Planet Blender

Blending…
Licuadora Studio - 2009-10-27 22:37:56

During the past months we Licuadores have been pretty busy and with little time to tell about our activities but here there is a short report of what we’ve been doing… At the end of May we organized with Martín Eschoyez (Epa! Animation) and Universidad Nacional de Córdoba the first Che! Blender 2009 where we [...]

Arterial Tree - 2009 Showreel
Vimeo / Blender3D [Animation/Videos] - 2009-10-27 21:15:16

2009 Showreel Arterial Tree::Michael Hockey Media Design

arterialtree.com

Music by Jan Morgenstern

wavemage.com

Created in Blender and After Effects. Edited in Final Cut.

Cast: Arterial Tree

Sintel fighting animation test
Vimeo / Blender3D [Animation/Videos] - 2009-10-27 20:51:25

During week 3 of production, Lee made this animation with Nathan's simple rigged bipeds to test out the animation pipeline and style.

Cast: Project Durian

creature
digital janitor - 2009-10-27 20:41:00



Just another character test. Also testing to work with blender 2.5 now, but I keep going back to 2.48 because not everything is there yet. Especially some workflow stuff with shortcuts, most of the tools are there.

Project Cooper: Blending AutoCAD and SketchUp for architectural 2d drawing
Blender 3D Architect - 2009-10-27 20:15:35

For architectural projects that must be presented as 2d drawings, the first option would be to use CAD tools like AutoCAD, DoubleCAD or other technical drawing softwares. But, what about the artistic side of those presentations? I still know a few architects and artists that draw their projects in CAD and export everything to Photoshop, [...] Related posts:

1. DoubleCAD XT: Free alternative to AutoCAD This article is not directly related to Blender, but since...
2. Free courseware for AutoCAD 2D and 3D Since I have started to work with Blender 3D for...
3. Free version of SketchUp with no support for DWG and DXF files A lot of architectural visualization artists start their projects or...

Epic fighting animation test (with blends)!
Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project - 2009-10-27 19:27:47

Hi blender community and beyond!

So this is my first blog post for the project and finally I have something to show! In the previous post you have seen the original first minute which took up a lot of my time in the second production week.

Last week before Blender Conference I was experimenting with action animation, basically to get into the groove of what will be needed. Luckily I got enough done to show it at the conference, and now here!

Sintel fighting animation test from Project Durian on Vimeo.

I gave myself this task just to test out the pipeline I’ll have for final shots. You can Download The Progress Files to see iterative stages of the animation (if you don’t have a 2.5 build, head to GraphicAll.org to grab one), the step number of the blend file (and video below for those without 2.5) corresponds to the numbers below, which are a run down of the process:

Progress: Sintel fighting animation test from Project Durian on Vimeo.

• 1) First I plan. Since there was no actual shot storyboarded for this I was able to be quite creative in what I was to animate. I knew I wanted a staff weapon for the main character, and a poor henchman being taken out in a creative and almost hilariously brutal fashion. I know that the final film will have a more dramatic atmosphere, and also the animation style I’m going to use here may be way too much for the final film, but its much easier to tone things down than up. As fun ideas come to mind I write them down in a text file very fast with basically no grammar, just for my reference (sorry can’t find that file).

• 2) Next I’ve loaded up two dummy characters to be main and henchman, and have begun with some of the initial poses. You’ll notice that the main dummy has no legs!? This is an interesting method I picked up from Shawn Kelly, Lead Animator at ILM who has a great e-book and blog. Here is a post on the subject. In my case I just took the leg bones, made them FK and scaled them right down, if you zoom in enough to see tiny legs =)

• 3) I continue adding basic poses, I’ve got them all down now except for the final slam. I have left the character sliding during running parts, my plan is to use a separate run cycle and blend it in with the NLA editor.

• 4) I’m happy with the body basically now, so I add the legs in.

