a small but practical real world use of my newfound JSFL skills on a FLA I am building. I'd created 9 symbols and set there base class to flash.display.Sprite as I made each one. After the fact, I decided that the 9 symbols that I'd made sprites should really be flash.display.MovieClip. In less time than it'd take to open up each one's property dialog and reassign its base class, I was able to type run the following in my script:

function changeBase(){
for each( var i in fl.getDocumentDOM().library.items){
i.linkageBaseClass = "flash.display.MovieClip";
}
}
changeBase();

If you've never tried JSFL before, here are some simple steps to get started.

1. Create a text document with the JSFL extension.
2. Add your code.
3. From Flash, select Commands -> Run Command...
4. Find your JSFL file (from step 1)

Control tipo Joystick
malefico's rigging notes - 2012-07-18 17:59:25

Un control que siempre me resultó cómodo para disparar shapekeys faciales es el control de tipo Joystick o “4 shape slider” que describe Jason Osipa en su libro “Stop Staring”. El control funciona hacia arriba y hacia abajo disparando shapekeys simétricos. Por ejemplo los lados izquierdo y derecho de una sonrisa al moverlo hacia arriba o los lados de una mueca triste al moverlo hacia abajo. Al dispararlos a la vez obtenemos la sonrisa o la mueca completas. Pero si movemos el control hacia los lados, se modula disminuyendo la influencia de uno de los dos lados.

Lo bueno de un control así es que reduce la cantidad de controles necesarios y evita que shapekeys “contrarios” puedan sumarse accidentalmente.

Para el Mercator Project yo había configurado algo así usando Py-Constraints, pero desde la desaparación de este feature de Blender, no había logrado reproducirlo. Finalmente con un poco de trabajo lo he conseguido sin la necesidad de Python. ¿ Cómo funciona ?

Fijense en esta captura. Tenemos 4 huesos, cada uno con un constraint del tipo Transformation apuntando al hueso control principal (con forma de gamepad). Cada hueso copia la posicion del principal solo dentro de su “cuadrante” indicado en la figura (A, B, C o D). Así, mientras el control está en el cuadrante A (X e Y positivos), el hueso “smile.R” copia los movimientos del control en Y, pero si nos movemos al cuadrante B (X positivo e Y negativo), es “sad.R” el que copia el movimiento del control en Y. Cuando me muevo en X, ambos huesos copian la componente X del control.

De este modo, podemos obtener dos valores, que serían la INTENSIDAD del shape en cuestión (la sonrisa o la mueca) y otro la MODULACION que sería un multiplicador para ajustar el balance “izquierda-derecha” del mismo shapekey. Si nos mantenemos en el centro, la modulación vale 0, y ambos shapekeys (izquierdo y derecho) son mostrados al 100%. Si nos vamos para un lado o el otro, la modulación cambia y por tanto obtenemos una mezcla de shapekeys.

Con esto en mente, creamos los drivers necesarios para los shapekeys y usamos la expresión: INTENSIDAD * (1 – MODULACION) para hacer el cálculo, donde  INTENSIDAD y MODULACION serán los canales de transformación Y del hueso Joystick y el canal X del hueso con el constraint respectivamente. La curva será positiva o negativa dependiendo del valor que usemos en cada caso. Si estamos dentro de los cuadrantes negativos, en lugar de ser (1 – MODULACION) usaremos (1 + MODULACION) para mantenernos entre 0 y 1 como resultado.

¿ Por qué no usar directamente el canal X del hueso Joystick para modular ? Pues porque no está restringido en cada cuadrante, con lo que al pasar al lado “izquierdo” seguiria dando valores para los shapekeys del lado “derecho”.

Si es muy confuso, descarguen el archivo adjunto y veanlo por ustedes mismos

BlenderDiplom Modifier Contest
BlenderNation - 2012-07-18 15:11:35

Do you have what it takes to create a design using only Blender native primitives and modifiers? Join the BlenderDiplom contest and win! BlenderDiplom writes: Contest Rules: You may only use the Blender native mesh primitives. You may not use … Continue reading →

Video: Workflow of Digital Dictation
BlenderNation - 2012-07-18 14:00:28

By AgenZasBrothers. AgenZasBrothers write: Hi everyone, you may remember our last 3d animation for our client Grundig Business Systems. Now we’ve made another 3d animation for the same client....

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Blender at Swiss Summer Camp
BlenderNation - 2012-07-18 10:00:10

Kids in Switserland get a chance to learn about Blender. Alain (mcBlyver) writes: Hi everybody, I’m proud to announce that we are doing it again: Introducing Blender to a group of young people (14-15 years old). We allready organised this … Continue reading →

Model: P51 Mustang
BlenderNation - 2012-07-18 06:00:21

By jimbo45uk. jimbo45uk writes: I created this simple model of a P51 Mustang WWII fighter plane for a short animation project I am working on. The model has been kept fairly low poly (12258 faces) and I have UV unwrapped … Continue reading →

Time to come back…
The Mercator Project - 2012-07-18 01:40:42

Long time has passed and many things have happened in our lives in these long months with no news. News is the project has not died, it has suffered a transformation but it certainly has not died. These things happen to projects. More news coming soon…

Free download of physically based metals for Cycles
Blender 3D Architect - 2012-07-17 23:14:01

One of the best places to find references for Blender related material is Blend Swap, where you can find all sort of things uploaded by Blender users. There are free 3d models of furniture, procedural textures and much more. If you don`t have an account there, I suggest you to... Related posts:

1. Add-on for wire renders with Blender internal and Cycles A wire render has a lot of uses in architectural...
2. Free download of IES profiles for architecture One of the common tasks that an architectural visualization artist...
3. Free download of 3d seats for architecture For architectural visualization artists working with interiors, there are some...

Natures small common wonders
sanders3d | digital janitor - 2012-07-17 19:55:00

So a little blog post from my iPhone. The weather has been a bit weird, but offers some cool skies and dramatic lighting.
I've also taken a lot of walks in the forrest and found a place that had a huge amount of white moss.
All the photos are taken with my iPhone, so I have no idea on how they look on a computer :)

BlenderDiplom Modifier Contest
BlenderDiplom - Blender Tutorials and Training - 2012-07-17 18:16:43

how to remove the blender default-cube ... with style (part5) - explotion
Vimeo / Blender 3D - 2012-07-17 16:58:08

When starting a blender scene almost everybody removes the default cube. This is kind of sad and therefore I started thinking about who to remove it with style.

for this part I made it explode

local-guru.net/blog/2012/7/17/how-to-remove-the-blender-default-cube-with-style---part-5---explode

Cast: Nikolaus Gradwohl

Tags: blender and default-cube

APC v2
BlenderNation - 2012-07-17 14:00:10

By Yazjack. Yazjack writes: I fixed that ridiculous amount of textures, there is just 22 now ~230k poly including SubSurf. Also fixed textures themselves. There was a lot of texture painting involved Some tweaks to the model and scene, composition is … Continue reading →

Modeling a Computer Fan in Blender
BlenderNation - 2012-07-17 12:00:41

Learn how to model this computer fan with this video tutorial by Anandha Raja. Anandha writes: This is a two part tutorial, explained how to model a computer fan, and also you will learn how to use array modifiers and mirror … Continue reading →

Karen Beilharz talks Kinds of Blue
processdiary.com - 2012-07-17 11:08:57

Karen Beilharz wrote and produced a wonderful collection of stories in her book Kinds of Blue. She funded the project via pozible - Australia’s answer to Kickstarter – to print 500 copies thru whirlwindprint. She managed to secure funds for 142% which got funnelled into 100 more copies.

Karen produced this book during her pregnancy, and during being a first time mum! On top of this (yeah, as if that’s not crazy enough) she battles with depression herself, and is married to Ben who also suffers from depression.

Karen explains to me how depression is diagnosed… why she wrote the book… and we talk for a bit about being first-time parents to boot! She gives me a great insight into dealing with artists on an anthology, self-publishing, layout, and juggling those commitments with everyday life.

Up-front, I apologize for the noisy cafe. Last time I recorded it was much clearer. You can hear us, but it’s a tad noisy. Still, it may be impossible to re-create this exceptional chat with an exceptional person.

If you want to know more about Karen, you can follow her blog at http://hippocampusextensions.com/ and you can order your copy of Kinds of Blue using this link: http://hivemindedness.com/kindsofblue/purchase

Download audio file (Karen_Beilharz.mp3)

Fishes
BlenderNation - 2012-07-17 10:00:43

By M.Christopher Lee. M.Christopher Lee writes: Here Is my blender work…..modeling, texturing,lighting,rendered in blender internal…… Blender screenshot:

Makehuman: Corrected UV layout.
Makehuman - 2012-07-17 09:10:12

Blender production Challenges – Call for content (yes still a few months to go :)
Oenvoyage's Blender Blog - 2012-07-17 07:27:11

I'm Olivier, and I presented the Open-Stage blender Production Challenges at last year's blender conf. I would like to get your help for this year.

‘Liesl & Po’ Book Trailer
BlenderNation - 2012-07-17 05:57:39

By Digital Dreams. From New York Times bestselling author Lauren Oliver comes a luminous and magnificent novel that glows with rare magic, ghostly wonders, and a true friendship that lights even the darkest of places. Liesl lives in a tiny … Continue reading →

Env-art videos: dome library overview
Tears of Steel - 2012-07-16 19:17:49

This is the 2nd in a series of videos about my environment art work on project Mango (wait! – actually: Tears of Steel ! )

It’s an overview of: dome models library, tileable and specific textures and the greeble kits.

For the actual modelling and texturing there’s lot more to say, specific videos will follow, on individual areas and topics.

