Planet Blender

Unifying the Harmonic force with the Spring force
Tinker Code - 2009-12-17 21:10:11

Hi all Thanks to Jahka who told me that he suspected the current harmonic force to act in a similar way to my spring implementation, I have performed some researches and he was indeed right.  Just that the harmonic force doesn’t consider a rest length parameter. So I have merged both implementation into one, where the harmonic force [...]

graphicall: Autorigging front end, access in pose mode armature panel. Ideasman42 [25450] http://download.blender.org/durian/metarig_demo.ogv
Twitter / graphicall - 2009-12-17 19:58:50

graphicall: Autorigging front end, access in pose mode armature panel. Ideasman42 [25450] http://download.blender.org/durian/metarig_demo.ogv

Rigify Auto-Rigging System
Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project - 2009-12-17 19:50:50

Since there are more then 3-4 characters to be rigged we agreed having some way to make a rig once and re-use with minimal manual tweaking was needed.
Over the past few weeks Nathan and I have been working together to make a system which can generate these in a way that lets us apply them in a variety of situations.

Nathan broke his rigs down into body parts; hips, neck, spine, finger, arm, palm and leg. with the desired ‘before & after’ for each.
Then I took these and wrote a script that would look at the simple rig and create the final version.

After this it was just a matter of putting it all together to rig an entire character.
If this proves its self to be useful it may well become the defacto auto-rigging system in blender, too early to say now.

Rigify Demo .OGG file (higher quality)
Please excuse the needless mouse waggling, clearly I can’t talk and use blender at the same time

Download the blend including metarig and generated rigs, older versions of Blender 2.5 should be able to open these too.
Sintel & Baby Dragon

Technical Details

• Written entirely in python 3.1
• Uses the blender 2.5 data api from python and operators in a few some cases, mostly to toggle editmode.
• ~400 lines of code for the rigging system, ~400 lines for utility functions, ~2500 lines for 9 metarig types.
• Rig types are separate from the rigging system, new rig types can be added by copying files into the module directory.
• Pose bone properties, one tag per rig type, optional tags can be added to set layers and the root parent.
• PyDrivers got a ~20x speedup by caching the compiled expression which helps since we needed to use PyDrivers in the more complex rigs.
• Available the regular Blender2.5 SVN revision 25450.

- Campbell

BlenderArtists Christmas Challenge Voting
BlenderNation - 2009-12-17 19:50:14

Well! It seems that BlenderArtist had a nice Christmas Contest going on and nobody bothered to tell us about it ;-) Anyway, come in and vote! theeth wrote: BlenderArtists is redecorating for Christmas. The winner of the Special Edition Christmas Week End Challenge will be featured in the banner at the top of the site. Please come vote for [...]

The Ian Report #477 - The harder they come...
Ian Hubert's Posts - Project London - 2009-12-17 17:58:40

Nate Taylor and I are tackling the hardest shots left in the movie—based on our estimates. After this, it's all downhill (is that the right word choice? I don't think it's the right wordchoice).

One side effect of nearing the end is that the shot locations are now so scattered about that I almost always have to set up the entire scene for it, and lug up old elements and put them in place—as opposed to when I'm working on a whole sequence and can just streamline the ending of one shot into the beginning of the next.

I'm really excited about all of the audio options that are emerging—could be some very cool possibilities in the near future!

Stay tuned!

Ian Hubert
Writer Director

Aqsis test - Flame (3)
KICHAVADI - 2009-12-17 17:58:00

KICHAVADI
Blender to RenderMan - 2009-12-17 17:49:00




Well it looks like our influence and efforts are starting to pay off! Recently a small team of artists over in India are working on developing an animated series and are using Blender and Aqsis, among other open source tools, to do it.

What a good start as well! They have been posting regular updates on their blog, mainly a lot of test renders but they do look very nice! In the past few days alone there have been many posts just on tests of shadows and DOF, so they seem to be getting the hang of Blender and Renderman quite well!

Hope to see more from these guys and best of luck gentlemen!

Launching Animafest Jogja
Hello! - 2009-12-17 17:25:01

Roadshow launching Beoscope Animafest 2009 kembali di gelar di Jogja (15-16/12/2009), bertempat di auditorium Telkom Jogja Jl. Yos Sudarso 9 Kotabaru. Acara ini bekerjasama dengan Telkom dan Blender Indonesia sebagai media partner. Selain di Telkom, pada keesokan harinya dilanjutkan dengan bincang-bincang santai di kampus DKV Modern School of Design, Tamsis. Acara secara umum berjalan lancar dan tertib hingga selesai.

