Planet Blender

[New Book] Blender 3D Incredible Machines, by Allan Brito
feeblemind - 2009-12-01 23:07:47

Allan Brito, author of the famous weblog Blender 3D Architect and of the Blender 3D Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery book did it again: he recently published a new book at Packt Publishing.

His new book is titled Blender 3D 2.49 Incredible Machines. I should receive it soon, and I would be pleased to review it on this blog for your very pleasure. Before it happens, you can check the full table of content or the attached sample chapter, courtesy of the publisher.

Just a little progress with Spaceship bar Concept Art
Starbright Illustrations (blog) - 2009-12-01 20:23:38

Blender-Empire Magazine #10 Released
BlenderNation - 2009-12-01 19:36:24

A new issue of the Russian Blender-Empire Magazine has just been released. Vychegzhanin Vladimir wrote: Now you are welcome to download and read the latest issue of Blender-Empire Magazine #10. The theme is «Everything an amateur animator needs ». Contents: Blown away send text Camera animation Interview with Morthan Animation. Where to start from? Automated animation for cars Characters and Rigging. «Big Buck Bunny» [...]

Blendiberia 2009
malefico's spot - 2009-12-01 17:01:31

Blendiberia meetings are a lot like B-Confs or like going to the pub next door: There are always some new faces, there might be one or two of the oldies missing, but it’s guaranteed you are going to have a good time and remember thousands of tiny anecdotes.

This was no exception. Thanks a lot to the organizing comitee, particularly to Antonio Lopez and the guys from Suresnet (especially Manolo !), for taking care so well of me and having organized this meeting !

And here go the pictures !

Blendiberia 2009
malefico's spot - 2009-12-01 16:39:13

Lo que tienen las Blendiberias es como cuando uno va a un bar a charlar con los amigos de siempre. Hay caras nuevas, pueden faltar algunos de los tradicionales, pero siempre se pasa un buen rato y se recuerdan miles de anecdotas. Esta no fue la excepción. Ante todo agradezco una vez más la invitación, [...]

New Book: Blender 3D Incredible Machines
Blender 3D Architect - 2009-12-01 16:13:38

I’m very pleased to announce that my latest book project was published last week! My new book is about Blender 3D again and it’s called Blender 3D Incredible Machines. This is a project in which I’m working on for the past year, and was finally able to complete the full set of chapters by the [...] Related posts:

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3. Book review: A visual dictionary of architecture Ever since I started to study and work with architecture,...

Durian Rigging 01
Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project - 2009-12-01 14:15:32

My first real rigging post! Yay!

First, watch this video (there’s no audio, your speakers aren’t broken):

sintel_rig_demo_01.ogv

Second, I love Blender 2.5. So many awesome new features to help me make better rigs. I shouldn’t even say that. It’s not even features, so much as the new core design choices.

For example, notice the custom rig UI elements integrated directly into the side bar? It makes me so happy. And it wasn’t even that hard. Just some python scripting.

Okay, okay. I’m gushing. Let’s get down to rig itself.

In the video above, I’m mostly showing off the spine rig. The spine and neck rigs for this character are my Big Proud Thing™ in this rig, because the rest of the awesomeness is thanks to 2.5, not me.

First, notice that there are only two controls for the spine: the hips (name “pelvis” in the rig) and the rib cage (named “torso” in the rig). I should probably name them better…

Anyway, animating with rigs that have 3+ bones to manage the spine has been a peeve of mine for years. It’s a pain to manage, and 90% of the time you just want to tell the rig “bend and twist this way”. So with this rig I simplified it to a single control that just does the “right thing” (i.e. approximately bio-mechanically correct) most of the time. You just give it the orientation of the rib cage with one control, and the orientation of the hips with the other, and the rig figures out automagically what everything inbetween should do to accomplish that in a plausible way.

In addition to that there is a “pivot slide” slider in the sidebar that lets you place the pivot point of the rotation. And what I mean by that is it defines what point on the spine should remain stationary in space when you rotate the two controls.

