Planet Blender

Klaas Vaak
Matt Ebb - 2009-10-09 23:19:54

We recently finished a cg sequence for ‘Klaas Vaak’, a European children’s TV show. The show’s about the Sand Man (Klaas Vaak), who tells stories and illustrates them with sand drawings, and it looks really fun. We did a 30 second intro sequence and 10 second end credits sequence. The character’s owned by a large theme park, Efteling, and as I understand, some of this stuff will be constructed in real life at the theme park – very cool.

As usual, I did lighting/shading/comp, and some modelling and fur work too. Jeremy Davidson did most of everything else – animation, rigging, particles, etc. In general it went pretty smoothly, although some of the bigger shots full of trees and houses caused some headaches with the amount of geometry. Especially since at the start of the project we were using 32bit systems to render, though we ended up moving to 64bit midway. Only the first few visible ‘layers’ of trees are geometry (well even still, geometry with branch alpha mapped image textures), but after that, much of them are either image planes with baked colour/normal/alpha maps. All in all though, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

Simple Biped Rig in Blender 2.5
Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project - 2009-10-09 21:09:21

I spent some of this week re-rigging my “Simple Biped Rig” in Blender 2.5. I did this to help verify that the basic rigging tools are now functioning in Blender 2.5.

Fortunately, they are!

So far my favorite new rigging features in Blender 2.5 are the ability to make bones unselectable, and the availability of quaternion, euler, and axis-angle rotations for both objects and bones (yay!).

But I still have a lot to test. Next up I’ll be rigging a full character mesh (though not a final character for the film.

Wish me luck!

—Nathan

UPDATE:

For those of you wanting to play with the rig, here is the file: biped_rig_25.blend

I place it in the public domain via the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 license.

All of the controls are on the first five armature layers.

[dot]BlendMagz #1
Hello! - 2009-10-09 16:40:28

HELLO!

Akhirnya saat yang kita tunggu sudah terbit di tengah-tengah Blender Army. Di sela perkembangan CG dnan Animasi di Indonesia tercinta, kami hadir dengan konsep baru. Menawarkan alternatif [pilihan] bagi para pecinta OpenSource, Blender khususnya

Terimakasih partisipasi dan kerjasama kalian, baik yg berkontribusi maupun yang sudah aktif di forum Blender Indonesia. Ini khusus didedikasikan untuk kamu Kami sadar masih banyak yang kurang di edisi perdana ini, baik dari segi konten maupun Tampilan yang sederhana. Juga mohon maaf bagi yang belum tercantum artworknya, pertimbangannya adalah keterbatasan waktu dan tenaga, juga ukuran file. Edisi berikutnya kalian tunggu saja.

[dot]BlendMagz didedikasikan untuk para Blender Army di Indonesia.Sebagai bentuk support
Terhadap FORUM Blender Indonesia dan perkembangan Blender di dunia. Magz ini mengupas
Perkembangan Animasi Blender dan Project OpenSource sekaligus mendukung Digital Artist
& Studio Berbasis Open Source. What Next? Tentu saja sebuah project besar yang bernama
Open Movie Hingga project-project inovative local artist yang diharapkan GO International.

Next kami akan coba menyempurnakan sesuai permintaan dan saran Blender Army sekalian. So, tunjukkan kemampuanmu dan berkarya lewat media kita semua. GO Blender Indonesia!

KAPTEN BLENDER ©2009

DOWNLOAD [dot]BlendMagz PDF

DOWNLOAS EXE
http://www.spotbit.com/main/magazine.php?∏=7573

DOWNLOAD dari SERVER LOKAL [BLENDERINDONESIA.ORG]

VERSI PDF

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Sakura Music Video
BlenderNation - 2009-10-09 16:00:09

ekakiya  wrote: I recently made short PV animation for the Japanese song "sakura".  It's done with a combination of 2D and 3D. Video Link Composite node is like this and I posted a script about the pixel base displacement-map used in the animation.

And we went home with a CG award
Montage Studio - 2009-10-09 13:58:39

Hey people!

I’m really excited to announce that my collegues from school and myself received an award for ‘Best Texture’ in the CgSociety challenge ‘Secret Agent’! And gosh it feels good

You can view the winners here: http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5293&page=1

We are on the last page unde the ‘Best Texture Award’.  I must congratulate my collegue Marc Lebuis, because he did most (as in, almost all except one or two object) of the texturing. And he did it in the last 48hours of the contest hehe. He just rocks! If any employer want him as a texture artist, or as a generalist contact him at marc.lebuis.3dart [at] gmail.com

You can either view our project on the winners page, or here:

Mission 4 – CGChallenge ‘Secret Agent’ from Js Guillemette on Vimeo.

My Beautiful Blog Pages Have All Disappeared during my Wordpress update, argh.
Starbright Illustrations (blog) - 2009-10-09 12:42:09

This cool CG 3d (and other stuff) blog is now being brought to you via the latest version of Wordpress, yeah cool! But during the update from the old version of Wordpress all my pages disappeared. Heaps and heaps of beautiful pages about role-playing games, art and other cool stuff that I poured all my creativity into, all gone. Not so cool…

For example this link http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/role-playing-game-illustrations/ is a collection of some of the best illustrations I’ve ever done – all with an RPG connection – and it’s one of the most popular pages on my whole blog, but now when you follow that link all it returns is this result,

“Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here. You can search again by using this form…”

That’s less than ideal, in fact I hate it when a site does that to me. It seemed like I had a disaster on my hands, but suspiciously the number of posts on my blog jumped by the same amount as the missing pages. Aha, I thought, I may know what happened. And sure enough what was once a “page” about RPG illustrations is now a “post” about RPG illustrations with a slightly different URL, an URL with more numbers in. It’s now at this link http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2009/02/19/role-playing-game-illustrations/

Argh, why did an update change all those URLs, and more importantly, what am I going to do about it.

I’ve got two options, either delete all the new “posts” and turn them back into pages. But I really hate deleting an URL once it has been created, because I hate finding a cool page in a search result only to click on it and find it has been deleted or moved.

Or option two, I could duplicate all the role-playing game and illustration content of these new posts at the original page URLs, leaving me with two copies of each page. But I’ve heard that Google doesn’t like this, and might even penalize me.

I guess I’ll duplicate the pages but rewrite them sufficiently that some value is added and they are no longer simple duplicates.

Now how on earth am I going to do that?

Chile Blender Conference, October 23
BlenderNation - 2009-10-09 12:17:00

Chile: We're making a parallel Blender Conference here in Chile the 23rd of October. It is a one day conference and is part of a bigger event called Encuentro Linux, so we're actually making a pretty big event. The Blender Conference is one of the activities of five, from the Universities organizing the event for [...]

graphicall: V-Ray/Blender 2.5 integration project http://blender.bevice.ru/
Twitter / graphicall - 2009-10-09 08:24:09

graphicall: V-Ray/Blender 2.5 integration project http://blender.bevice.ru/

Music Video for the Band "Jack Daw"
BlenderNation - 2009-10-09 04:29:55

We have just finished a music video for the band "Jack Daw". They are the winners of a music contest called "Moviet" All the close-ups on the birds are made completely in Blender, and some of the "bird crowds" are made with Blender, others in Adobe AfterEffects. The video have been awarded for "Best Music [...]