• 5) Working in video game animation for so long before this project I had to really force myself to start animating to camera a bit more, I experiment and begin adding runcycles into the NLA. I find out that the NLA in Blender 2.5 is still quite in need of testing. After many frustrated hours of NLA blending not working well and losing data when saving, I decide to use multiple cameras and hide as much running as possible ;). Animation is all smoke and mirrors! For finals we will have each shot its own file most likely which allows much more control of editing, but since I started this test all in the same file I just went with it.

• 6) The final file (press alt+p in the text editor to activate a camera switching script as demonstrated in the video). Just went through and added polish so it looks nice from each particular camera angle. The right leg of the henchman has some bug where I can’t add keys or edit the curves, luckily the camera hides it! Check out the right foot as he is hit with the stick at the end ;). You’ll notice in the file that the weapon has a few versions, this is a work around until we have our better rigs but works nicely for quick tests. I have one staff parented to her hand control, and over one frame I size it to zero (still haven’t gotten the hang of layer switching yet in 2.5), and size another from zero to one, which is not parented to anything, and easily I can animate this new staff as if she just let go of it. I switch back and forth as needed using the same technique.

Cool 2.5 stuff: Now we can use quaternion or euler rotation types for any bones, and what makes it so cool? You can animate *between* them! So to get the nice flipping at the end, I’ve actually gone from quaternion (no gimbal lock which causes weird rotations sometimes), to euler (rotate 360+ degrees, easier to visualize curves in graph editor) using an animated curve.

There were a lot of problems and unforseen challenges during this test, and most of these will be fixed by the time we animate final shots, but there will constantly be challenges that will appear. This exercise shows that there is always a way to keep moving and end up with a result, just takes a little bit of compromise and illusion =)

More blog posts on each of the team members conference demonstrations to come!

-Lee

Stilliskaba #30 – “Kuutioitu (cubed)”
#blender.fi - 2009-10-27 16:36:10

Modelcon-tauon jälkeen päästään takaisin arkeen ja uuden skaba-aiheen kehittelivät NoSoulX ja HeGeX. Uusi aihe on siis “Kuutioitu (cubed)”. Deadlinenä on sunnuntai 1.11.2009.

Threadi löytyy tästä.

Blender Cookie Launched!
Montage Studio - 2009-10-27 15:21:11

Good morning everyone,

I am pleased to announce that www.blendercookie.com launched mid-last week! Over the last year I have been working very closely with Wes Burke from www.cgcookie.com on training material for Blender. Starting out Blender represented only a small portion of the site, but almost over night it exploded, taking over more than 50% of the daily traffic. It soon became clear to us that Blender deserved it’s own home within the cookie family, thus Blender Cookie came into being.

 

What is Blender Cookie?

Blender Cookie is a site dedicated to supplying consistent, high quality, blender education materials produced by certified trainers from around the globe. By offering high resolution streaming videos, written education, developer interviews and featured resources, we aim to be the central hub for blender education.

OUR GOALS OF THIS SITE.

• To offer blender education to artists around the world
• Participate in community events, contests and give back to the community
• Support the foundation and further development of blender
• Have a bit of fun. 

I for one, am very excited about this whole project. We have very high hopes for the site and a lot of plans with where we would like to take it. If you watch closely you will see a few of those plans materializing over the next few weeks!

Speaking for both Wes and myself, I truly hope you enjoy this site as much as we have enjoyed creating it. There are a lot of exciting things in the pipeline and I would like to thank all of you as none of it could have happened if it weren’t for all of your incredible support. Thank you all!

Enjoy and I look forward to hearing your comments.

Visit the Site!

-Jonathan

Blender Army at GCOS 2009
Hello! - 2009-10-27 14:47:02

Sebuah perhelatan besar telah diadakan di jakarta. Para pakar dan pionir Open Source dunia hadir di Shangri-la, jakarta, guna mengikuti Global Conference on Open Source I. Acara ini di selenggarakan oleh Depkominfo, AOSI, dan beberapa lapisan pemerintah dalam bidang IPTEK, khususnya Open SOurce. Di gelar beberapa seminar tentang perkembangan Open Source di masa depan dengan speaker dari dalam dan luar negeri. Termasuk Workshop Blender dan pameran Blender Indonesia.