For example, by default that spot is at the hips, so in the video when I’m first rotating the upper body, the hips aren’t moving. And when I rotate the hips, the upper body moves to accommodate the bend of the spine. But you can also set that point to the upper body, as I did later in the video. Then when I rotate the hips, the upper body stays put. And when I rotate the upper body, the hips move to accommodate. But you can set that “stay put” point to be anywhere along the length of the spine. Setting it near the hips is useful for things like walk cycles, setting it near the upper body is useful for swinging from the arms or bracing against a wall. Setting it towards the middle is useful for quadruped types of motion.

Anyway, I’m being long-winded, and that makes this seem complex. But it’s actually really simple to use. Watch the video again. It will make sense. :-)

Of course, animators need control and flexibility, so you’re not limited to this simplified system. I didn’t show it in the video, but if you need more specific control over the spine pose, the raw spine bones are accessible in the “body extras” layer, and you can animate directly with them like normal. You can even combine the two systems (they layer on top of each other nicely). And lastly, you can also tweak the amount of bend that happens at each spine joint during the automatic bending with some extra sliders (which I also didn’t show).
But this simpler control system on its own is enough for probably 90% of situations.

The neck control is similar, but even simpler. You just specify the orientation of the head, and it works out the proper neck rotation. (Again, you can easily get more control if you need it.)

Aside from those setups, one of the nice things about this rig is how it decides what sliders to show at any given time. I’ve scripted it so that any sliders relevant to the currently selected control(s) get’s displayed. So, for example, the IK switch property for the right leg actually belongs to the right IK foot control. But thanks to the scripting it shows up when you select any control of the right leg.

For those who are curious, here is the blend file:

sintel_rig_01.blend

Note that it requires a recent SVN build of Blender 2.5. The alpha 0 release doesn’t work with it. Also, if you don’t see the custom UI controls, just run the script in the text window. In theory it should run automagically, but there are still bugs that need to be fixed with that.

Until next time!

–Nathan

Box Modeling an Alien Character in Blender 2.5 alpha 0
Blender Cookie - 2009-12-01 13:00:12

In this tutorial, I show you a few basics of Blender 2.5, and cover how to use the box-modeling technique to create a full character. The box-modeling technique is a good way to quickly visualize the shape of your character, rather than creating the detail from the beginning. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons [...]

http://blendercookie.com

Blender 2.5 beginners guide in Spanish
BlenderNation - 2009-12-01 12:05:13

Joaclins has published an extensive introduction to Blender 2.5 in Spanish. Does anyone know of an English equivalent? Joaclint wrote: I have a guide for beginners adapted to 2.5 version. Maybe the first one. There is: PDF version: 45 pages (very visual, lot of screen shots) online version (at Google docs) All links and information in Spanish. Happy blending…

Blender++ 1.2 released!
Akta's Way - Blog - 2009-12-01 11:59:36

Hi!

I’m proud to announce you that Blender++ v. 1.2, the batch renderer for Blender, has been released today!

If you don’t know what is Blender++, please check it out here!

What is new in Blender++ 1.2:

- Queue support: now you can submit queues to Blender++ in a special .que file format. Check it in the Blender++ folder to see how is it done!

- Command line: you can now use Blender++ without opening the GUI at all! This means that if you can remotely access to your machine (i.e. with Putty) you can just start your renders using the following sintax:

• queue render: brend95.exe queue_file q 1 t app_folder
• single frame render: brend95.exe blend_file f frame_number t app_folder
• animation render: brend95.exe blend_file a start_frame end_frame t app_folder

Where t is number of threads you want to use (remember that Blender uses from 1 to 8 maximum threads) and app_folder is the path to the blender.exe file. Moreover if you are using the OSX or Linux version just change brend95.exe with “python brend95.py”

- Baked data support: fluids and soft-bodies/cloth baked data is rendered as long as it’s pre-baked in Blender before launching Blender++.

