Planet Blender

WorkShop Blender Army Bandung
Hello! - 2009-11-01 22:41:14

Sukses sudah acara workshop Blender Army tanggal 1 oktober 2009, bertempat di Coomon Room Bandung. Workshop ini di selenggarakan oleh komunitas Ubuntu Bandung dalam acara Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Release Party Bandung. Acara berlangsung santai tapi menarik dan seru. Blender Army sendiri memulai acara paling akhir setelah beberapa acara inti dari jam 9 pagi.

Sekembalinya dari acara GCOS di jakarta, workshop Blender Army merapat di kota kembang Bandung. Blender Indonesia bekerjasama dengan Pongo Studio sukses menggelar workshop dan presentasi karya para Army. Acara yang bertajuk Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Release Party ini di adakan oleh segenap komunitas Ubuntu di Bandung untuk menyambut Ubuntu versi barunya. Walaupun terlalu singkat untuk sebuah workshop, namun para peserta tidak nampak beranjak sampai selesainya acara , apalagi ketika para Army dan Pongo studio beraksi di depan.

Dimulai dari presentasi singkat HizaRo dan pemutaran film Blender BBB & ED, penonton serius menyimaknya. MEreka terkesima setelah melihat dan tak henti berseru sambil bertepuk tangan. Tak kalah ketinggalan pula, si Hebring, Jagoan Indonesia yang sukses di buat dengan Blender ini, melakukan aksi di depan mata penonton. SERU! “Ini karya anak bangsa yang sebagian besar sudah dibuat memakai Blender’, imbuh Hiza.

Setelah sedikit segar dengan tayangan film Blender, Reko AGung (Army Bandung) segera mengambil posisi workshop dengan tutorial modelingnya. Praktis dan terstruktur dengan baik setiap langkahnya. Sehingga penonton tidak terlalu pusing dengan materi yang disiapkan Reko. Tujuannya mengenalkan keunggulan Blender yang walaupun GRATIS akan tetapi tidak kalah dengan Software #D yang mahal lainnya. Bravo!

Pongo Studio juga memulai aksi dengan presentasi konsep Studio FOSS. Mereka bermarkas di Pratista Bandung dan baru berdiri kira-kira 3-4 bulan. Konsep studionya memang beda dengan yang lain, selain memakai Free Open Source Software, mereka juga menjadi pionir dalam perkembangan animasi Blender. Selama ini beberapa project sudah berhasil dicapai dan dalam perkembangannya tidak ada klien yang mengeluh dengan hasil akhirnya. Dalam acara ini Lukman (animator) beraksi dengan presentasi singkat Blender dan di bantu Berto dengan concept artnya, berto menggunakan Alchemy untuk memulai artworknya. PEnonton berdecak kagum melihat kepiawaian mereka. Gud Job Bro

Target utama workshop ini menurut HizaRo adalah memperkenalkan Blender Indonesia di kalangan penggemar animasi. Selain memperkenalkan Blender sebagai alternatif software dan berbagai aplikasi pendukung seperti Gimp dan Inkscape. Audiens juga diberi ‘penyuluhan’ mengenai perkembangan animasi software sekaligus membentuk mental pemakai software yang masih ‘meminjam’ :p. Alhasil mereka diberi alternatif pilihan untuk memakai yang Free dan Open daripada membajak hak cipta orang lain. Sukses untuk semua Army yang mendukung acara ini, kita bertemu di Surabaya 10 November 2009.

The Ian Report #471 - Kung Fu Arizona!
Ian Hubert's Posts - Project London - 2009-11-01 22:31:31

So I've been trying out my animation legs again... trying to animate some more of the final battle, and it's going a lot better than expected! I was able to complete one of the more ambiguous parts of the fight, "Random Kung Fu Stuff". Admittedly, it's not actually "kung fu" at all... more them just bashing on each other—but hey! I dig it! Knowing that creating a full shot of Arizona and Subject C battling from scratch isn't going to be total nightmare is a weight off my mind (so far, everything involving both Arizona and Subject C has been animated supremely by Mr. Veggie)!

Nate Taylor's also animating stuff for the end; a crazy awesome backflip/land bit. It's looking great, and I'm excited to get it in, since once it's laid in I think the majority of the end of the battle will be done.

Gettin' there!

Ian Hubert
Writer Director

Special Announcement - Half Acre Day
Phil McCoy's Posts - Project London - 2009-11-01 21:23:03

As many of you know we have been very excited about the music of Half Acre Day. Today, we (Ian, Nate, Phil) proudly wear HADster mustaches to announce that we have reached an agreement in principle with the band to use their music in the movie and on a soundtrack CD.

Needless to say, we are over the moon, and have been since last Friday when I (Phil) received the good news. Ian's first word was, "AAAAAAAAAAAAwesome!!!" and Nate sent me a note saying, "Woohoo! This is awesome[,] I am absolutely thrilled." We have high hopes for our new partnership.

Somewhere, I know Anton "Tony" Urban is pleased with himself. In fact, he is probably wearing his patented self-satisfied smirk™. Huh? Anton introduced me to the band. Thanks Anton.