Seperti di beritakan kemarin, Blender Indonesia terpilih menjadi salah satu komunitas Open Source terbaik di Indonesia dan iringmendapatkan penghargaan yang di berikan Menkominfo, Tifatul Sembiring.
Berikut liputan lengkapnya;
http://www.detikinet.com/read/2009/10/26/120328/1228543/398/praktisi-open-source-dunia-berkumpul-di-jakarta
http://www.detikinet.com/read/2009/10/27/130247/1229334/398/menkominfo-sarankan-nama-jawa-untuk-komunitas-ubuntu

FOTO:

*Merchandise Pameran

*Prepare in Booth, Dzinc, Mechanimation, Hizaro

*Tanda Mata Penuh Perjuangan, penghargaan sekaligus PR besar

*Acara Penghargaan

* Chrisvi in action

blender conference modeling session
artificial3D - 2009-10-27 10:21:32

hi!

after many requests, i would like to publish the file i created at my blender conference modeling session. i’m quite happy how it turned out, considering that i always find it difficult to talk while creating something decent to look at… previous conference models of mine always turned out less than satisfactory. that’s why i deliberately kept this one very simple and stylized to focus on shape and design, rather than technical stuff, while still conveying some of the technical decisions necessary in the modeling process.

right-click > Save As on the screenshot below to download the .blend file

cheers!

.andy

Blender Conference 2009 – Report
Akta's Way - Blog - 2009-10-27 09:17:17

I wish I had a laptop in my brain from where to share every single thing I saw and learnt in my first BC to share that with you guys, unfortunately I can just write a sort of final report on what this experience has been for me.

If you are Blender fans, you must go there. It’s impressive to see how many people love this open-source tool and how much close you can feel to them even though you met them only few minutes before. It’s like everybody there has been your friend since the childhood, there’s feeling between people, a kind of magic friendship in the air which lives under the same flag, Blender.

Besides the human aspect of the conference, where I had the chance to meet really cool people that I knew just because their tutorials or articles on the web (like Sebastian König, Andrew Price, Anfeo and all the italian Blender community), I must say that the quality of the conference was extremely high. This from several points of view: artistic, scientific, organizational.

Artistically speaking I’ve never seen such a good quality artworks made by Blender users. I was especially impressed by the Durian concept art sketches made by the french artist David Revoy. His epic fantasy style really astonished me. Also the Suzanne Award Festival was great. It took me some time before I could decide for whom I was going to vote.

Blender as a tool for scientific applications was an important aspect of this conference. It really showed the endless possibilities that the software can offer also to the scientific community, beyond the artistic one.

Dolf, Anja and Anna. Three words to express the same concept: organization. Without them all of this wouldn’t have been possible, so thanks!

Personally I feel really satisfied. The feedback I got from the talk was much more than I expected, people were really excited about the idea of having emotions in games and they come up with several interesting possible applications. I thank them for their support and as I promised my aim for the next year is to release a full game which uses biosignals in realtime

If you are interested in paper and abstract, you will find them soon on blender.org, as well as the video of my talk.

If you want another point of view of this conference, I recommend to visit Andrew’s website BlenderGuru , you can find there an article and a lot of cool stuff like tutorials, tips and articles about Blender!

Marco

7 Important discoveries from the 2009 Blender Conference
BlenderNation - 2009-10-27 08:14:36

Andrew Price wrote down the 7 biggest 'discoveries' of the Blender Conference 2009. Andrew writes: This years Blender Conference was one of the biggest ever. With over 200 attendees, 40 presenters, and topics ranging from 2.5 updates to protein expressions, there was a lot to take in. So here are the 7 most important topics discussed at this [...]

Durian First Minute - 01
Vimeo / Blender3D [Animation/Videos] - 2009-10-27 07:25:29

This is the first installment in the series of videos showing the work we've done on the first minute of Durian.

This is a glimpse into our process... this first sequence will evolve greatly over time.

Uploaded on Oct. 27th, 2009.