- Threads support: you can decide how many threads Blender will use to render your blend file or queue (max.

- Bug fixes

If you find some bug please report it to me and I’ll be happy to help you out providing a patch

You can download Blender++ 1.2 from sourceforge.

Akta

Two LuxRender Tutorials
BlenderNation - 2009-12-01 09:02:26

BlenderArchitect.com's Allan Brito takes another dive into LuxRender. He checks out the state of affairs for Blender 2.50 and explains how to adjust the light sensitivity of your camera. First preview of the LuxRender exporter for Blender 2.50 One thing that I still didn’t saw on any of the test build of Blender 2.50 was a preview [...]

Muse on interface design
mike's digital anthology - 2009-12-01 08:17:20

Lately in my attempt to juggle many tasks and getting things done as fast as possible, I have become increasingly frustrated at some of the current UI implementations, some are pointless, some are ugly, some are a pain to use.  And often it’s the combination of all 3.  For once, I am not talking about Blender.  This is a general rant on the various softwares I encounter every day.

Part 1: The diminishing vertical space

How much time do you spend watching movies on the computer screen?  And how much time do you spend browsing the net?  If your answer is in favor of the web browsing, then help me understand why is widescreen still a popular choice for laptops and netbooks, where the focus is suppose to be work, and not play?

And if we agree that widescreen is a bad idea for working with text (reading webs and writing emails, etc), then why do applications still like to hog up vertical screen space so much?  And no, a 1280×800 screen can NOT fit two pages of point 11 text side-by-side, so don’t even try that argument.

On a 13 inch laptop, the ever popular resolution seems to be 1280×800.  If you are browsing with IE8 running on Win 7, (Firefox is not any better when it comes to this),  out of the 800 vertical pixels, 185 pixels are taken up by the UI elements,  shrinking the viewable content to a diminutive 615 pixel!  For a netbook it’s worse, browsing without fullscreen is almost like looking out a slit.  Sure you can scroll up and down to view the content.  But why make the user work for it when the application can simply condense the UI element?

Google Chrome seems to have the right idea about this: out of the box uses a reasonable 64 pixel of vertical space, leaving the rest for CONTENT.   A few pixels might not seems like a big deal, but when you are working on a small screen, every pixel needs to do something useful!

Man I am bitter today…

Lunch with Captain Doug Pine
Phil McCoy's Posts - Project London - 2009-12-01 02:00:00

We have been talking to Doug quite a bit lately after his harrowing experience with mutiny on the high seas. If you didn't already know, Doug is a real ship captain who plays the captain of a floating restaurant in our film, Project London. Today, Doug took us (L to R: Doug, me, Ian, Nate) out to lunch at Hale's Brewery in Fremont. Delicious food. Good conversation. Thanks Doug!

Space Boy
Arkavision - 2009-12-01 00:10:28

I am working on a new short film project.  Space Boy is only the working title, as it is too similar to the title Astroboy, coming to theaters within a few months.

The story is about a 13 year-old boy, who looses his father in a kidnapping by what initially appears to be aliens. The boy, like is father, is a genius, and uses his intellect to build the means of finding his father – a space ship of his own. With the launch of his space ship, a great journey begins for him and his pet cat Herby.

The idea came to me while thinking back to my childhood, when I would daydream of going into space to escape whatever boring situation I was in.  As such, the character was initially modeled after myself, though this is no longer the case.  Eric is a ‘bad’ boy.  Very intelligent, but also misunderstood and very angry.  Other kids call him ‘emo’, though he is not totally goth.  His trusty pet cat likes to emulate him outwardly, though the two characters are very different.  I should also point out that Herby and Eric are temporary names, until I settle on better alternatives.

Attached below are early concepts of this idea.  The current idea I have for how Eric looks is quite a bit different from the concept drawing of him below.

And finally, as a sort of happy accident, I believe I can make use of some of my previous character models for the later scenes – especially Cable and Toki.