Planet Blender

The Ian Report #469 - Whack-a-Mole
Ian Hubert's Posts - Project London - 2009-10-10 23:47:15

So I've definitely bit off slightly more than I can chew lately. But only slightly! It's like a drawn-out game of whack-a-mole. I wrote out a to-do list the other day, glanced at it, then quickly hid it, so as not to be overwhelmed.

But hey! Most of these tasks will be over within the next couple weeks—so just gotta push on till then!

Until that point, I'm just trying to keep up the momentum that's built up with Project London as well as I can—had kind of a non-crazy-awesome week last week...

Basically, in order to remain really productive, I need to find the 'hook'—the thing that keeps me interested and crazy excited. Last week I didn't have that. This week I think I've found it—a new sequence that's more or less ready to be attacked.

So here's hoping! Nate Taylor's just finished another shot, and it looks fantastic, so I'll get on rendering that. Pretty darn pumped!

Peace!

Ian Hubert
Writer Director

New Tutorial on cmiVFX: Blender Shading and Fur
- 2009-10-10 23:15:04

Yo! I am very pleased to announce a new mammoth tutorial on www.cmiVFX.com! This time it’s getting hairy! In fact, Blender really  has some pretty damn good tools to comb and shade fur. Well, maybe not really self-explanatory, but still, they are very powerful and can make your characters and creatures look so much more realistical! Hopefully with this tutorial [...]

The Producer’s Report #88 - Swallow Your Tiny iPod!
Phil McCoy's Posts - Project London - 2009-10-10 23:14:36

Ian, Jen, Bryce and I met to look at the fabulous shots Ian brought in for review. Nate wasn't able to join us in-person, so we emailed him the data and he produced the stats you see below.

Jen reported that Josh Truax is scheduled for his last ADR session this Saturday. Pretty cool.

Here are the stats.

Status of Visual Effects (VFX) Shots:
Number remaining: 95
Number in progress: 3
Number completed: 522
Percentage remaining: 15.4%

Doom: "No Doom" (calculated by Phil this week)

Projected date for completion of all VFX:
22 January 2010 (based on projected time estimates of all tasks)
9 February 2010 (based on spreadsheet items completed per week)

This week’s recommendations:
Ian: "Swallow Your Tiny iPod" and taste the tunes!
Jen: "Freak Show Horror Film Festival" in Orlando, Florida. "Echoes," one of Jen's award winning short films is screening at this festival!

Bryce: "Frost", the best donut shop ever (in Millcreek).
Nate: "Mother Mother," what a great little band.
Phil: "A Man From Argentina" by Billy The Vision and the Dancers. Because Nathan Vegdahl (and Ian) recommended it, and it's a fantastic song. And you should listen to it many times.

Cheers,

Phil McCoy, Executive Producer
on behalf of Nathan McCoy (left), Producer and Phil McCoy (right)

p.s. Here's a crazy fun post from Nathan Vegdahl from his location working on the Durian project.

Durian Fire
Vimeo / Blender3D [Animation/Videos] - 2009-10-10 17:59:30

Hi all!

This is a test to show the flexibility of the fire I've been working on in Blender more than anything else.

By flexible, I mean I created an image texture with the word 'Durian' - plugged that texture into the fire material - copied that material and three modifiers on to a plane mesh and this is the result.

The letters that are more pointy give better results. I could have made more 'peaks' but then the word wasn't legible.

Please see my other video "Fire V2 - 5" for a better look at the flame effect in a more 'traditional' use.

Cast: Ben Dansie

Simple Biped for Blender 2.5
Vimeo / Blender3D [Animation/Videos] - 2009-10-10 17:59:01

Nathan being silly and demoing his simple biped rig in Blender 2.5

Cast: Project Durian

Fire progress
Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project - 2009-10-10 17:10:42

The purpose of this fire method is more of a companion effect in case a particular scene calls for so much fire that the volumetrics / simluation becomes route impractical to use on ‘absolutely‘ every part of the scene. The goal is to use volumetrics and simulation for the bulk of the fire where appropriate.
_____________________________________________________________________________

I was going to call this post ‘Flaming monkey mullets Batman!” seeing as most of my tests were setting the top of a Suzanne head on fire, (eg the first of these two videos ) but never got around to compositing the head back in.