New Blog!
Tinker Code - 2009-11-01 18:52:29

Hi, this is -again- a friend of Farsthary! As Farsthary made last week a “little” excursion in the beautiful particle world of Lord Jahka (sorry if this sounds cheesy…), I thought you would be interested by some pieces of information: - Jahka has kindly accepted to review his patch, so stay tuned to Jahka’s blog [...]

Developer Meeting Notes (Blender 2.5 Report)
BlenderNation - 2009-11-01 18:06:35

Previous week report, from Blender Conference meeting - Blender 2.5 "beta 0" naming still has some pro/contra discussions… in some aspects it's more like an alpha. Everyone agrees it has to be communicated as a test build when released - Beta0 targets: Python api is ready for exporters, importers work for mesh. Collada might be in as [...]

Renderman friendly advise from Campbell McGrouther
Prince Harming To Prince Charming - 2009-11-01 17:49:38

When working up your models you are welcome to develop them how you please, but when it comes to delivering these models to other people, they need a few things cleaned up. And when it comes to rendering a piece of geometry in a Renderman renderer, there are some really important things to consider. Especially when it comes to how the geometry is arranged, and UVs are laid out.

Renderman renderers are not as forgiving as many others. For instance if the normals are funky, this will cause all sorts of nastiness when the shaders are applied. Don’t assume that because the geo looks fine in the Blender renderer, it will work in Aqsis or another Renderman renderer.

 

 

Terminology

(I thought I should make sure we all know what I’m talking about)

• Asset - the full collection of geo to be passed between artists. The Peacock.
• Mesh – an element of geo in the asset. Left Eyeball.
• Geo - geometry in general.
• Shell – a seamless collection of Uvs.
• Shader – a program written in Renderman Shading Language to define the surface properties of the geo.

Polygons:

All polygons are to be quads. Triangles if you are really stuck.

 

Break your asset up into meshes that will have different surface propeties. Renderman does not support multiple shaders per single piece a geo. So you cannot have the head of the character with one shader for the fur, and then select the beak and apply a different shader. This is a really important issue. It will mean that you need to think carefully about seams, and how to connect these pieces together.

 

Meshes should be ‘closed’ surfaces. For example don’t just model one side of a piece of paper, model both. It takes a fraction more work, but it means that these meshes will be more versatile when it comes to shading. On a similar note, it’s worth modelling things like eye sockets for characters too. This way if the eyeball doesn’t sit perfectly - or is stretched - then the render may still look correct in the gaps. If there was no geo there, it may be too late or too hard to send the model back to get fixes made.

 

All normals are to face the intended direction. If on the same surface some are facing out, and some are facing in, then edges or seams will appear on these borders. You may also get things like shadows and occlusion calculating incorrectly as when they are calculating, they test for things like normal direction.

 

 

UVs:

Be patient, and take your time. There is no fast answer to setting up good Uvs.

 

Uniform spacing. Test your Uvs regularly with a checker map. All the checks should be evenly distributed across a mesh. It’s important for the texture painter to know that if they paint a detail in one area of the model, the same detail painted elsewhere in that model will come through the same size.

 

No atlas mapping. Break your UVs into logical shells. This way anyone can easily paint and amend textures. It’s not uncommon for textures to need little paint fixes late in the game, and to be able to open up and spot the problem areas quickly, is something you’ll soon appreciate. Atlas mapping is - possibly in my own opinion - only useful if you have a full 3d paint application supporting your work, like Mudbox or zBrush. Take the time to lay UVs out correctly.

 

Keep all geo in a single UV set. I’m not sure about how Blender deals with different sets, but I think they also need to supported in the shaders for them to work. So for now, keep them in the default set.

 

Get regular feedback from your favourite texture artist, on how they would like the UVs laid out. Think about the artist painting the UVs, if you have 10 fingers it might be easier to lay them all out in the same direction, near each other. This will make it much easier for the artists to paint up the details. Also, keep the different UV shells orientated vertically and horizontally. If they are skewed it becomes very hard to paint and change details.

 

All UVs to be kept within a 0-1 range (unless a method for dealing with UV Tiles has been developed).

 

Be patient, and take your time.

 

 

So in conclusion …

Just make sure you tidy up after yourself. It’s actually fairly easy to write some simple QA tools that can test many of these things, otherwise just get into the habit of checking everything before you hand off the asset to the next person in the line.  If someone has planned to do some work on an asset - and these things have not been checked - they may well end up wasting a lot of time trying to fix errors, and be well within their rights to simply send it back to the modeler for continued work. Also it’s possible that an error may not show up until a lot of work has taken place. This is why it’s very important to QA your own work.

graphicall: Aligorith just added Spline IK constraint! [24210] http://bit.ly/2Gfqxy
Twitter / graphicall - 2009-11-01 16:49:48

graphicall: Aligorith just added Spline IK constraint! [24210] http://bit.ly/2Gfqxy

espresso-2 [Flickr]
Matt Ebb - 2009-11-01 12:14:53

mattebb posted a photo:

espresso [Flickr]
Matt Ebb - 2009-11-01 12:14:42

mattebb posted a photo: