Planet Blender

Monolift
Vimeo / Blender3D [Animation/Videos] - 2009-10-05 20:54:39

A Blender rendered movie of the 2/4 Rack I use when lifting weights - which you can see in reality on my other videos, e.g. vimeo.com/916258

I rendered this as one cycle then appended 4 copies via Avidemux.

Cast: sumoman

Tip: Appending Nodes
Vimeo / Blender3D [Tutorial] - 2009-10-05 20:48:27

Appending nodes allows you to reuse node trees from previous files. This can be a huge time saver, particularly when working with complex setups.

Cast: Wes Burke

The Ship from the Planet Beyond
Vimeo / Blender3D [Animation/Videos] - 2009-10-05 20:42:22

An alien ship visits earth.

Created mostly with Blender 3d.

Cast: Micah T

Landscape - Sea coast - Part 03
feeblemind - 2009-10-05 20:04:58

Ok, I finally found out about the uggly billboards. In fact, Atmosphere option of the Sun lamp is not friend with ZTransp alpha mapped planes... I will fill a bug report as I guess it is one...

But as I don't want to wait for the bug to be corrected, I messed with Composite nodes to correct this. I set up three rendering layers:

• one with the clouds alone, Sky option deactivated
• one with the sky alone
• one with the landscape itself

Here's the nodes setup, based on the three previous rendering layers:

found this on the web
digital janitor - 2009-10-05 19:58:00


( click the image )
I picture says more than a thousand words. Don't know who took this one, and I hope I wont step on any toes.

3rd part of my tutorial series is up
thisroomthatikeep - 2009-10-05 19:39:00

Oooooh, arty animation, but it’s 3D
Starbright Illustrations (blog) - 2009-10-05 19:21:19

I’ve been looking to inject something of the arty and experimental into my images and animations. Although, for me, the distinction between image and animation is becoming a little blurred. I now primarily use Blender to create my works, and every image is by default just frame one of an animation.

Here is an example of the arty studenty vibe I’m looking to inject. Close to the Skin: Oooooh, arty animation, (but is the wall in the top animation real or is it created in a 3D modeling suite).

Here is a test of the new look I’m aiming for. This mouse head (it’s not done yet, but trust me it’s a mouse head) is both drawing and 3D object at the same time.

**………..

Oh dear, it isn’t working. I must have messed up some of the settings because, as you can see, all that appears is a big question mark over the QuickTime logo.

Here is a 2D image of what that animation should be showing. Er… yeah… it looks an awful lot better moving around in 3D.

 

I’m writing this blog post offline with Windows Live Writer so there is the vague hope that everything will be OK with the animation when I upload it, but it is only a vague hope. My suspicion is that I’m once again going to be spending hours fiddling about with the audio and video export settings in Blender before my little 3D animation test starts working again.

Oh by the way, I’m part of a 3D blog register dedicated to Blender, Planet Blender v2 beta1, and I picked up a tip for a challenge site.

Cgsosiety.org

It’s all a bit advanced for me at the moment, but it would be great to have the time and skills to enter something in this competition and have a chance of winning.

Blender 2.5 builds now available in downloads
Tube - Epic Production Notes - 2009-10-05 18:26:02

We now have Blender 2.5 builds in our downloads page for OSX 10.6.1 and Ubuntu GNU/Linux 9.10. We will be updating the builds periodically and blogging those updates here. A Windows 7 version will be up soon, hopefully.

Modeling for architecture: Blender 3D BevOb and 3ds Max Loft tools to create cornices
Blender 3D Architect - 2009-10-05 18:20:42

Just by the time I was giving a course on architectural visualization with 3ds Max, a lot of users asked me about the issues and learning curve of Blender 3D. Some architects and 3d artists still think that by learning 3ds Max or other 3d package, will make the learning of Blender 3d impossible, because [...] Related posts:

1. Modeling for architecture: How to create curved curtain walls in Blender 3D? At some point in the modeling process we have to...
2. Retopology tools for architectural modeling A lot of tools available in 3d packages like Blender...
3. Modeling terrains with displacement maps in SketchUp and Blender 3D The creation of terrains and sites can be accomplished in...

Video Tutorial: Basic Hand Structure for 3D Modeling
Blender Newbies 3D Video Tutorials (Learn to Create 3D Graphics with Blender!) - 2009-10-05 17:37:00



In this tutorial, we'll be taking a look at basic hand structure for 3d modeling. This is part of a Hand Modeling Tutorial Series, but we won't get into any modeling at this point.

We, first, want to take a look at what we need to consider when modeling a hand. These structural issues are relevant whether you're modeling a cartoon hand, a more realistic hand, or any type of stylized hand.