This mainly is about the assets organization: naming, grouping and linking: how i split things into scenes, named objects and materials to sort them, grouped objects so that they could be used as detailing greeble or as set pieces to link the sets into the final shots.

Of course: the whole assets management  pipeline is much bigger than what you see here Plus, things are still evolving and being optimized during production and creation of actual shots, other team members like Francesco Siddi and Sebastian Koenig have a better technical/organization overview and know the pipeline way better than me.

Still  this will be useful for modellers and texture artist looking for infos on how to sort and manage their assets.

Hope you enjoy the video!  More next week!

Review: Humane Rigging
BlenderNation - 2012-07-16 18:49:04

Terry Wallwork reviews Nathan Vegdahl’s ‘Humane Rigging’ DVD. Terry writes: Another month and it’s time to do another Blender Foundation Open Movie Workshop training DVD...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Weekly progress
Morevna Project - 2012-07-16 15:57:15

And here’s another delayed weekly progress.

What can I say? The last week was hot! We did a lot of work on animation, we have started working on 3d elements of the project and published two community calls…

Today is exactly a middle of the period dedicated to the Vectorization and Tweening task – according to the plan, we have 3 months for this and on 1st of September we should have all keyframes vectorized and animated. Well, looking at the production sheet I must admit – it’s not even a half of the work done yet.  Still this is usual situation and we still all have all chances to catch up. ^__^

As I mentioned in my previous post, we got awesome response from blender users on our community call for Ivan and Morevna models. Looking at the intermediate results I really believe that the models will be really awesome. Unfortunately, for some reason people avoiding the community call for soldiers models. That’s  a bit unexpected for me, because I really thought that it’s the funniest way to contribute. Comparing to Ivan and Morevna task it less strict on requirements and really lets your imagination flow. Maybe people treat this task as menial work? Or maybe it’s easier to create your own model than modify existing one? Or maybe it’s just too early for results? ^__^

One more thing to mention – Julia Velkova joined our team to polish the screenplay translation and last week she have finished stylistic editing of the first four (most complex) parts of screenplay. She’s very serious about this task and looks like we will have final version of screenplay translation available soon.

That’s all our news for the moment. Let’s have an awesome new week!

How to use the Amazon Web Services to render with LuxRender?
Blender 3D Architect - 2012-07-16 15:03:51

For everyone working with 3d modeling or animation, one of the critical aspects of any job is the render time. It is quite common to remove details or effects from materials in order to get the render done on schedule, or otherwise you will miss the deadline. One of the... No related posts.

‘Saperi e sapori’ commercial
BlenderNation - 2012-07-16 13:24:01

By Fab Design Fab Design writes: Hi, i wanted to let you know of our latest project, it is a commercial 2d animation created to publicize the event Saperi & Sapori in Bari, Apulia. All the animation in the video … Continue reading →

Weekly – July 13
Tears of Steel - 2012-07-16 13:06:13

All attention went to the teaser and new website, but we also had a weekly again! Here’s interesting files I copied for you here!

Animated by Jeremy, cleaning/render/composite by Sebastian:

Prometheus Unbound : The Making Of
Vimeo / Blender 3D - 2012-07-16 12:02:29

A behind the scenes look at the making of Prometheus Unbound.

Cast: Reban Robotics

Tags: blender, 3ds max, animation, vfx, mocap, motion, capture, stereo, 3d, tracking, robot, reban robotics, mycap studio, human, rigging, lightwave, cinema 4d, maya, emotion and drama

Maya SOuP BMesh vs Blender Skin Modifier
BlenderNation - 2012-07-16 10:16:34

Jimmy Gunawan compares Maya’s SOuP BMesh against Blender’s Skin Modifier. Jimmy writes: As you knew already Maya recently got BMesh via SOuP plugins allowing us to do quick meshing based on Joint similar to ZSphere inside ZBrush.. While on the … Continue reading →

Cartoon Village
BlenderNation - 2012-07-16 06:00:21

By Robo3dguy. Robo3dguy writes: Here is a set of cartoon village assets. Includes winter/Christmas themed models as well. Contains: Houses Cars Fences People Snowmen Candycanes Popsicles Everything is set up for Cycles. It’s all CC Zero, so use them however … Continue reading →

Macro Fun
Aligorith's Lair - 2012-07-16 04:16:00

It's been unseasonably nice and warm over the past few days (22.4 deg C yesterday, in the middle of winter). With a few flu-like illness scares and nose bleeds too, it was about time that I took a few days off from all the projects that have been keeping me busy for the past while. That's not to say that the past month of dedicated project time has been hard-slog; rather, compared to the madness of a few weeks back, the slower pace of research vs courses/classes was quite a godsend that didn't last long enough!). Anyways, some pics from around the house (as usual).

King of the Stack
Aligorith's Lair - 2012-07-16 03:59:00

SoftIK revisited
Tube - Epic Production Notes - 2012-07-15 21:40:51

I’ve done some prior experiments in Soft IK, but shied away for it in gilgamesh because the rig was getting too complex for it’s own good, and because I couldn’t find a satisfactory way of solving it in blender 2.5 and above (my 2.4 solution depended on py constraints). Since we have great drivers in 2.5/6 series, I thought I’d try it that way. The result is below:

I’m guessing only seasoned animators will see the difference. From left to right we have:

1. normal, non stretchy IK
2. soft, non stretchy IK
3. normal, stretchy IK
4. soft, stretchy IK

Ik softness basically takes  care of the ‘pop’ at the knee so common in IK when going from straight to bent (or vice versa). This works out because the speed of that joint non-linearly increases as we are close to straight. Good sources here and here (softimage blog). My solution for non stretchy is exactly the same as that blog post- plugging the equation into a driver. For the stretchy case it was a bit trickier and they diverge, but the mathematical result is the same.

I’m not publishing the .blend yet, nor can I use this as is in gilga because the solution depends on driving a bone within a bone inside the same armature; until I find a workaround or blender will successfully handle this case in the dependency graph, this solution causes lagging and errors (there are python frame update handlers here double calculating the rigs to make them behave)

Once I get this working I’ll publish a simple .blend.

Developer Meeting Notes, July 15, 2012
BlenderNation - 2012-07-15 20:00:40

Blender 2.64 is a tough cookie to crack – the bug count remains high and the release may be postponed until september. Ton Roosendaal writes: Here’s the notes from today’s meeting, irc.freenode.net #blendercoders 1) Blender 2.64 status Bugs bugs bugs… … Continue reading →

Week before OSCON
Tube - Epic Production Notes - 2012-07-15 16:47:26

Hello everybody! I’ll be going to Portland/Oregon and OSCON 2012 where I’ll be giving a talk about tube and meeting up with various great people- including tube contributors Chris Webber and Oscar Baechler. chime in if you’re going there, and let’s have tea.

This week was quite full. we’ve got a beautiful anim team who are going through their shots (perhaps I should post some snippets?) and we are now at only 17 shots left for character animation. (not counting assigned shots that are in progress) This might mean we will make our goal of getting 90% of the character animation done by the end of the summer… we shall see.

This was also the week of infinite recursion! Two blender crashers turned out to be due to infinite recursion errors in our files, to whit:

• we couldn’t link anything into one file without crashing. Joshua Leung found that one by looking at the backtrace – turned out we had a file with a group duplicator inside its own group.. tsk tsk.
• instantly crashing files! this is because newer versions of blender can’t cope with nodal materials that are referenced in their own groups. I found this one by looking through the bug tracker.

The rest of our team haven’t been idle: we have more progress on lighting , new effects in some shots using various techniques, such as dynamic paint, smoke, modifiers and careful keying. Our new sparkly pipeline is (mostly working) and we’ve introduced it to our new anim team. Since this is a rush post, I’m going to copy ton and post a few random images, with no explanation

next week might be slow, because of oscon, but I’m hoping we’ll make more animation progress, add a couple of small rig enhancements, get some new shots  into animation, and continue our work on models and layouts.

Hello world!
Blender Development - 2012-07-15 12:31:24

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Drums!
BlenderNation - 2012-07-15 12:00:38

By DeNapes. DeNapes writes: This model is similar to the normal drums but not entirely the same, because I only had a reference image. The reflections of the drums and cymbals are generated with an...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Community Call: Soldiers models
Morevna Project - 2012-07-15 08:06:54

Hey, everyone!

There was so much response about our previous call, so we decided that it will be bad to waste your attention just on two models.

Let me explain the situation. Right at the moment there are some artists working on the model of Ivan. No one is working on Morevna yet. EDIT: And now Morevna in the work too. But the thing is that we will be able to accept only one model of Ivan and only one model of Morevna. And at the same moment I keep receiving mails from awesome people kindly offering their help for the project. If we will have 4-5 people working on one model and just one of them finally credited, then it will be waste of resources, that will be unfair and kind of disrespectful to the Blender community. Of course, the target of our call was not only to get models, but also to find people who we can attract to the project in the future when the time will come. And of course, some people taking this work to (im)proove their skills and as result we will have amount of CC-licensed content available around. But still, for many of artists mention in the credits, the fact that their model is accepted and used is a very important as motivation.

That’s why we’re taking the moment to post the another call, which will extend the opportunities to participate.

I’m talking about soldier models. Right now we have a basic soldier model, created by Erik Castillo:

You can download it here:

soldier-1.zip

But for Morevna Project Demo we will need a lot of more soldiers to appear. The idea is to create 5-6 variations of this basic soldier. For example, change the body constitution, cloth elements, head shape, hairs – everything in your hands! In the Demo the soldiers play a role of punky bandits at some meaning. So you can free your imagination and the variations could be quite radical or funny.

Please look at the wiki page for more information about soldiers.

So, all you need is to download the model above, play with it and send it back to us! Easy, fun and safe. ^__^

This idea to attract the community for creating soldier models is surely not belongs to me – I have stolen it from the Durian project. Although in case of Durian the idea didn’t worked as expected, I think in our case it could work because the low-poly models are enough for us and we have no such demands as “photo-realism”, “high resolution textures”, etc. We will use models in long-distance shots only – that’s why it’s ok to keep them low-polygonal and low-detailed.

The cool thing about soldiers task: in case of Morevna and Ivan models we can accept only one (best) work. But in case of soldiers we have no limit in accepting results. 5 or 6? More? No problem! So the probability of model to be accepted and you get credit is much higher. The only requirement is the quality of the model. ^__^

Models are expected to be:

• Made with Blender.
• Low poly. We will use them for long-distance shots only.
• UV textured.
• Rigged with bones, IK.
• Intended to use with Blender Freestyle rendering engine. Though, the internal renderer is fine too.
• Provided under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Just in case if it wasn’t clear in previous call, I will outline few important moments:

• We can’t offer any monetary compensation for the models – everyone is working at Morevna Project Demo on a voluntary basis at the moment.
• If the model gets accepted then we guarantee the mention in the credits. Please note, that in order to be accepted your model should be provided under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution license. It means that you don’t mind if your model will be used/reused/modified in this or any other project as long as you are mentioned (credited) you as an author.

The models are accepted before August 15th.

So, join our efforts! Army MorevnaProject wants you! Contact us!

Mango Called ‘Tears of Steel’, Teaser Released!
BlenderNation - 2012-07-15 06:28:15

Ton Roosendaal writes: The open movie project Mango now has a title: “Tears of Steel”. A teaser edit with music by Joram Letwory has been made available now. The Mango project and blog will continue as usual – we’re far … Continue reading →

Red Scarlet Fisheye with Rendered Elements
Dalai Felinto - 2012-07-14 18:43:09

Some time ago Paul Bourke sent me some images he captured with the Red Scarlet and a 4.5mm lens. The result is really impressive. He can get a recording in crystal clear 4K at 30fps. Below you can see one of his images:

Wait, what is Suzanne doing there?

Ok, that’s not really his original capture. I wanted to explore how would be to insert virtual elements in a fisheye image. It shouldn’t be much different than integrating synthetic elements in a panorama (topic of some previous blog entries and a paper waiting for approval – more on that later this year ). And as it turned out, it’s ‘straightforward’-ish enough.

First take a look at the original image:

This is a cropped image, expanded vertically to fill the 180 FOV (field of view). This arrange of camera+lens+4k doesn’t give you a full frame fisheye nor a circular fisheye. As a curiosity, the Red Scarlet can get a complete 180 fisheye circle if the photo is made in 5k. However you can’t get a 30fps movie capture at that resolution.

In order to use the IBL Toolkit for the scene reconstruction I first generated a full panorama (360×180) out of the original fisheye photo. I used the open source tool Hugin for that.

Be aware that Hugin has a bug in the calculation of the  focal length multiplier for equisolid fisheye lens (basically it’s using the full frame fisheye calculation for all its fisheye modes). Actually if you know someone involved in Hugin/Panotools project, I would send her/him over this patch. As far as I can tell the fix is along these lines. I couldn’t manage to compile Hugin though, so I don’t feel like sending a not-working patch for their tracker.

Back on topic … this is the image I got from Hugin (using 4.5 as lens and 2.35 as scale factor for equisolid – 2.35 was eyeballed because I couldn’t find in the internet the sensor size of the 4K capture for the Red Scarlet, and remember, once they fix the software the input would have to be different):

Once I got the full panorama the rest of a piece of cake. This scene is perfect for the IBL Toolkit (this square in the front plane is practically screaming “Calibrate with me !!11!!”).

And a render from a different angle (where glitches are expected). I used the Project UV option of IBL Toolkit to project the corresponding UV in the panorama to the subdivided meshes.

Final considerations:

• I really wish Blender had a shadow-only shader to help integrate support meshes, synthetic elements and a background plate.
• I’m pretty sure Blender Institute crew worked nicely around that for the Tears of Steel project. I’m still waiting for them to finish the movie and release the files though.
• The lighting is indeed bad here because the original plate was a LDR, not an HDR, so I didn’t have the lighting of the scene (and didn’t want to bother recreating it – thus you see no shadow in the original scene support elements).
• If I had the HDR I would use Luxrender (AR Luxrender actually) for the render
• IBL Toolkit should be called Pano something instead, anyways
• I forgot to say that the final render was only possible due to the Fisheye Lens in Cycles, a patch that I wrote on top of Brecht’s original full panorama code and is already on trunk (and will be available in Blender 2.64).
• In fact I’m sure I could have fisheye implemented as an input option for the IBL Toolkit (discarding the need of Hugin). That would help to output the content in the exactly same position as the original camera (if you put them side-by-side you can see they have a slightly different orintation).

I’m planning to present a complete framework for working with panoramas and virtual elements in the Blender Conference this year. Even though this is based of my work with Aldo Zang (using Luxrender and not Blender) I think it can help to inspire possible solutions for Blender. So finger crossed for the presentation to be accepted and I hope we can make it interesting. The original paper (submitted to CLEI 2012 goes by the name:

Production framework for full panoramic scenes with photo-realistic augmented reality

So stay tuned, (and enjoy the Summer, Vancouver is finally sunny \o/)
Dalai

(thanks Paul Bourke for authorizing the re-use of his image, consider giving his website a visit, its one of these corners of the internet that will keep you busy for a long time)

Morevna Project is looking for 3D artists
BlenderNation - 2012-07-14 12:00:41

The Morevna project needs a hand with the animation of their main characters. Konstantin Dmitriev writes: Morevna Project is an effort to create free-culture anime with free software, it was covered by BlenderNation a few years ago. Much like in … Continue reading →

“Tears of Steel” – Blender Foundation Open Movie Teaser
- 2012-07-14 10:03:47

After 4 months of  work the Mango Project team can finally present the teaser to the shortfilm “Tears of Steel” that will be finished end of August. We have worked hard to get our pipeline to work and to create the tools we need to produce this movie. Since everything has to be done with [...]

Summer and rain
sanders3d | digital janitor - 2012-07-14 09:33:00

Summer and rain offers a opportunity to take some nice bokeh photos. This one is from last year, but now that I have my vacation... I'm pretty sure there will be a lot of rain and opportunities.



Taken with my D70

Cabin in the Woods
BlenderNation - 2012-07-14 06:00:40

By Jonathan L.

GSoC BGE Fixup Status Report Week 8
Moguri's Blog - 2012-07-14 04:34:49

What did you do this week? This week was a rather slow week for me as I was busy with other things and waiting on files. However, I’ve fixed some memory leaks in both trunk and Swiss that I found using the handy Visual Leak Detector. I also wrote up a Game Engine release log [...]

Meetup: Seattle, Saturday July 14
BlenderNation - 2012-07-13 22:00:35

Blenderheads in Seattle are meeting this saturday. Oscar Baechler writes: Where: AIS North Campus, 2601 Alaskan Way, (probably) Room 104, Seattle WA When: Saturday, July 14, 2 to 5:30 What: Blender! In addition to the other stuff listed here, we’ll … Continue reading →

“Tears of Steel” – Teaser
Tears of Steel - 2012-07-13 17:33:32

An epic teaser deserves an epic blogpost.
So here it is:
TEARS OF STEEL

HD mp4 download/play: tears-of-steel_teaser.mp4

Also cheers to Francesco for our new website!

Model: Millenium Falcon
BlenderNation - 2012-07-13 10:00:16

By kuhn0362. kuhn0362 writes: The fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy… NOTES: “High Poly” is an understatement- this thing has almost a million vertices. I was making it for a large...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Another Blender Rip-off: 3DMofun
BlenderNation - 2012-07-13 06:03:46

Yet another example of a company that removes credits and rebrands Blender. The Chinese community has done some research into them and Ton Roosendaal reports. Link 3DMofun – shamelessly removing credits

"DEADSTAR"
Vimeo / Blender 3D - 2012-07-13 00:58:15

Deadstar follows the adventures of Harrison, a space traveler that encounters a lost girl, Panala, on a distant planet. As her mysterious origins begin to unravel. Harrison learns that Panala may have acquired a strange power that may not only be a danger to him but to the entire universe.

Cast: Brandon Wright

Tags: deadstar, brandon, wright, anime, cartoon, animated, short, film, animation, space, action, science, fiction and stars

Idaho Forest Photos
ThruDreamsgate's Blog - 2012-07-12 16:27:35

Well I am getting caught back up. I think I fixed my Google Docs vs Drive problem. I’m waiting to hear back from my proofers to see if all is well. (Seems they can get in now, Whoot for me!!!  ) Then I went through all the forest photos I took while camping. I deleted [...]

Green Woods
BlenderNation - 2012-07-12 14:00:54

An INCREDIBLE render by major4z. See BlenderArtists for background information.

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

square
Matt Ebb - 2012-07-12 13:19:10

near emir sultan mosque, bursa

Blender at Campus Party 2012 Berlin
BlenderDiplom - Blender Tutorials and Training - 2012-07-12 12:50:21

Quick tip – Cycles Viewport Preview Fix
BlenderNation - 2012-07-12 10:00:17

If you have a fast GPU, then this tip by Austere Grim will be a huge improvement of the Cycles preview quality!

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Animation test from Pepeland-School
sanders3d | digital janitor - 2012-07-12 07:42:00

I've had my eyes on this fantastic school in Spain started by Daniel Martinez Lara, Pepe-School-Land. It looks to me that they are doing a fantastic job, and they create some really nice animations. They are in the process of making a new short film called "Alike". It's very nice to see that someone is doing to really nice high-end animation work in Blender.

I recommend that you are a frequent visitor to the blog, even though it's not being updated a lot.
http://www.alike-short.blogspot.com/

Animation test for the short film Alike
http://vimeo.com/45224512

This is a previous short film that they have made "changes".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc-5o0-wqec&

Hair Factory v1.0
BlenderNation - 2012-07-12 06:00:22

‘Bake’ particle hair into a low-poly hair model with the Hair Factory by MajorNightmare. MajorNightmare writes: Here’s an easy way convert Blender’s pretty particle hair into a Low Poly...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

"Alike" anim tests
Vimeo / Blender 3D - 2012-07-12 02:11:46

Animations test from "Alike"
Just to test the pipeline, rigs, animation tools, render, etc ...
so this footage is NOT the Alike short itself, just animation tests.

Made in Blender 2.62

More info at alike-short.blogspot.com.es/

Cast: psl

Tags: animation, blender and 3d

Process to Go – Pandeia Episode 14
processdiary.com - 2012-07-12 00:54:56

Some insights into printing costs, local vs international, and what it means to be an independent, international artist on the internet.

I’ve been moving in new artistic circles, and it’s been extremely productive. While still doing the indie comic thing, it’s beneficial to keep in contact with artists who have worked in commercial projects. They are invaluable as mentors and contacts, and support up-and-coming artists.

I’ve learned about a new P.O.D service which sounds really promising called lightning source. It is a print-on-demand service, which will distribute your book via channels which reach a wide market. They also will print in three countries depending on where the order comes from. This means that an Australian order will be printed and shipped from within Australia; a US order will be printed and shipped within the US. This saves a lot of time, and saves of shipping costs for the buyer. That’s a win for me.

A soft-launch of Anthology8 - the next step in evolution for some of us from the Illopond. It’s a new website where we will be marketing new work to a wider market. We’re still researching avenues for printing, selling our goods on the internet, and how we’re going to include future artists. We’ve got a common goal, and will eventually open this up, but for now we’re testing the waters. Please drop by and check out the forums, the blog, and subscribe so you can see how we do what we do.

My role was simply setting up the website and social media for it, but the others are going to soon work their magic on the very first book under this brand. As they work, I’ll be solidifying the marketing strategy and working out all the nuts and bolts. It really is a case of jumping of a cliff and building our wings on the way down!

A small chat about contracts: should you write one, even if you’re doing independent work? Well it depends if you’re going to be BFFs forever. it’s really not as nasty as it sounds. A contract is simply a legally binding document which outlines what you intend to achieve and how. If anyone ever has any doubts or questions about it, they can always check it. It can be as simple or as complex as you like… but simpler is definitely better. I encourage anyone who is working on something where money will be involved to write up a contract.

Lastly: am I the anti-Chris Oatley? *jokes* Where Chris offers loads of inspiration and keeps you pumped about being creative, do I tend to be too much of a realist? Sometimes I reckon I do get a bit too obsessed with the nuts and bolts, but hey: someone’s gotta be the grease-monkey!

Next week – a special interview with a local independent author and her brilliant comic anthology about depression.

Download audio file (TPD_P2G_PanE14.mp3)

Paper Jams
Aligorith's Lair - 2012-07-12 00:19:00

Just my luck: while trying to print off some stuff this morning, I ended up with a bit of a problematic paper jam...


Somehow, a sheet of A4 paper had become crumpled/folded in the printer, with one corner of it sticking out like an origami flame or napkin (as seen above), and the other end wedged firmly underneath the print head (as seen after opening the lid). Unfortunately, things weren't a lot better from the print tray - a narrow < 1 inch slit 2-3 inches deep - where a mere 1-2 cm of paper was still visible.

Read more »

Creating a Realistic Head in Blender – part 06 – Eyes
Blender Cookie - 2012-07-11 19:38:53

Hello and welcome to this tutorial series on creating a realistic head in Blender 2.6!

This is a complete tutorial series explaining the creation of a realistic human portrait with Blender. The entire process will be covered from base mesh modeling, detail sculpting, texture painting, hair growing and styling, sub-surface scatter shading, and compositing. Some of the more time-consuming tasks will be time-lapses with commentary like modeling, sculpting, and texture painting; the other parts will be mostly real-time.

Part 6 is all about the eyes which are paramount in achieving a believable result. From modeling to texturing-painting to shading, we’ll create realistic eyes by artistically interpreting human eyeball anatomy. Some of the texture is sourced from Google and some hand-painted in Blender/Photoshop. Blender Internal is utilized for rendering. Textures and images are packed into the .blender file.

DISCLAIMER: We cannot redistribute these references, due to the license, but we can use them under Fair Use laws for educational purposes. They’re not available for commercial use, though.

Music: “So Kill Me” by Minimal Art (http://ccmixter.org/files/minimal_art/8652) and “Grapescape” by Grapes (http://ccmixter.org/files/grapes/12748)

Note: This series has been previously available on Kent’s Vimeo channel but he has kindly permitted us to repost them here in order to reach a greater audience. All parts will be available on Blender Cookie very soon, while part 05 will be available exclusively on Blender Cookie.

Blender 2.64 Test Builds Available
BlenderNation - 2012-07-11 19:29:18

The Blender Foundation has released a first set of test builds for Blender 2.64! Check out the preliminary release log to see what’s new. As always: test, test, test and be sure to report any bugs to the Blender bug … Continue reading →

Ara’s Tale
BlenderNation - 2012-07-11 18:00:40

Martin Lubich worked for a staggering three years on ‘Ara’s Tale’, and the result is beautiful. Martin writes: This movie was created in my sparetime over the course of 3 years. It was produced in the spirit of an Open … Continue reading →

And I’m Back!
ThruDreamsgate's Blog - 2012-07-11 17:08:43

Well okay I was actually back yesterday. But between unpacking and general tiredness, I was too tired to do much of anything else. I did brave checking my email and almost had a heart attack. I had over 600 emails and an additional 1200 spam mails to sort through. The spam just got deleted, but [...]

Community Call: 3D models of Ivan and Morevna
Morevna Project - 2012-07-11 16:33:52

Attention, Blender artists!

We are looking for volunteer Blender modeller who can make a 3D models of our two main characters – Ivan and Morevna. The models are going to be used be used in the Morevna Project Demo and for reference drawing. And yes, we plan to use them in the next parts of Morevna Project.

Models are expected to be:

• Made with Blender.
• Detailed enough, like here or here. Though, the models will be used in long-distance shots only (there will be no close-up face shots), so detalization shouldn’t be too high.
• UV textured (black and white lines are enough).
• Rigged with bones, IK – something like this.
• Intended to use with Blender Freestyle rendering engine. Though, the internal renderer is fine too.
• Provided under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

We need models finished by the 15th of August. If you are interested, please contact us!

EDIT: Please take a look at this page for some comments on this call and others alternatives to contribute.

New realistic teeth model
Makehuman - 2012-07-11 16:10:25

Tracking, Keying and Layout. Workflow Demo.
Tears of Steel - 2012-07-11 14:57:14

Here’s a little timelapse of the general workflow for our keying shots.
First we track the camera and save that as a blendfile. From that file we generate a new file that is then used as base for masking and keying. The tracking markers can often be re-used as a way to mask out stuff from the footage.
The cleaned footage is then saved as 4k openEXR files with premultiplied alpha channel.
A third blendfile is created as a base for that layout, swapping the footage for the clean plates and setting up the final shot dimensions (1920×800). That file is then handed over to the person that is then doing the layout for it. The scene layout for this scene was originally done by Andy.
Usually after the main composite is done I fix some alpha-blending issues that cannot be solved in the pre-key outside the main composite.
The key that you see here is still a little but too harsh on the one side of the head, but for the demo I didn’t want to tweak it too long.

Dailies
Tears of Steel - 2012-07-11 13:14:43

Very cool to see the crew doing dailies now (not every day but alas… :). Doing art crits and reviews is a great added value of being in one studio together.

Book: Blender 3D Basics
BlenderNation - 2012-07-11 12:45:53

A new Blender book by Gordon Fisher has hit the shelves. Gordon Fisher writes: Packt Publishing is proud to announce Blender 3D Basics. Blender 3D Basics takes the beginning Blender user through the process of doing 3D animation with Blender, keystroke … Continue reading →

Wave Equation
BlenderNation - 2012-07-11 06:00:52

  Enrique Sahagun exports mathematical data to Blender for visualization. Enrique writes: I’m converting Blender in a graphing software. As a theoretical physicist I generate a big amount...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Back from festival
Morevna Project - 2012-07-10 19:24:43

Last week I have spent 5 days attending the festival of children’s animation “FireBird” in Novosibirsk. We had a screening of the work done by kids under my direction and got some awards. One of the important festival events was a meeting with Plenipotentiary Presidential Representative in the Siberian Federal District Viktor Tolokonsky. The talk haven’t touched Morevna Project directly, but some of our latest achievements were mentioned.

The bottom side of this event is that I almost haven’t worked on Morevna during those days (you probably noticed the the missing weekly progress post). That means I am working this week with double efforts. Right now I’m reviewing all the work done by Nikolay during my absence.

Also, people reported the instability of the Synfig packages we provided in previous post. Looks like my approach for fixing “on-close” bugs was a bit wrong. Now I have made a different fix – it should be much more stable now. Please grab binary packages from the software page.

One important note. Looking at our modifications people may think that the main Synfig developers are inactive at the moment. This isn’t true. Last months Carlos Lopez Gonzalez and Nikita Kitaev are working hard on implementing cairo-optimized rendering engine for Synfig Studio. This should give a major performance boost for the workarea redrawing operations and it is critical step for the whole project development. And of course this is a way more complex task than the tiny modifications we did. This is a long road, but I believe – they will succeed.

