Planet Blender

new news
Matt Ebb - 2008-11-29 23:19:51

It’s getting to the end of the year and things are getting busy. There’s been plenty on at work - quite a few projects have been running concurrent for a while, including a new Bridgestone gecko spot that’s out now, and the still in-progress project I’ve been working on the volume rendering for.

We’ve been getting around a bit too, four of us headed down to Melbourne in October to attend the first ‘Melbourne Blender Society‘ meeting. We gave an informal presentation about some of our work, much of it involving character setups, and then headed out for some ‘beer r&d’, meeting some fun and interesting people (Hi Glenn, this only took a month ;).

Jez, James and I also gave a presentation at the Digital Media Festival in Sydney , on the topic of ‘an open source pipeline’, talking about our use of Blender in production. Some of the parts that interested the audience of mostly 3d/vfx/design people most were existing features like the library linking system, but also the ability for us to do custom development, such as contracting the ocean sim tools for the Lighthouse project. I also showed off some work on the volume rendering too ;)

The volume rendering tools are at the point now where it’s going to give acceptable results given the timeframe. Although it’s still lacking a bit in some areas right now that aren’t a priority for this job, for my purpose it’s going pretty well. Raul has now picked up this code to work with too, and I’m looking forward to seeing his implementation of voxel data sets. A couple of the improvements I’ve made since last time posting include:

• Particle rendering
  There’s now a new 3d texture called ‘point density’ that retrieves density and colour information from point clouds (either particle systems or object vertices). It uses a BVH tree to store the points, and looks up what points are within a given radius of the shaded point, with various falloffs. It also has a few methods for simple turbulence, adding directed noise to give the impression of more detail. It’s also possible to use this texture on solid surfaces too.
• Light Cache
  In order to speed up rendering of self-shaded volumes, there’s a new option to precalculate the shading at the start of the render into a voxel grid, which gets interpolated later to generate lighting information, rather than shading the lamps directly. You could make the analogy to raytraced occlusion vs approximate occlusion in Blender - it often gives around a 3x speed up with similar quality.
• A few other small things such as internal and external shadows, anisotropic scattering with various phase functions, integration with the sun/sky system, and various fixes.

Kajimba’s also rolling along nicely. We’ve released several more animation tests with audio (and plenty more sill in the pipe), the voices for the first episode have been recorded, and the animator dudes have started working on lipsync tests to begin some animation on ep 1 soon.

And on it goes…

Blender books galore
Tony Mullen's Amazon Blog - 2008-11-29 08:23:58

There's been a lot of activity lately in the world of Blender books, and some exciting new offerings.

I've finally had a chance to take a look at  Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish  by Roland Hess, and I think that it will definitely be of interest to readers of my own  Introducing Character Animation with Blender. Roland (who, full disclosure, was the technical editor for both ICAWB and my second book,  Bounce, Tumble, and Splash!: Simulating the Physical World with Blender 3D ) has written a start-to-finish guide to creating short animated movies with Blender. He takes the reader from the early planning stages of writing a script and drawing storyboards through to the final processes of rendering, editing, adding sound and releasing a finished video. Admittedly, it's a lot to bite off and in some areas, such as story writing and storyboard creation, it cries out to be supplemented by other, more in-depth books (such as Nancy Beiman's excellent  Prepare to Board! Creating Story and Characters for Animated Features and Shorts ). The strongest areas in the book, that make it really worth having in my opinion, are the chapters on Libraries and Linking and on Rendering and Compositing, which are two hot topics in Blender that are not well covered by other books. If you've always wanted to put your character animation skills to work creating a complete short movie, I think this book will have a lot for you to sink your teeth into.

Another release to look forward to is the Blender Foundations own Blender GameKit 2nd Edition by Carsten Wartmann. This promises to be a full updating of the original GameKit, complete with all the latest functionality from the Apricot Open Game project. That should definitely be worth checking out for anybody interested in game creation.

I don't know how much this will interest long-time Blender users as reading material per se, but as a sign of how fast Blender is taking off it's certainly exciting to see that Blender will soon have it's very own official  Blender For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech)) book, thanks to Jason van Gumster. I'm looking forward to checking it out, and even more looking forward to welcoming the vast armies of new Blender users that it is sure to help create!

Quartz Composer Session - Podcast/Tutorial - Augmented Reality, Quartz Developer List, Javascript, Kineme
Vimeo / Blender3D [Animation/Videos] - 2008-11-29 05:27:02

I have been asked here and in emails, to give some explanation to some of the techniques I have been using in Quartz Composer.

This is a few minutes of an unscripted run down of some QC topics, including some notes about Augmented Reality, Javascript, the QC Developer List, and Kineme.

Cast: George Toledo