Planet Blender

Jack Daw – Perilious Poetry
Blender Art Gallery - 2009-12-09 23:16:52

Description:

“Jack Daw” are the winners of a music contest called “Moviet” Were the praise was a music video and this i the result, produced by Istudios filmproduktion in Sweden. 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 Video 2009″ in “TellUs Movie Festival”

Blender + Unity3D = Great game
Elvis Alistar's Blog - 2009-12-09 20:37:58

In one of my recent posts I was giving a quick overview of Unity3D game engine. This is a great tool that I used during my Master studies in Media Technology and Games in the last 3 months to create one game: Escape from Planet Zombie. All the game models are created and textured in [...]

Barrel
Blender Art Gallery - 2009-12-09 18:46:51

Description:

I have always been really into silly cartoony stuff. I made this animation using a lattice to rig the Barrel. All textures are procedural exept the banana. The song at the end is called ‘Le Festin’ by Camille. All 3d done in blender, video editing in premiere and all sounds were severely messed with in audacity.
Here’s the vimeo link:
http://www.vimeo.com/6995978
or you can download it here:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=SMY7U83G
or (worst quality) youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ixn3s3UX34
Lycence type:
Creative Common Attribution.

Featured Video of the Week 2009-12-09

Reel 2009-10
Vimeo / Blender3D [Animation/Videos] - 2009-12-09 17:52:29

This reel is being updated...

Cast: Avenue

Wise Men
Blender Art Gallery - 2009-12-09 17:45:11

Render: Yafray

Tree of Life
Blender Art Gallery - 2009-12-09 17:41:06

Render: Blender

Poor Pluto
Blender Art Gallery - 2009-12-09 17:36:27

Render: Blender

Babioles trailer
Blender Art Gallery - 2009-12-09 17:20:02

Description:

Trailer for an upcoming french tv show.

Bonding
Blender Art Gallery - 2009-12-09 17:13:19

Render: Blender

Author’s comment: Mommy and baby jellyfish bonding together.

This image is free to share.

Free Female and cell phone model
Tube - Epic Production Notes - 2009-12-09 16:17:31

Hi,

I have created another small free models pack. They are under CC licence again. You can use them in your personal, commercial projects without worrying about any fees. For more details and possible restrictions please check out the included .txt files. The only main restriction on these models is that you cannot sell these models under yoruname or someone else`s name.

Here is a supposedly funny render that depicts the content.

Here is a turntable

Free Female and CellPhone Model (Blender scene) from freeartsculture_kursad on Vimeo.

For more details you can check out my sharing page.
http://share.plecxus.com

The girl model
http://shup.com/Shup/250527/Femail_Share.zip

The old clunky cell phone model

http://shup.com/Shup/250528/t300.zip

Demo Reel: Avery Lanier
BlenderNation - 2009-12-09 15:00:32

Blender Workshop for Northern Utah Professionals
BlenderNation - 2009-12-09 13:15:39

The Ott Planetarium announces a new Blender workshop in February. Ron Proctor wrote: The Ott Planetarium at Weber State University is pleased to announce a new Blender Workshop designed for Northern Utah professionals. The class will meet over the first three Saturdays in February to learn basic Blender skills and collaborate on an open movie project. [...]

Blender and OpenCV
Akta's Way - Blog - 2009-12-09 12:18:43

Hi!

I managed to have some good working interaction between OpenCV and Blender to do face tracking, using a simple webcam, in order to control a camera in the BGE.

For those who don’t know what is OpenCV, they will find the answers here. OpenCV is a really powerful library for real-time image processing, so I strongly recommend you people interested in that to have a look at it!

Anyway how does it work this system I developed? There are basically two components:

• The face tracker
• The real-time BGE camera tracking

The face tracker gets frames from the webcam and for each frame checks if there are faces in the image using the pattern file “haarcascade_frontalface_alt.xml”, where the shape is defined by a set of coordinates (a lot as you can see yourself if you open the file!) which defines face’s pattern. Beware that multiple faces can be detected, but if you are using my example they won’t work, you must use just one face. Once the bounding box of the face is found, its center and area is calculated. CenterX and CenterY are used to control the camera position on the X and Z axis, while the area is the Y, so the bigger the closer the camera gets to the center of the scene (a cube). In the .blend file the area is not used because I’m still doing some experiments to get the best usage of that value, but you can try it yourself, just play with it.

The face tracking works really well in almost every light condition, but I recommend to have a plain light and a good color difference between you and the background. I haven’t made yet any screen recording to show you how it works, if somebody wants to do that in the meanwhile and send me the link of the video, I’ll put it in this post.

Note: this example works on Linux/OSX/Windows platforms as long as the webcam is supported by OpenCV. Mine wasn’t so I had to use VideoCapture module for windows. If you are going to run it in OSX/Linux, change the part of code regarding the webcam device initialization and image capture using the OpenCV methods instead of VideoCapture ones and you are ready to go! Basically you just need a PIL image format value that can be passed computed by OpenCV.

You can find both sources and a win32 build that doesn’t need anything installed on your machine, just run it! The python script needs OpenCV installed. Once you install it you will find in the folder a Python26 subfolder with libs and DLLs. Copy them in your Python folder and that’s all, those are the python wrappers for OpenCV.