Without further babbling on:

Fire V2 - 5 from Ben Dansie on Vimeo.

Durian Fire from Ben Dansie on Vimeo.

And of course, a .blend file - Durian_Fire_BD_1.blend (477kb)

Alternate Link

The .blend file contains one sphere with a standard material and one with the fire material on it and 3 modifiers. To transfer the fire effect to your own meshes you need to:

1. Make a duplicate of the object you want to set on fire.
2. Copy the material and the three (one subsurf, two displacement) modifiers to that fire mesh.
3. Create an image (greyscale image texture recommended) that will act as an emitter mask for what is on fire and what isn’t and assign that to the texture called “Fire Mask”
4. Hit render.

The idea behind this fire setup is that a previous version of the script included an entire city being burnt by dragon fire. Which sounds cool as a shot, but when you are the effects dude working in full 4k, that is a lot of fire.

Clearly some R&D needed to be done.

I don’t start in Amsterdam until December, but with fire being such a key thing I wanted to have some tricks up my sleeve before I got there. So I took the flames I had been working on before in a previous project and set about making the whole thing more convincing and more flexible to transfer on many different meshes. I’d still like to do more with it, (stuff like this can always be tweaked that little bit further…) but for now I think I’ll give it a rest until I have a set list of what fire effects I need for Durian.

“What about volumetric fire?” you ask…

Very good question. It will be more flexible in what it can do and has the potential to be more realistic. However, if a scene like the ‘town on fire’ one was to be done entirely with volumetric fire - imagine setting up the simulations needed to set the 200 buildings on fire, the trees, wooden carts, etc. In 4K. The sheer logistics of file size for the cache would be a nightmare, let alone the time to set it all up and then let it simulate. The idea is to use volumetrics for ‘hero’ fire like the fire from the dragon’s breath, fire in the foreground and so on. This fire material setup is intended for anything in the midground and background. But being 4k (yes I keep coming back to that) a midground element can still be larger than a full screen PAL render so it needs to look good.

While it is very quick to put the material on and get going, a particle system to set some nice embers flying around and some smoke composited over the top if needed will add a lot to the effect. This is intended as the base of the effect.

Advantages

• Quick setup time
• Low file size
• No simulation / raytracing required at all, so it renders fast
• Can be applied to any mesh
• Empties no longer required from previous fire method I was using

Current Limitations

• Fire ‘peaks’ are stationary and rotate with the object instead of being heavily influenced by the global coordinates. (This is something I’ll need to look at per effect shot. Might be able to get away with this limitation or might be able to fix it in 2.5 by adding a mapping setting or two.)
• Fire ‘licks’ off the top of the flame probably need some more attention
• Still not suitable for multi-directional fire like flame throwers or dragon breath. Again, we have volumetrics though so that isn’t so much of an issue.

Finally (long post, I know) there is a Blenderartists.org thread that chronicles the development of this material / effect and that is where I will be posting any further updates and tweaks. (Major stuff I’ll post here too of course.) If you use this material to do something groovy, post a render there - I would love to see it!

Enjoy!

-Ben.

Buscando La Chica CG – Looking for the CG girl
BlenderNation - 2009-10-10 15:24:02

Eich News Online has released the result of their first international contest.  This release includes works completed in various CG software programs  of which two where done in Blender (plus other software) and involved artists from thirteen countries . This is a free download at 107 Megs and consists of thirty works in the [...]