That’s all for the moment – back to work!

Prometheus Unbound (Actor)
Vimeo / Blender 3D - 2012-07-10 15:47:18

Same as the original Prometheus Unbound video, this time with MOCAP actor.

Motion Capture
--------------------
Software: MYCAP Studio 2012 Pro
Cameras: 2xLogitech Webcam Pro 9000
Markers: white stickers with center cross
Lighting: sunlight

Rendering
--------------
Software: Blender Cycles
Hardware: Core i5 2500, 8GB, Geforce GTX560 Ti
Total render time: 50 hours (CUDA)

For more information visit rebanrobotics.com

Cast: Reban Robotics

Tags: blender, 3ds max, animation, vfx, mocap, motion, capture, stereo, 3d, tracking, robot, reban robotics, mycap studio, human, rigging, lightwave, cinema 4d, maya, emotion and drama

Chromatic Aberation - Enough is Enough
Aligorith's Lair - 2012-07-10 13:44:00

It's a funny situation: many if not most photographers wish it would go away, with some going to expensive (quite literally) extents to avoid/minimise its effects. And yet, we as CG artists are all too trigger-happy to apply it liberally, adding into nearly every comp, and boosting the intensity until its effects are smeared across the screen for the world to see. Enough is enough!

If you've ever had to sit through more than a few multi-hour long presentations with a bad-quality/uncalibrated projector that's giving 2-5 cm color-fringe shifts (yellow/blue or red/green in opposite directions on one or more axes), eyeballed a batch of photos (*) only to notice that they're blighted with severe fringing in the worst/most noticeable places, then perhaps you'd think twice before trying to apply this effect next time. At the very least, if you must have it, keep it down to 1-2 pixels max. Please.

Read more »

Ara's Tale
Aligorith's Lair - 2012-07-10 12:50:00

Three years in the making, Martin Lubich has finally released his short film "Ara's Tale" - an impressive solo effort, especially for a project done during spare time and in Blender nonetheless :)

• http://www.loramel.net/ - Author's (Production) Blog
• http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?162804-Ara-s-Tale-short-film-wip  - WIP Thread
• http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?260296-Ara-s-Tale-a-short-film - Released!

Overall, a beautiful film. Kudos to the sound and music team too for their great work, which takes this to the next level indeed.

Read more »

Journal Cover Designs
BlenderNation - 2012-07-10 12:00:42

Some very slick cover designs by ibworlds. ibworlds writes: Here are some cover designs I recently put together for a series of policy journals, done in Blender. I chose a clean, more NPR-style to...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

timelapse: cleaning background plate (WIP)
Tears of Steel - 2012-07-10 11:36:19

for a wide angle shot we needed a clean plate that’s going to be mixed with holographic effects of amsterdam. unfortunately there was no clean plate shot, that’s why we had to clean it up by hand in gimp. for the scale to look more correct, a lamp had to be removed. also the shadows had to match the footage shot on that day and people on boats and in the street had to be erased.

this is a timelapse recorded during the photo touchup process. there’re still some obvious mistakes, but since this is only the base of the background for that particular shot I hope they will not draw any attention.

before:

after:

Alien Invasion 2
BlenderNation - 2012-07-10 10:00:08

Beniamino Della Torre is back with the second part of his epic ‘Alien Invasion’ trailer! Read on to learn more about him and his project. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? What is your background? Ok, I’m … Continue reading →

Ara’s Tale is Released !!
Blender Minutes - 2012-07-10 09:27:58

After 3 years in the making, finally is the moment of truth:

I proudly present the release of Ara’s Tale !

Writer/Director: Martin Lubich
Music: Philippe Rey
Sound: Mikkel Nielsen

Watch the movie online on

Youtube
Vimeo

or directly download the movie files from the following links. I have provided links to google drive and dropbox. (note for the links into google drive: to download it, you have to open the menu and select ‘download’ or just hit ctrl-S)

!! The alternate links (dropbox) are all down at the moment. Dropbox has dicontinued serving these files due to excessive traffic. I am really sorry for this !!

• 1080p, h264, 5.1 Sound (968MB; alternate link):
  This is the highest quality visuals with the ultimate 5.1 sound. Use this if you have a 5.1 equipment at hand. The movie deserves it.
•  1080p, h264, stereo Sound (960MB; alternate link):
  This is the highest quality visuals with a stereo downmix from the 5.1 sound.
• 720p, h264, stereo Sound (300MB, alternate link)
• 480p, h264, Stereo (59 MB, alternate link):
  This one is intended for mobile devices with reduced resolution and lower bitrate.

I developed this short over the course of the last 3 years in my spare time. Which started as a simple naive idea, soon grew into something hugely complex, but in the end utterly rewarding.

Without the work done by Phil Rey (Music) and Mikkel Nielsen (Sound) this movie wouldn’t be what it is today.

Without  the work done by Phil Rey (Music) and Mikkel Nielsen (Sound) this movie  wouldn’t be what it is today. I want to express my deepest gratitude for their work and dedication throughout the project.

Thank you Mikkel and Phil !

This short is intended to be seen and heard. So turn on the volume when watching this short.

I also want to thank all who have given feedback and have shown their interest in this project. This gave motivation in times when everything seemed hopeless . Thank you!

The full movie is licensed under a Creative Commons license (CC-BY-NC-ND). The movie was created in the spirit of an Open Movie, thus I am in the process of preparing all the production material for release under a CC-BY license as well. With this a visuals only version of the movie with a CC-BY license will be released as well.

Enjoy the movie. Any comments and/or critique are highly appreciated and encouraged.

If you like the movie, please spread the word. If you don’t, spread it nonetheless

CFD Simulation of Car/Caravan Combination
BlenderNation - 2012-07-10 06:00:51

Scientific visualisation of some ‘computation fluid dynamics’ data. Henry Pang writes: This is a CFD (Computation Fluid Dynamics) simulation of a car/caravan combination using a DES modelling technique conducted by the CFD Consultancy, TotalSim. The movie was rendered in Blender … Continue reading →

Seattle Meetup: July 14
BlenderNation - 2012-07-09 22:00:03

Blenderheads in the Seattle area are meeting on Saturday, July 14th. Oscar Baechler writes: The next Seabug’s coming up July 14th, 2 to 5:30 PM, and we need some intrepid volunteers to show off some cool Blender stuff! There won’t … Continue reading →

Modeling a Soccer Ball in Blender
BlenderNation - 2012-07-09 18:00:32

A short videotutorial by Blender Cookie. Jonathan Williamsom writes: In this Blender tutorial, Jonathan will show you how to easily model a soccer ball in only a few minutes time by starting with a regular solid in Blender 2.6. During … Continue reading →

The Dome!
Tears of Steel - 2012-07-09 16:59:05

Dome view on bridge with captured robot. Central set in our movie. Dome environment by Nicoló, Robot by Kjartan and Matte rendering by Andy.

Developer Meeting Notes, July 8, 2012
BlenderNation - 2012-07-09 12:00:35

Despite holidays (I’m currently in France myself ;-), Blender development continues! Ton Roosendaal writes: 1) Status of 2.64 release and the current code Bug tracker… keeps sadly being...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Improved result validation, stability enhancements, future plans
Renderfarm.fi - 2012-07-09 09:07:02

For the past weeks I've been working on a new mechanism that handles our validation of results computed by our users.

We used to have a pixel-by-pixel comparison, with a small error tolerance hard-coded for the different file formats (PNG, EXR). The problem with such a comparison is that between different platforms the same rendering process can result in very small numerical differences. These differences are so small, that in most cases our eye can't distinguish between such results. Unfortunately, doing a pixel-by-pixel validation using their absolute values can quickly trigger the error tresholds, especially for larger images, invalidating results that good.

The solution to this dilemma is to use a computational model that simulates the human visual system. This is known as http://pdiff.sourceforge.net/ypg01.pdfPerceptual Difference. Based on information found through pdiff.sourceforge.net the idea was to implement this technique from the ground up, but after some time and tests I determined that it was better to outsource it to the already working implementation that the tool PerceptualDiff already provides. Apart from being able to use a proven implementation our system also benefits from a lowered memory requirement to do the validation in this manner.

The robot model was made by Arto Harju / Samuli Jomppanen.

The main problem for me to solve became the question: What result image to use as reference? Normally one would use PerceptualDiff in a controlled environment, where the reference image is known beforehand. On Renderfarm.fi it is not the case, we get a number of results from which we can't directly tell if they are actually correct.

Our current system will calculate a special value for each result. The system picks the result with the value closest to the average in the result set. Using the selected reference result all other results will be validated. If PerceptualDiff determines that the images differ perceptually such a result will be invalidated.

The tests we have conducted show that this process is quite robust: even sessions with very low amount of AO samples get properly validated, despite minor differences in results from different platforms.

This means that finally we can render sessions again on all supported platforms instead of assigning them to one operating system only. This will improve the overall performance of our grid for sessions, and everyone will be getting an equal quantity of work.

Other improvements and future plans

During this summer we've been mainly focusing on fixing open issues and improving the service performance. A number of smaller problems have been eradicated (zip corruption that jammed sessions, clients crashing due to library issues, OS X computers not getting work, automatic file deletion after 2 weeks, &c.), and we'll be focusing on this for a while longer. We'll be observing how the new validator behaves and giving it some patches when it shows signs of bugging, although it is expected to perform excellently. 

The uploader was given a small feature update which makes login automated once you have done it once. This means that you no longer have to type your email and password every time you wish to upload new work to the farm. This was pushed to the Blender trunk this morning, and will be available in the next Blender version.