Berikut Dokumentasi Foto di Telkom Jogja:

Dokumentasi Foto di kampus DKV MSD:

Aqsis test - DOF (3)
KICHAVADI - 2009-12-17 17:15:00

Aqsis test - DOF (2)
KICHAVADI - 2009-12-17 17:02:00

Aqsis test - DOF (1)
KICHAVADI - 2009-12-17 16:46:00

DOF rocks.. :)

graphicall: Physics branch: Basic rigid body setup is possible now via game physics panel. [25441] By Arystanbek. Check it out! http://vimeo.com/8236800
Twitter / graphicall - 2009-12-17 16:19:13

graphicall: Physics branch: Basic rigid body setup is possible now via game physics panel. [25441] By Arystanbek. Check it out! http://vimeo.com/8236800

Twitter Updates for 2009-12-18
Matt Ebb - 2009-12-17 15:01:00

• very nice smoke test by 'woodn' http://vol-2.com/div/smoke/index.php?vid=smoketest3_29.flv #

Interview: Matt Ebb
Blender Cookie - 2009-12-17 13:00:26

Many of you will recognize Matt Ebb, he was a lead artist on Elephants Dream, has worked on many prominent Blender productions, including Lighthouse and Kajimba, and is the developer responsible for many of the Blender features we use everyday. But more recently he was brought on by the Blender Foundation (thanks to an anonymous [...]

http://blendercookie.com

Pinecones
ArtofInterpretation.com: Recent Images RSS Feed - 2009-12-17 13:00:00

From my "Nature" series. Technical note: Pure Blender internal render.

Feedback Episode 12-09
processdiary.com - 2009-12-17 13:00:00




Feedback for December 2009!

Some news, some musings, an Amazon order comes early, and the feedback is very insightful advice on how to go about marketing the video releases of the tutorials!

Cheers to Rich Brown, Nixon, Kris, Jon and James for the emails, comments and suggestions!

Some inspiring books just came in the mail:

• Mechanika
• The Skillful Huntsman
• High Moon

Stay tuned to the final WIP video for 2009 just after Xmas, but just before New Year. Until 2010, Merry Xmas, Happy Honnuka, may your Saturnalia yield an evil-doer to scapegoat successfully.. oh hell, just have a great time with your family, friends, and food. :D



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CSS Transform Exporter for Blender
BlenderNation - 2009-12-17 12:27:46

The CSS Transform Exporter exports a 2D Blender animation to a CSS animation. As only a few browsers actually support this (including Safari and Chrome) it has limited use, but it’s a cool idea ;-) James Urquhart wrote: Just to let you know, i released an export script for Blender which takes Blender scenes and exports them [...]

Twitter Updates for 2009-12-17
Matt Ebb - 2009-12-17 10:01:00

• TED Talks James Balog: Time-lapse proof of extreme ice loss http://www.ted.com/talks/james_balog_time_lapse_proof_of_extreme_ice_loss.html #
• nudelZ: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT_hkSbK8Iw new multires and sculpt rocks #
• Open source lens distortion plugin for nuke, using same lens model as 3DE http://bit.ly/7uId3w #

Aqsis test (9)
KICHAVADI - 2009-12-17 08:27:00

A little sharp shadow.. I think it doesn't requires..

Blender sculpt demo – 45 million polygons!
BlenderNation - 2009-12-17 08:18:21

Demo by nutelZ on a C2Q6600 @ 2.95GHZ, Geforce 8600GT

City Maker Dies, Long Live City Maker
Arkavision - 2009-12-17 07:02:55

There will be no further updates to City Maker, or any further Java programming efforts.  Instead I’m going to focus entirely on the short film project.  I left the Information Science major for the Studio Art department at school, and I hope to be out in a year, much sooner than I would have otherwise.

Instead of Java, I will learn and use Python, which is a common scripting language used in Max, Maya, and Blender, and will be of direct usefulness to my projects.

Why post this you ask?  Well, in the height of my excitement around finishing a potentially useful program (hurray!) I tried submitting it to Blender Nation and was turned down.  Why?  Well, Bart, the maintaner there said that my program wasn’t much use to the blender community, and there was a superior program – a python script named Sucicidator.  So that’s that.  I already knew about the script but I wasted my time with City Maker anyway.  Nothing’s better than a rejection of your work to tell you that you spent your effort poorly.  But hey, at least I made an A in Java…  a class I didn’t need to take anyway.

Final Spaceboy Concept
Arkavision - 2009-12-17 06:48:42

The character’s name is Eugene.  He’s a boy… who goes into space.  Hence the working title Spaceboy.  I’ve decided to change his personality a bit, to make him more likable and less of a geek.  At one point, I considered making him ‘emo’, but I’m deciding against that too.  Also included in this post is a car concept drawing.  The car was inspired by the Karmann Ghia.

I’ve chosen to make the short film cartoony.  I do not want to make it too realistic for fear of burnout in the process of making it.  I’m getting a little tired of doing creatures and monsters anyway, so I probably won’t include nearly as much existing character modeling work as I thought I would.  “Toki” might still fit the film’s design scheme though.

graphicall: Added search filtering to key map editor - searches in UI names of operators. By Matt [25423]
Twitter / graphicall - 2009-12-17 01:08:23

graphicall: Added search filtering to key map editor - searches in UI names of operators. By Matt [25423]