• $2.00 (ZIP download 88.4MB, MOV video format)
• Higher Resolution video (1280 x 800)
  View sample snapshot of download quality.
• Reference images used in the tutorial
  

technorati tags: Blender3D, 3D, graphics, Blender tutorials

Bloxel (Blender Voxel system) roadmap
Tinker Code - 2009-10-05 15:55:29

Hi all This is a first draft of a todo for the Bloxel project (Blender Voxel system as has being suggested in a joke by VIBrunazo , but is very cool Note that this roadmap could and possibly will change over time according to priorities but is a rough sketch of what I will aim [...]

the road of excess...
Vimeo / Blender3D [Time lapse] - 2009-10-05 14:48:02

...leads to palace of wisdom! This piece was made during our compositing class with karin heide (mingo) at the University of Applied Sience Graz.

music from freesound.org
Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 License:
creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling+/1.0/

20-Prelude from Suite in G Major BWV 1007 (JS Bach)-Voices of Music
10-A--Williamson

Cast: Christian Kermer

Johnny Blender DVD by David Ward
BlenderNation - 2009-10-05 13:37:12

David Ward has just finished a great DVD. We wrote earlier about his detailed youtube series- its now complete, online and also available on DVD. Plus, just to add to it, hes even helping out the Blender Foundation! David wrote: Well i finished up the series (see the Youtube playlist here: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=23220C9F539F61DC) and went ahead and stuck [...]

Counting and curving
jahka particles - 2009-10-05 13:24:00



The beginning of the video is for CoyHot and the second part for Nicholas8681, but I guess you other guys can watch too :)

Some more info in the commit message.

PlanetBlender shinanigans
wahooney.net - 2009-10-05 12:05:21

Wow, what a momentous occasion, I've just been added to the PlanetBlender feed collector thing!

Hopefully this will light a fire under me to get some more news posts and downloads going.

In the teaser news: Renaming Army Knife coming soon for Blender 2.5.

volume shading updates
Matt Ebb - 2009-10-05 11:08:23

It’s been a little while since I merged the volume rendering work into Blender 2.5 but I’ve been steadily poking away at it since. Today I committed some lighting features, support for volumes receiving external shadows (raytraced, and quick but more limited shadow mapped) and a new shadow only mode that’s a bit faster than self-shading, good for less dense volumes like fog or wispy smoke:

I’ve also had some behind-the-scenes help in the form of code review and some new features from Alfredo de Greef, which has been great, and last week I bit the bullet and redid part of the shading code. It was previously using a custom method left over from initial experiments that wasn’t entirely physically correct – the shader didn’t conserve energy. In the real world, if more light is scattered out of the volume, towards your eye, there will be less left to keep penetrating through the remainder of the volume, but the previous method didn’t account for this.

In reality this also applies on a wavelength-dependent basis too, if the media is such that the red light is scattered out of the volume (from an initial white light shining on it), all that’s left to continue through the rest of the volume is the inverse of that (roughly cyan). I got to work changing this in the code, but after a long time testing realised it was getting very difficult to control. Most of the time, if you’re making a coloured volume (like the excellent coloured smoke in the Cloudy trailer), you want to be able to just set a colour and be done with it. Doing it by tweaking wavelength dependent absorption and scattering was getting to be a real pain, so I ended up chopping and changing things around.

Now there’s a single physically based ’scattering’ parameter, controlling the amount of light that’s scattered out of the volume (leaving less to continue through), as well as a ‘transmission colour’ that defines the result colour in the rest of the volume, after out-scattering and absorption. With these settings, by default, the shader works physically correctly. For ease of control though, I also added a ‘reflection’ colour and strength which basically acts as an RGB gain, tinting the out-scattered light. It’s more of a non-physical tweak, but it does make life a fair bit easier. I’ve documented these settings with example renders on the blender wiki.

I’m pretty happy with how it’s working now: physically correct by default, but with the option of changing it for artistic control, and philosophically I think that’s how it should be. One of the many things I dislike about Blender’s current shading system is that it generally starts out incorrect, and you have to really understand what’s going on, and work quite hard in order to make it do the right thing (energy conservation, obeying physical laws, etc.). Not only is this a real pain since you have to go through the same chores every time just to get a decent looking material, but for many people who don’t have a good understanding of how rendering/shading works (or should work!) they’re left with sub-par results since they don’t know what magic buttons to press. You should have to work to break it, not to get just a base level of correctness. In further work I do on shading/rendering, that’s going to be a large motivation, to get things working physically plausible by default, but with the ability to break the rules if the situation requires it.

Links for 2009-10-04 [del.icio.us]
Matt Ebb - 2009-10-05 07:00:00

• Séraphine (2008)

Animation.... Animation...
KICHAVADI - 2009-10-05 04:53:00

Blocking stage begun...

The Ian Report #469 - The Finale!
Ian Hubert's Posts - Project London - 2009-10-05 04:30:27

It's actually coming together. The entire finale! Finally! The Finale! Is actually coming together!

I'm still riding the wave from Nathan's involvement a while ago—rendering out all the shots he animated over the months. Nate Taylor's animating out a few more shots, so hopefully we'll reach an equilibrium where we're both animating shots as fast as I can render/composite them.

I think the ending needs more explosions. This is something I feel strongly. The explosions don't even necessarily need to be motivated—things just exploding is enough.

Also; I'm practicing drawing badgers and moose.

Peace!

Ian Hubert
Writer Director

Weekly update September 28 – October 4
Freestyle integration into Blender - 2009-10-05 01:45:29

Integrating Freestyle in the RNA is going to be more difficult than we expected. For that reason, we have asked Brecht to help us in the upcoming week to make it happen. Once this is done, we will be able to reintegrate Freestyle in the UI. Unfortunately, we cannot work on other features until we can configure and run Freestyle in Blender 2.5. Thank you for your understanding.

Puppet-Anim
Reyn's Blog - 2009-10-05 01:07:00

A camera animation from my still Puppet.