In the autumn we'll have the screensaver finally deployed for Windows machines and for other platforms when we have the Windows version working properly. We have also been looking at replacing all our old rendering clients with virtual machines by basing the software on the CernVM developed by the folk at CERN, but it would seem that the VM support for BOINC is not quite what we require, yet. We'll be continuing the work on this if it seems to be functional enough.

10 Motion Capture Tips
BlenderNation - 2012-07-09 06:00:24

Here is a good checklist if you want to work on a motion capture project. Delfeld writes: Given the popularity of the new Blender movie, Kinect, and other live action capture technologies, more people are becoming interested in motion capture. … Continue reading →

Process to Go: Pandeia – Episode 13
processdiary.com - 2012-07-09 02:52:19

Forgive the tardiness of this episode. I recorded it on time, but due to sick kid, and an interstate job, I was not able to edit and get it out. So this week, you get this episode, and the usual Thursday/Friday episode. I say “usual” because that’s become my schedule of late. :)

Talking Celtx this week – a brilliant app which is available for the iPad. I am really enjoying writing script on the fly, and Celtx does make it very easy – buttons exist to add pre-formatted headings. Now I used to think “why bother? I can write these myself as needed” but I am addicted. Having this program do the automatic indents, formatted uppercase, brackets or numbering for the parts of script you need allows you to think of the dialogue, layout and character. I feel as if writing is now an enjoyable experience.

What’s more: it saves to the cloud, and by logging in online, you can edit on your desktop, and even share the script with other Celtxz users should you need to collaborate with someone.

I talk a bit about script today, and what I think it lacks… but why I think it is important as a starting point. Here is a sample of the first two pages:

West-Cadian Ridge as seen from desert. The Menai glow faintly in the morning sky.

West-Cadian Ridge. Three days ago.

An explosion. A vehicle hurtles towards the foreground.

The vehicle crashes into the sand, bounces and…

Lands in foreground, upside down. A metallic logo – a bold M on top of a C – gleams clearly on the front: MASON CORP

Chapter 3: Marcus Blair.

Al K’mer. Wide shot. A large metropolis sits on an island, shaped like a great, black hand.

FIETTA NAVARA

It’s a disaster, ambassador. We only hope we can find a diplomatic solution before we resort to more… drastic measures.

Closer shot of city. A tower begins to stand out. It bears the same logo that was on the front of the vehicle. This is MASON CORP TOWER.

DAVID WINFIELD

The details, If you please, Ms Navara. The sooner, the better.

FIETTA NAVARA

Of course, ambassador.

Closer on MASON CORP TOWER. Close in on a large, Oval amber window. A zeppelin can be seen still tethered to a docking platform on the upper level.

FIETTA NAVARA

A prototype vehicle, and the vent miner piloting it, we’re lost to the Cadian desert this morning.

Close on the window. A silhouette of a gantry and two figures can been seen.

FIETTA

Salman Wedge – Blair’s colleague – was surveying from a distance and saw the whole thing. He’s been ordered to assist you in any way you need. I cannot stress how delicate this situation is.

Just silhouettes. A tall female hands an electronic tablet to a shorter, well-groomed male.

DAVID WINFIELD

Thankyou, director. We’ll be in touch.

No real spoilers. These pages kick off the issue, and as you see thumbnails posted, you’ll be able to see what cannot be expressed in script, but how that lack of expression allows for experimentation.

Another link I mentioned is for ISSNs. Here is how to register yours:

• http://www.issn.org/ is where to go to register for your FREE ISSN – this is different to ISBNs, because they are specifically for serial publications. There are a couple of steps, so after you register yours, you need to create a barcode – here is a free service to generate your barcode: http://www.terryburton.co.uk/barcodewriter/generator/
• Once you’ve created your barcode, download an EPS (so you can scale it – it’s vector) and put it on your cover before you send the file off to print.
• Finally, order at least 5 copies in print. You will need to mail 4 to various libraries mentioned on the ISSN website, but it’s good to keep one for yourself.

A quick plug for a couple of podcasts I will talk more about in the next episode:

First up: Escape Artist by Marshall Calmplex. Another “on the road” podcast about Marshall’s process when creating his projects.

Second: Candrai Comics by Michael Dambolt, in which he talks about the Behind the Scenes of his web-comics and graphic novels.

Both – I am proud to say – are fans of The Process Diary and both are emerging artists in their own right. Listening to their shows, I am reminded of the ending of that Christian Slater movie Pump Up the Volume.

This week’s podcast will be up in a couple of days!

Download audio file (TPD_P2G_PanE13.mp3)

Blender Game Engine Water Shader
Reyn's Blog - 2012-07-09 02:14:00

It's been awhile since BGE (Blender Game Engine) got something nice to show-off or at least something the community can truly be proud of; but alas, Martins Upitis got the guts to prove that BGE is in fact an aspect of Blender worth embracing.  I, for one, am a total noob when it comes to things BGE-related, but after watching this demo by Martins Upitis, it makes me want to come back and give it

Training Course: Low Poly Game Asset Creation – Fire Hydrant in Blender and Unity 3D
Blender Cookie - 2012-07-09 01:28:38

Create Low Poly, Game Ready Assets in Blender and Unity 3D!

Through this Blender and Unity tutorial you will learn how to create low poly assets for games. Over the course of this tutorial you will learn the high poly and low poly modeling techniques needed to create the fire hydrant subject matter. You will learn how to unwrap the UVs of the final low poly model and how to bake out normal maps, ambient occlusion and texture maps.

After the UVs are unwrapped and the baking is done we’ll take you into Photoshop to show you how to finalize the textures by adding the ambient occlusion and extra detail. Once the texturing is done we’ll go back to Blender and export the finished model out to an Autodesk FBX file and import it into Unity. In Unity we will then show you how to setup all the materials and textures and create a prefab for easy use in-game.

What You’ll Learn in this Course:

1. High poly modeling methods with minimal effort
2. How to create the low poly model quickly
3. Techniques for creating convincing low poly models with good silhouettes
4. UV Unwrapping and how to optimize your UV space
5. Normal map baking and how to deal with common problems
6. Baking ambient occlusion and color passes for easy texturing
7. Creating detailed texture maps in Photoshop
8. Making a specular map for good highlights
9. Mixing and improving normal maps with Crazy bump
10. Exporting the model out to Unity and setting up a prefab

Software Used:

• Blender 2.6+
• Photoshop CS 6
• Unity 3.5
• Crazybump

my blender encounters
sanders3d | digital janitor - 2012-07-08 21:13:00

So, I've been using it for a while now (again) and trying (again) to make it as my default application. And while it's getting closer, it's still a bit to go before I will actually try and put it into production as the base package.

Issue #1
I've "solved" one thing which as been really nagging me for a while, and that is how to select everything under a parent, and that includes having the parent still selected. In Blender you need to have all the objects in a hierarchy selected in order to duplicate it. So it's not enough to have just the parent selected. In Softimage you have something called "branch" select, which helps you, and in Maya you just select the parent and duplicate it.
In Blender it's a bit more complicated. But here is how you will do it

Mango: Materials Shaders Presets
BlenderNation - 2012-07-08 19:00:24

Nicolò Zubbini from the Mango team shares his Cycles materials workflow. Nicolò writes: It’s about materials in cycles , shaders-preset nodegroups in particular , next videos will be more strictly about modelling and texturing , but i’m starting with this … Continue reading →

Controlling Blender with a Wiimote
BlenderNation - 2012-07-08 15:49:20

An interesting project by Micah Denn. Micah writes: Modeling in blender using a Wiimote has a surprisingly natural workflow. Its Linux Mint12 using Gnome 3, I’m using libwiimote library’s...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Weekly – July 6
Tears of Steel - 2012-07-08 12:34:23

Here’s some picks of last friday’s weekly. Ian’s already having fun with playing with color spaces and tonemaps. “Film shit” he calls it!

(Actor credits: Jody Bhe, Derek de Lint, Vanja Rukavina, Sergio Hasselbaink, Rogier Schippers)

Siggraph Selection for “The Risk not Taken”
BlenderNation - 2012-07-08 06:00:42

Alex Glawion’s ‘Risk not Taken’ has been selected to be shown at the prestigious Siggraph Animation Festival! Alex writes: After the premiere of my most recent (blender) animated...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Meet Tiny
Reyn's Blog - 2012-07-08 05:36:00

(click to enlarge) Thanks to my older brother, Rommel Martinez, for the motivation. :) -Reyn

Game Engine Water Shader
BlenderNation - 2012-07-07 12:00:29

Here’s a GREAT water setup by Martins Upitis. Martins writes: This is a water shader I am working on in my spare time. The work is based on my own observations of water characteristics and written from a scratch. It … Continue reading →

environment art videos : materials shaders presets
Tears of Steel - 2012-07-07 11:20:53

Here’s a first tutorial/log about environment modelling and texturing.

It’s about materials in cycles, shaders-preset nodegroups in particular , next videos will be more strictly about modelling and texturing, but i’m starting with this because .. it’s just such a cool topic: while setting up textures for the dome it was necessary to organize them in a way that lighting and shading artists could make sense of it, tweak it or rearrange the material for the final shot .

So i started using nodegroups for organization… But it’s more than just keeping the node-tree tidy and readable, it speeds up material creation, keeps things consistent and allows to refactor and do quick ‘global’ changes on materials.