Cast: Project Durian

Blender Conference Intro Video
Vimeo / Blender3D [Animation/Videos] - 2009-10-27 07:15:24

This is the first official "teaser" video for Project Durian, premiered at the 8th Annual Blender Conference in Amsterdam on Oct. 25th, 2009.

The epic music is by Denny Schneidemesser and has a creative commons license.

UPDATE: Guess what? Looks like I forgot my own name in the lineup of artists. Yeah, I'm on the team too.

--Colin Levy

Cast: Project Durian

Update!! - RenderAnts - Interactive REYES Rendering on GPU
Blender to RenderMan - 2009-10-27 04:50:00

This has been floating around the net recently, something that is actually quite impressive for what it does as well as what it could be. Interactive REYES rendering on a GPU, which really in a sense has been something a lot of people and studios have been looking for.




CG Society Link

BlenderArtist Link

Authors page:
http://www.kunzhou.net/

Paper:
http://www.kunzhou.net/2009/renderants.pdf

Video:
http://www.kunzhou.net/2009/renderants.wmv

Updated News!

According to a source recently in the comments of this post the source code(?) for this is located here : http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/283bb827-8669-4a9f-9b8c-e5777f48f77b/default.aspx

There have been other similar types, such as Pixar's LPics which was featured after Cars was released, as well as Lightspeed which ILM had developed during the Transformer production. However the difference was these used GL shader equivalents of RSL shaders, so they both did not really use a Renderman based rendering. Both were very impressive though.

Gelato was also something that had been designed for such a purpose but was discontinued after a few years, certian tools did have the ability to convert basic RSL shaders into it's own shader language so in a sense it was sort of a start of what could be. Larry Gritz, the same person who had developed the first non Pixar REYES renderer, BMRT, had developed Gelato. So maybe that was another reason for Gelato being non REYES based considering the legal issues between Gritz and Pixar in previous years.

RenderAnts is a GPU based REYES rendering system, using RIB and RSL code to render the resulting image from the GPU, rather than the traditional CPU software we currently use. The ability to get fast rendering feedback is always a great thing, the only current way to do this is to render smaller sized images along with turning down the detail features of REYES, or do something like Crop rendering which will only render a certain region. This does in fact make an image render faster but if you are concerned about details, or lighting changes, having to render out a new image just to see if something works or not is quite a painfully slow task. This is why RenderAnts is a huge deal. It is not because of the fact that Elephants Dream was used to showcase the speed difference of normal CPU based rendering versus GPU, though it was pretty cool to see that. Elephants Dream was used mainly because it is Open Content, these were fully animated scenes that can be used for any reason within legal bounds.

What makes it so interesting for us, the Blender to Renderman users and developers, is that Mosaic was used to export these scenes out. This is why open source Blender to Renderman is important, it can be used for research, not only production. It is far easier and cheaper to use Blender, Mosaic and Aqsis or Pixie to showcase some new 3D research where you have access to the source code and can make your research possible, than it is with closed source commercial software. At best you can make a plugin for Maya if you were to make something like say a new form of fluid simulation that used a custom RSL volume shader. You would also only be able to do this on one system, while with open source you can have several copies spread out over a network, even at home.

This is the first time Mosaic has been officially used and cited in a published research paper.

If you watch the video make sure to notice that this NOT real time, it is fast but it does not have the ability to render at even 1 fps. At best it does take a few seconds, the few that do look fast are more like camera placement changes or lighting changes. Anything really drastic does seem to take a bit longer to render. However considering the same frame using the same data would take a considerable amount of time for PRMan to render does say quite a bit. What this also means is that this is not to replace current software for final frame rendering, at least not for a while. The best use for such a system is for previewing during production, the little changes that artists and TD's make for instance. Something so tedious like shader development would cut such time in half, making 30 renders of minute changes in the shader is a very time consuming task. It is not hard to imagine that this will be used by the big boys very soon, it is also only a matter of time before a commercial adaptation of this is released in the next few years.