I’ve made the switch to Firefox/ScribeFire for my 3D blog
Starbright Illustrations (blog) - 2009-10-10 11:51:51

Yahoo turning all the “pages” on my cool CG 3d (mostly) blog into “posts” (when I was updated to the latest version of WordPress) was very, very annoying indeed, but it might just have turned out to be a good thing. I decided to duplicate the content of the new “posts” at the old URLs – that way whatever link someone follows they should be able to find the content. The problem was that WordPress was so slow on my Internet Explorer setup that copying the content from the existing post to the new page was taking an absolute age, if it didn’t time out altogether. To fix all 30 of these pages full of images, renders and other 3D and RPG content would probably cost me my sanity the speed problems were so bad on my blog.
And this has always been a problem for me, my blog was slow to load, my dashboard was slow to load and I would get frightening server error messages now and again.
So, even though I was tearing my hair out with frustration, I decided that before I could even fix my pages problem I had to speed up my blog.
I was looking for ways to do this and getting the same old advice about deactivating all your plugins and gradually reactivating them again – this would take me a week at the speed my WordPress was going – when I found something that was new and interesting.
The FireBug addon for FireFox.
It can be used to see what is causing the problems on your Blog and to make the blog faster loading as recommended by Paul Spoerry in his blog. While I was installing FireFox I remembered hearing about a blogclient called ScribeFire and I thought that since I was installing FireFox anyway I would give it a try.
FireBug was great, it identified and I have removed some of the worst offending widgets from my blog. It was less of an issue all of a sudden though, because WordPress is so much faster on FireFox than it is on IE7, at least for me.
After having such a positive experience I installed ScribeFire and it has operated in the same simple and enjoyable way as FireBud so far. I have noticed a couple of problems though. There is no wordcount or spellchecker as far as I can see.
But I’m going to persevere – see I don’t know about you but I need spell checker for words like persevere – and so this is my first ScribeFire post.

Let’s meet at the Blender Conference!
Oenvoyage's Blender Blog - 2009-10-10 10:58:07

Hello all blenderheads! I would like to tell you that i will be at the blender conference in amsterdam and i will be happy to meet all artists that would like to meet me. I will be there with 2 collegues from RGBprod studio, including my apprentice Andres. Last year was my first conference and i did [...]

GPS 1.3 Gimp Paint Studio
4RTE DIGIT4L - 2009-10-10 02:56:00

A nova versão 1.3 do Gimp Paint Studio acabou de sair do forno e parece que está cheia de recursos novos que não pretende decepcionar. A primeira e mais marcante são as 25 pré-definições especificamente para Sketching, incluindo canetas, grafite e carvão.

- Nova seleção de predefinições
- Novas predefinições para a ferramenta Lápis
- Novas predefinições para a ferramenta Borracha
- Novas predefinições para o Paint FX
- Novas predefinições para a ferramenta Borrar
- Novas predefinições para o G-Pen
- Nova Paleta 2009

Esta versão é totalmente funcional com 2.6.x gimp gimp 2.7.x. Agora é só começar a pintar, desenhar..... botar a mão na massa!

Final Character Design - Turk
Prince Harming To Prince Charming - 2009-10-10 02:54:06

Turk, our ugly, lovable, romantic hero is finally complete.

Here is the final color concept of “Turk” our lovable that Luis Gadea put together for us based on our input. The colors are beautiful, the expression is exquiste and fits the character perfectly.

Points to Ponder:

• He is an underdog. (There should never be a doubt)
• Goal is the girl. Obstacle is the peacock and his looks.
• Underdog that never did anything wrong (should not be DONE! HERE.) Use the peacock, to show some of his flaws
• good head to body ratio.
• He is optimistic and persistent. (strike a balance between realistic expectations)
• He has inner doubt and hence needs yubiy
• is he educated?

Questions about the character

• What would he do to attain his goals?
• What would he never do to attain his goal?
• What happened in his life that started this insecurity? (helps with his reactions to things.)

Video Tutorial: Basic Blocking for a 3D Cartoon Hand
Blender Newbies 3D Video Tutorials (Learn to Create 3D Graphics with Blender!) - 2009-10-10 01:39:00



In this tutorial, we'll be taking a look at the basic blocking for modeling a 3d cartoon hand.

This is part 2 in the BlenderNewbies Hand Modeling Tutorial series.

• $3.00 (ZIP download 192MB, MOV video format)
• Higher Resolution video (1280 x 800)
  View sample snapshot of download quality.
• Smooth playback at 30 frames per second
  

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