It’s also a good starting point to just discuss best-practices for texturing and shading in Cycles, so i’m looking forward to comments, and the presets you see in this video could be expanded with more types and variants (there’s quite a few threads on BlenderArtists i need to dig through :)

More to come, I’m still tuning the audio recording quality (I removed noise and normalized in Audacity, but my new soundcard is still misbehaving. It’s also tricky to find the right balance between doing many takes and editing more, to make the speech more fluid)

Pure python branch
Makehuman - 2012-07-07 10:32:06

Creating A Low Poly Ninja Game Character
BlenderNation - 2012-07-07 05:38:18

Learn how to model and texture this Ninja character in this two-part tutorial by Karan Shah. Karan writes: In this tutorial you’ll learn how to create a low poly ninja character model for games using Blender. The final model will … Continue reading →

GSoC BGE Fixup Status Report Week 7
Moguri's Blog - 2012-07-07 04:59:30

What did you do this week? I finally implemented an interface to work with asynchronous lib loading. I settled on a future object that can register callbacks as mentioned in this post on my feedback thread. As for the tracker, I managed to close eleven reports, but five new ones came in. The good news [...]

Blender 2.6 MultiCam Selector
Vimeo / Blender 3D - 2012-07-07 03:22:30

Tip: Dirección de cámaras en Blender,
Con el efecto de MultiCam Selector del VSE (Video Secuence Editor) puedes renderizar varias tomas en una misma escena.. :D

musica: cantecademacao.net
tutoriales y recursos en klibre.net.ve

Cast: Sergio Muñoz

Tags: blender, 3d, 2.6, multicam selector, vse, editor and video

B-Maxwell: Maxwell Render exporter for Blender
Blender 3D Architect - 2012-07-06 21:27:26

Last week I did a post listing some of the external renders available for Blender 2.6 and how they can help us to produce quality architectural visualization with Blender. And this week I found out that another big commercial render has now an exporter for Blender. I`m talking about Maxwell... Related posts:

1. Another comparison between Cycles, YafaRay and Blender Internal render Here is another study comparing the results of a render...
2. External render with YafaRay for architecture: Pool deck To render a scene modeled in Blender using advanced algorithms...

Weekly Meeting 06.07.2012
Tears of Steel - 2012-07-06 16:35:33

This week’s weekly, again via youtube.

Tool Kits and Good Fits
The Blender Show - 2012-07-06 15:21:39

We define ourselves in the 3D animation world by the tools we use. Should we be more indifferent about our software or more passionate about our digital hammers? Download .mp4

“Make Stuff More Real”
Tears of Steel - 2012-07-06 12:44:36

So!

Sooo……..

We’re making a movie. And it has a lot of VFX shots in it (110ish?). And they were not photo-real enough. So now we’re making everything more realistic! And keeping up with our quote of 50 seconds per week.*

You want to know what’s tricky? Staring at a picture that looks pretty good, but not entirely realistic, and trying to figure out what exactly is off about it.

It’s a really abstract place to be. Take a look at the image below. It looks like a reasonably solid game cinematic, but not exactly realistic. But what exactly is off? Of course you can always look at the models and find problems, but it’s something more than that, since the picture doesn’t look any more realistic if you step back and see it from a distance where the details are unnoticeable.

One of the biggest factors contributing to “The CG Look” in general is perfection, or a lack of randomness. You can see in the above picture a lot of the tricks we employed to try to get rid of that: haze, film grain, lens flares, destruction, a wee bit of diffusion, a narrow depth-of-field, angled boards, burned textures, specular maps, image textures, worn down edges on the robot, beveling, chromatic aberration (and though you can’t see it in the picture, some handheld shake shake and lens jitter (nothing distracting)). It’s a smorgasboard of tricks to try to convince you that the image looks too natural to have been made by a computer, and in a lot of cases you can take an fairly mediocre shot, throw some of those tricks at it, and have a great final render.

Though sometimes, as in this case, it backfires. Especially with Blender, chromatic aberration is an infamous cg ‘tell’, and lens flares have been overdone since the 90s.

It’s easy to find details that are off- things being out of scale, modeling being low res- but if a whole scene is looking weird, that’s usually a sign that the lighting itself is wrong. I’ve always considered it a good practice that if you render the scene all gray without textures, your lighting should still work.

Shooting day for night is a reasonably common practice where you shoot during the day, but put various filters in front of the lens to try to make the image look like it was shot at night.  It can work reasonably well under certain conditions, but one where it never really flies is when you’re trying to pass of sunlight as moonlight. It’s all about contrast. We know that the contrast between the light and shadow from the moon is far less than the light and shadow from the sun, and we don’t buy it (even if it’s tinted nice and blue).

That was a problem with the above shot. The sunlight’s intensity didn’t have the right ratio to the ambient light’s intensity. So to try to fix it, I brought in a picture from the internet that had the lighting that we were actually going for, and made everything match as well as I could. The color of the haze, the intensity of the light, and the shadows. It was a combination of doing the initial lighting setup in the viewport, then doing the final black-level tweaks in the compositor. At some point I might figure out a more automated way of balancing the sun/ambient lighting intensities, but until then, it’s all just eyeballin’.

Meanwhile, across the room, Rob was remodelling all the buildings like a madman.  I don’t want to talk about it too much, since I suspect he’s going to be doing a post soon, but he’s been incredible. He modeled dozens and dozens of buildings and city props. Initially he had burned out most of the roofs in the city, showing evidence of a massive robot war- but trying to get that level of detail and randomness on a citywide scale was proving a bit prohibitive (seriously- just try googling ‘burned building’. and imagine trying to model an entire city of that, that has to be realistic even in close-ups. Super tricky!)

So here’s where we’re at now. Not final, but definitely a lot better. Rob is still going through pumping up the resolution/textures of various elements (I suspect he’ll be irked by my uploading a WIP :P), and a bit of coloring/grading could be tweaked, but it’s a definite step up.  You’ll be able to see how the shot finally turns out when we release the upcoming teaser (soon!).

*One of the sentences in this paragraph is a lie.

How to setup artificial light for architecture with Blender internal render
Blender 3D Architect - 2012-07-05 20:33:19

Even with faster ways to light up a scene these days with render engines like YafaRay, LuxRender and Cycles we still find room for old school style lighting for architecture. If you want to learn a way to light up a scene using the Blender internal render and with some... Related posts:

1. Another comparison between Cycles, YafaRay and Blender Internal render Here is another study comparing the results of a render...
2. Free download of IES profiles for architecture One of the common tasks that an architectural visualization artist...
3. External render with YafaRay for architecture: Pool deck To render a scene modeled in Blender using advanced algorithms...

Voronoi Fracturing
Tears of Steel - 2012-07-05 14:05:54

In new builds of blender you will find under User Preferences/Addons/Object/Cell Fracture the new voronoi fracturing tool from Campbell Barton! It’s still under development, but already useful.

screenshot with all the options

and a example video:

(Sorry for the short post and the boring example video. Back to work!)

update!

fracturing in action in actual shot:

GSoC 2012 – Bullet Integration Progress Video 1
BlenderNation - 2012-07-05 12:00:58

Sergej Reich is working on the Bullet integration project for the Google Summer of code. In this progress video he demonstrates the new workflow that this will enable. And boy, you’re gonna...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Blender Book Review – The Complete Guide to Blender Graphics
Blender Cookie - 2012-07-05 06:00:44

The Complete Guide to Blender Graphics: Computer Modeling and Animation by John M. Blain

Hey everyone! I was recently sent a copy of a new Blender book and asked to share my thoughts on it. Rather than blab on like I tend to do in many of my tutorials I’ll just get right to it! I’ve broken my review up into several sections: Content, Printing Quality and Final Thoughts.

Book description from the Amazon page:

While Blender is a wonderful free and open source program for computer modeling and animation, there has been a lack of unified, up-to-date documentation for beginners. Removing the frustration from the learning process, The Complete Guide to Blender Graphics: Computer Modeling and Animation helps beginners understand the basics of computer animation using Blender.

The author begins with a detailed explanation of the Blender graphical user interface (GUI) and its method of navigation. He covers basic mesh modeling on both the object and sub-object levels. At this point, the beginner 3D modeler can create a wide variety of models. The author moves on to materials, camera, lighting, and rendering, allowing the creation of more complete models and rendered images. He also includes a section on animation. This sequence provides a solid foundation for the more advanced topics discussed in later chapters.

Alleviating the difficulties in learning Blender, this book provides thorough instruction on the basics of this 3D modeling and animation program.

View the table of contents and sample chapters HERE 

 Content

As with any software book, the most important aspect is the value of the content, followed closely by the quality of the presentation of said content. The first thing to note is this book is intended for beginning users. Intermediate and advanced users will not find much to ingage them here. However, assuming the reader is a beginner then this book provides quite a wealth of information.

As can be seen from the Table of Contents the book covers nearly every aspect of Blender 2.60, which was the newest version at the time of writing. It does not cover Cycles, BMesh or any of the other newer additions, but all of the information is still relevant. All of the content is presented in a reference-like manner, with short tutorials interspersed to help the reader directly. The book reads quite a lot like a textbook, which I find to be refreshing but could also be off putting to those people wanting a step-by-step production guide.

Let’s be clear, this book is much more a reference rather than a tutorial book. You won’t find any example projects and final results in the book. Instead you’ll find a large collection of quick guides on how to use each of the tools and aspects of Blender covered. If you’re looking for a production guidebook then this is not the one for you.

Printing Quality

In short, the print quality of this book is quite good! Every page is printed in full-color on high quality stock. Next to the numerous Blender books with poor print quality, sadly including my own, it’s great to see high quality printing for this title.

The only problems I found with the printing were a few screenshots that had to be scaled up dramatically for printing that saw some pretty severe artifacts.

All things considered, the print quality is not a concern with this book; I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Final Thoughts

All in all I was pleased. I think John has done a great job at simplifying the first learning steps for Blender. As many of you are surely familiar with, this can be a very intimidating and frustrating process. A reference book like this can really help ease the transition into Blender, even for those people that don’t have the first clue about where to start. If you’re a brand new Blender user or someone that is interested in learning Blender then you’ll likely find this Blender book a valuable resource.