We just have a nice warm feeling knowing that our work here has helped in this, we were used first. THAT is something.

graphicall: Since r24103 you can now right click any button in Blender and view its documentation online !, bright future for docs! :D
Twitter / graphicall - 2009-10-27 03:24:00

graphicall: Since r24103 you can now right click any button in Blender and view its documentation online !, bright future for docs! :D

Revealed: Title, Character Design and 1st Minute
Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project - 2009-10-27 02:24:42

Hello!

Sorry for the lack of updates recently. Yesterday was the last day of the Blender Conference and we’re all still recovering!

But we haven’t forgotten about you. We have a number of posts coming up to go over some of the stuff we showed off at the Durian talk on Sunday.

But first things first. For those of you who missed the live stream, we revealed a lot about the movie–including the (working) title!

7 important discoveries at the 2009 Blender Conference
Blender Guru - 2009-10-27 02:01:29

This years Blender Conference was one of the biggest ever. With over 200 attendees, 40 presenters, and topics ranging from 2.5 updates to protein expressions, there was a lot to take in.

Here are the 7 discoveries you cannot miss…

1. Surge in gaming development

From the announcement of the speaker lineup, it was obvious that change was in the air. A total of 11 gaming presentations were held, in comparison to last year’s one. No doubt thanks to the Apricot project, Blender is being looked at as a commercial game development platform.

Several announcements for commercial games were announced, including: Super Yum Yum, Thorworks, Pokme and Foreign Legion, as well as special discussions on iPhone development, digital puppetry and sensory controlled gaming.

2. Blender is being used in numerous real world applications

Another pleasant surprise was learning how many uses blender has outside of it’s pretty graphics. There were presentations on using blender for robot guided medical interventions, fire safety and smoke physics, protein expressions and improving road safety. All this has proved once again that the possibilities of Blender are limitless.

3. Full time developer

Arguably the most exciting news was the announcement that Blender will be receiving some serious tender loving care in the form of a fulltime developer for 12 – 18months. The funding was received from an anonymous sponsor who needs the API sped up for business purposes. He proposed that hiring a developer full time might fix the issue. Not only does this greatly benefit the community, but it sends a strong statement about blender’s impact on commercial studios.

4. Frustration over lack of documentation

When Ton held a round table discussion on Blender education, I don’t think he expected the heated discussion that arose. Several beginners spoke up about the difficulties of trying to learn Blender from scratch, stating that at times it was impossible to learn some features due to missing documentation.  At the 60 minute mark the discussion was far from finished and had be continued upstairs. Although a resolution didn’t seem to have been made, it was clear that the community needed to be more focused on the learning aspect if we want to encourage more users.

And on that note…

5. Enthusiastic users are scarying away the public

A special presentation by Tom Musgrove educated us on “How to be an effective Blender advocate”. His presentation covered common etiquette in the 3d industry, and how not to deter future users from Blender by being obnoxious.

Ouch.

The presentation was good advice for anyone in any field. It’s common knowledge that repulsive behaviour will drive anyone away. But a subtle reminder could be what the community needs right now.

6. Amazing entries at the Suzanne Awards

One of the more pleasant surprises was the quality of entries into the this years suzanne awards. I spoke with Ton after the screening who said “it was almost like being at a real film festival”. Couldn’t agree more. From the start of the 90 minute screening till the end, the audience was engrossed in the mixed stories and visuals each artist brought to the competition.

The festival was summed up nicely by an equally impressive award ceremony in which the winners were announced:

Best Character Animation: Dragosaurio
Best Design: Evolution
Best Short: Memory

7. Durian is going to be “epic”

Colin Levy lived up to the high expectations of the community when he delivered a polished presentation of what we can expect in the third open source movie. Starting with a teaser trailer, he went over concepts, showed some storyboards, then handed the microphone over to the rest of the team to show off their current progress.

The results speak for themselves…

Did I mention that all of this was completed in less than 3 weeks?

The finished result is looking very promising indeed.

If you never been to a blender conference before, I’d highly suggest attending the next one. It’s a brilliant opportunity to network with like-minded people and recieve feedback on new ideas and proposals. So what are you waiting for?