- Download BlendCV win32 binary

- Download BlendCV sources

Akta

Villains are fun
Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project - 2009-12-09 10:58:49

Hi all from the Blender Institute after two months of waiting! Talk about being late for work…

Best advice I can give for jetlag is to just get straight into it. I got here last monday morning at about 9am after a whole lot of flying so I wasn’t up to full speed that day of course (still worked a bit), but have been loving it ever since. I’ve been given domain over creating the guardian characters. Baddies are a lot of fun to work on. I’ve tried to keep their expressions fairly neutral for rigging because it is very easy to get carried away and give them massive smirks, angry eyebrows and all that sort of thing.

One day I’d like to pull out all the stops and create my own ridiculously over the top evil supervillain, but for now these characters need to fit in Sintel’s world. Which brings me to the point of style. Most characters I have worked on (at least in recent times) have been based on photographic reference of people, meaning my default reaction is to aim for as much realism as possible in proportions, details and so on. While we plan to add a lot of detail to much of the film, the world does have a certain style to it. My main challenge was to stop modelling from references like Jack Black and Hugo Weaving and bring the models into line with Sintel and each other. This aspect might take a few more revisions yet but the team reaction so far has been quite positive which means I don’t have to get on the next plane back home. Yay!

As far as technique - I modelled Jack first, tweaked the topology a bit and then made the other characters from that mesh so they all have the same topology. Not that we plan to just use one texture map for all of them because that would be lazy and really boring, but it should help troubleshooting when we get to the facial rigging and so on. Brecht has his genius hands full for a bit so sculpting is on hold for a little while (I was testing it for a bit on the weekend) so I’m working on finishing up the characters bodies and then some environment work. Really looking forward to how far we can push the characters with sculpt though, mainly in detailing their outfits but it will help add a lot to the look of the film in many ways.

Three quick things to finish up the post:

1. Go to the AAO (Approximate Ambient Occlusion) settings and look at the new options. (Not in the Alpha - try a build since last friday.) Indirect light with multiple bounces! I’m still hesitant to post a .blend example because I’m just playing with settings like everyone else for now. Basically the same advantages and disadvantages as AAO, works with falloff, works better with higher subdivided surfaces, etc.

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=173425 for some related experiments and images.

2. Apparently it’s been in there for ages, but Angela and I didn’t know : In edit mode when you click the icon to go into vertex, edge or face mode you can simply shift click on those icons in any combination and then be in ‘edge and face mode’ and so on.

3. http://www.drhorrible.com/ Good ol’ fashioned fun for fans of good ol’ fashioned supervillians. Recommended. It premiered online which is cool in and of itself, but not sure where to watch it now outside of the US other than the dvd.

- Ben

Interview: James Neal, RedCartel
BlenderNation - 2009-12-09 10:00:54

James Neal from RedCartel talks about the use of Blender in their production pipeline and about the creation of their Gecko commercials. James says: In late 2006, I met Matt Ebb, who is an Australian guy passionate about open source 3d and Blender and has been heavily involved with the development of those tools. I was already [...]

The Other Day in The Forest
BlenderNation - 2009-12-09 08:06:57

Designed by Martin Lubich (via Blender ARt Gallery.com)

Been very busy, and I'm not alone.
goplexian.com - 2009-12-09 07:06:00

I will be continuing this project sometime in the new year, but for now if you're interested in checking out some more of the Project Euler exercises in the Go language then take a look at this git repository by Josh Goebel.

In other news I just found out that my cellular provider Bell Mobility now has an Android phone, the Samsung Galaxy, I will likely be upgrading to that when it is time to upgrade from my current phone which is an HTC Touch.

Also, I am very happy to see the release of the Google-Chrome browser for Linux, I've been using the nightly builds of Chromium for the past couple months and I've gotta say Chrome is top notch.

Been very busy, and I'm not alone.
goplexian.com - 2009-12-09 07:06:00

I will be continuing this project sometime in the new year, but for now if you're interested in checking out some more of the Project Euler exercises in the Go language then take a look at this git repository by Josh Goebel. In other news I just found out that my cellular provider Bell Mobility now has an Android phone, the Samsung Galaxy, I will likely be upgrading to that when it is time to upgrade from my current phone which is an HTC Touch. Also, I am very happy to see the...

Get Into Gear Webinar at Blenducation
BlenderNation - 2009-12-09 07:03:29

Blenducation is coming back with a bang, offering “Get Into Gear Webinar,” a series of live classes with some of the top Blender 2.5 users, introducing Blender users to the new changes of 2.5 and how to adjust to these changes. Starting December 12 to the 13, 2009, the class instructors include:  Dipingo, ZanQdo, Micheal [...]

Tip: Making Sharp Edges with Subsurf
Blender Cookie - 2009-12-09 06:00:14

This quick tip demonstrates how to create sharp edges while using a Subdivison (subsurf) modifier. This technique is particularly useful when doing any kind of mechanical modeling.

http://blendercookie.com

Animating with Blender available for Kindle
harkyman.com - 2009-12-09 04:08:13

Very cool news! Animating with Blender is now available for Amazon’s Kindle.

Now, besides being called the “top recommendation” among all books about short animation production by one reviewer, it is also available for perusal on your Kindle or iPhone with Kindle app.

You can bop over to check it out here.