However, what you won’t find in this book is any info covering workflow, the production pipeline, specific techniques, theory, or any of the other key items that factor into being a successful artist and Blender user. Granted, I don’t believe it was ever the author’s intention to cover any of these items and so I was not disappointed.

This book would make an ideal reference companion for a Blender classroom environment if presented by the right instructor.

Book Details:

• Paperback: 390 pages
• Publisher: A K Peters/CRC Press; 1 edition (April 16, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1466517034
• ISBN-13: 978-1466517035
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds

You can purchase this book from the Amazon page.

Battleship Yamato
BlenderNation - 2012-07-05 06:00:28

A very high detail naval ship model by GuillaumeCote. GuillaumeCote writes: So this is a replication of the Japan WW2 battleship Yamato. I have made it as accurate as possible with a high amount of polygon so the file will … Continue reading →

how to remove the blender default-cube ... with style (part4) - eat it
Vimeo / Blender 3D - 2012-07-05 04:53:08

When starting a blender scene almost everybody removes the default cube. This is kind of sad and therefore I started thinking about who to remove it with style.

for this part I made a pacman eat the defaultcube

local-guru.net/blog/2012/7/5/how-to-remove-the-blender-default-cube-with-style---part-4---eat-it

Cast: Nikolaus Gradwohl

Tags: blender, default-cube, cycles and pacman

2012-Jun-28 Doodles
Reyn's Blog - 2012-07-05 04:50:00

Presenting: Mikmik and Flords (click to enlarge) (click to enlarge -Reyn

Clarity Computer intro animation
Vimeo / Blender 3D - 2012-07-04 23:09:03

An intro animation for a client. Modeling/Animation/Sound by Joel Wagner.
Software:
Blender 2.63, Cycles render, After Effects CS6, Premiere Pro CS6

Copyright ©2012 Clarity Computer Svc. Used with permission.

Cast: Joel Wagner

Tags: blender, fluid, simulation, cycles, clarity, animation and intro

cloaked man
Matt Ebb - 2012-07-04 22:43:32

Chocolate!
BlenderNation - 2012-07-04 18:00:09

Teisson Froes from Ovnivfx sent in these luscious fluid tests.

Fun with Instancing in Cycles
BenSimonds.com - 2012-07-04 17:42:24

I’ve been experimenting more with cycles lately, and one thing I’m really impressed with already is the speed with which it handles instanced objects. I thought I’d share some silly experiments I made in the process and also a tip for using instances. It’s great fun to use instancing to create fractal-like structures out of [...]

Magical !
Blender Minutes - 2012-07-04 12:24:20

After 3 years of writing alone on this blog, it is now time to let the other team members have their voice and thoughts heard.

And it also helps a bit to shorten the waiting time until the final release …

Philippe Rey (www.phreymusic.com) was so kind to write a bit of his experience with working on the score for this project.

Thank you Phil for taking your time and a thousand thanks for enriching this movie with your wonderful music !

And now I step back and let Phil tell his tale …

_________________________________________________________

If one word can summarize my experience as a composer with Ara’s Tale, it would be : “Magical” ! (and also maybe “Nutella”…)

I met “by chance” Martin’s project in May 2010. I was immediately seduced by the magic  (and rigor) which was already emerging from his work at this moment.

I was so impressed that I fastly composed 2 minutes of music for one of his ”raw” video of Ara’s Tale, for fun, but with the slim hope of seduce him ! I wanted to be a part of the adventure !

I think he liked the music at this time, but unfortunately (for me) he was already working with another composer. (That day I sacrificed an entire jar of Nutella to comfort me – let’s call it jar number 1)

I continued to follow his project as a fan, and 7 months later, I was very surprised to receive an email from him asking me to finally work with him! I could not believe it ! (this day i had to murder a second jar of Nutella - jar number 2)

Inspiration has never missed me during these months of work, I think Ara has a powerful magic that infuses a breath of love and creativity. I think the problem was even the overflow of ideas !

The first step was the teaser for Ara, where we tried several approaches, then the work on the film finally began. Again, after several very interesting and very different attempts, we have finally understood how to approach the film. The rest of the score was easier to realize, I just had to follow the thread, to let me be guided.  Magical !

At half of the film we took a break. It was time to compose the song of Ara. I knew Martin expected much from the film score, and had a particular attention to this passage. In other words, I was under pressure! (jar number 3)

Like him I wanted a simple but captivating melody. I was initially afraid to
spend weeks on this song, and finally (again), the notes came very quickly, almost from the first attempt. Magical !

I provided the score to Martin, who later worked with Julia (the wonderful voice of Ara) to record the song. The result went beyond our expectations.

We also had to make some adjustments to allow the score and sound design to work perfectly together. Mikkel, our Master of Sound, did a fantastic job. We all had fears that the score and the sounds cannot coexist in harmony sometimes, and finally, again, it worked perfectly well. Magical !

After another break for a few weeks, I came back to work. As in the beginning of the adventure, the end of the score took place on its own without a lot of corrections either.

In conclusion I confess I’ve rarely seen a filmmaker putting as much passion, sincerity, and love in his project. It is primarily these feelings which have guided me. So I think it’s fair to say that a big part of the music was primarily written by Ara, and Martin.

Magical !

Thank you to them, a thousand times thank you.

Mayo Clinic Wax Models
BlenderNation - 2012-07-04 12:00:57

An interesting read on the digital recreation of historic medical wax models. John Fino writes: Last year, I put together two projects to show how Blender could be used in historic interpretation (museums, historic sites, archaeological sites, etc.) and presented … Continue reading →

Driving Cycles Materials
Aligorith's Lair - 2012-07-04 06:39:00

It has come to my attention that in recent weeks that many of you out there have been trying to assign drivers to properties of Cycles materials, with a few bug reports appearing in the tracker in as many days. Yesterday, I took a short break from some of my other projects to try and find a fix for these problems, so now:


A live version of the image above can be found on BlendSwap (link will be added when available), and Pasteall. This blend is based on Bicycle (low Poly) by Brandon Farley, originally released under (CC-BY)

Read more »

The Trip
BlenderNation - 2012-07-04 05:00:27

By Anuraag.

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

pipeline changes
Tube - Epic Production Notes - 2012-07-03 22:45:20

This is a slightly technical detail kind of post- the kind of geekery you’d be interested in if you’ve heard of revision control systems, GIT, Subversion, etc. It doesn’t seem to have to do a whole lot with 3D graphics, but managing files is always going to be an issue in a project of any size.

Since the tube kickstarter campaign ended our team has swelled to 25, and most of them are not located at Hampshire. (Iincidentally why I haven’t blogged for so long- keeping the project running with an expanded team was a greater than full time job) Even a while ago, it was clear that SVN (aka subversion) was not a great fit for most people, for a bunch of reasons:

1. You have to download the entire project (roughly 8 Gigabytes!) the first time you use it. Slow internet connections and bandwidth caps make this impractical for some.
2. Not everybody is ‘technical’ – updating and committing is several, potentially error-prone steps, sometimes involving the dreaded command line
3. GUI front ends are platform specific – different docs for different people.

Animators previously used what we called ‘production packages’ : we used blenderaid to pull out dependencies and make a zipped bundle of all the file the animator needed, this was:

1. impractical to do updates on rigs/etc. while an animator was working
2. hardcoded to anim files (though I could have fixed this)
3. needed to ask the animator to send back work in progress for lighting tests.

So we found sparkleshare ! Sparkleshare can be best thought of as a dropbox clone with a git backend. A while ago I looked at it, but it only had a linux client; now that it gained windows and mac clients, we migrated from the production package way to sparkleshare, and away from blenderaid to the blender python api. Now we have the following advantages:

1. one click (on my end) to create a package for *any file* in the production tree – with a choice of including or excluding image files, and the possibility of adding more files easily to the same package.
2. user on the end has to click twice, and enter two bits of information.
3. end user experience after that resembles dropbox. updating rigs means just dropping them into the share, and we can get wip files at any time without having to ask.

Is it perfect? we found some issues (where else) on Windows, where there was no SSH client available (luckily one of our interns- Arindam Mondal) figured out how to use Putty and wrote an extensive Howto , and we also found that Windows XP is not supported. I’m frankly stunned that anyone is still using XP though

Razorback Concept Sculpt
Vimeo / Blender 3D - 2012-07-03 19:54:06

First rough sculpt and paint test, retopo with BSurfaces and second paint test.
(CC-BY-SA 3.0)
Concept Art Katarzyna Zalecka kasia88.deviantart.com
Ancient Beast AncientBeast.com

Cast: Roberto Roch

Tags: Blender 2.63, Blender, Remseh modifier, Sculpt, Sculpting, Painting, Retopo and Bsurfaces

Model: Paper Bridge
BlenderNation - 2012-07-03 18:00:47

By TheDuckCow. TheDuckCow writes: This was a mini project that I used to kick off my entry for Andrew Price’s Photorealism Contest. The idea was to force myself to pay attention to details of a model by drawing it out … Continue reading →

How to break things
Tears of Steel - 2012-07-03 17:04:24

Because this is a vfx film, the animation workload is a little less stressful than it would be if everything was animated. Which lets me get in with a fine tooth comb and really polish the c**p outa these shots.
Other things it lets me do it to add in little bits that’d make it look a lot more awesome (because we love that word here at Mango!)

So here’s a very brief tutorial on how to break things.

Step one
Take your bike.

Step two
Mesh deform your bike!

Step three
Rig your mesh deform.

Step four
Get a 3 tonne robot to stand on it.

Should all go well, you should end up with something that looks a little like this:

Happy smashing!!

-note: Please do not try this in real life. Here in Amsterdam, we’re rather fond of bikes and don’t support the smashing of perfectly good bikes.
-Unless you film it.
-Then it would be awesome.