Planet Blender

Measuring Objects and Distances in Blender
Blender Cookie - 2010-01-13 23:25:27

In this tutorial, we’ll look at how to measure objects and distances in Blender. We’ll look at features built into Blender and the Caliper script (created by Dolf Veenvliet, aka macouno). The Caliper script can be downloaded at: http://www.alienhelpdesk.com/python_scripts/caliper Support the site – Download includes: High resolution .mov Video .blend file at the state of the tutorial

http://blendercookie.com

Rig Facial para Virginia
The Mercator Project - 2010-01-13 21:37:09

Virginia’s Facial Rig from Mercator Project on Vimeo.

Despues de probar varias cosas para lograr un rostro lo suficientemente expresivo y facil de animar, terminé volviendo a las bases,esto es, usar Shapekeys, Blendshapes, o como le digan. La creacion de los shapekeys en sí no es ningún secreto aunque lleva bastante tiempo, solo hay que tener cuidado de no olvidar que las combinaciones entre ellos es aditiva.

Me basé en el libro de Jason Osipa “Stop Staring” que creo es la Biblia para este tipo de trabajo. Llevar a Blender (2.49) el sistema de control de Osipa me llevó algo de tiempo. Este sistema se basa en que el eje vertical de un slider tipo joystick modula la intensidad de una expresión construida con dos shapekeys (lado izquierdo y derecho por ejemplo) mientras que moviendo de izquierda a derecha cambiamos la mezcla favoreciendo a uno o a otro. Esto se llama un “control asimetrico”.

Para lograrlo recurri a un Pydriver. Las curvas de los shapekeys las hice todas iguales: lineales empezando en 0,0 y terminando en 1,1. El driver python consiste en una unica llamada a una funcion almacenada en un archivo pydrivers.py, que se encarga de obtener un valor de esa curva apropiado dependiendo de la posición del hueso controlador.

Cuando vamos hasta arriba por el centro, los shapekeys 1 y 2 quedan ambos al 100%. Si ahora nos movemos de izquierda a derecha, uno de los shapekeys seguirá al 100%, mientras que el otro disminuirá gradualmente. Cualquiera sea la mezcla, al bajar verticalmente se mantendrá la proporción izquierda-derecha que hayamos establecido.

Para abajo ocurre lo mismo con los otros dos shapekeys. Este sistema permite simplificar la cantidad de controles. Aqui pueden ver el sistema aplicado a los shapekeys de Virginia (pobrecita sin cabello).

La función definida en el pydrivers.py, necesita el nombre del armature, el nombre del hueso que controla, luego un codigo indicando el “cuadrante”, y finalmente los limites minimos y maximos para el movimiento del hueso. Si queremos un control muy “sensible” pondremos un valor pequeño para el desplazamiento.

Aqui pueden descargar el archivo de ejemplo con el pydriver para que lo usen en sus propios rigs. Hasta la proxima !

Blender 2.5 r25969 – COLLADA bugfix
Letwory Interactive - 2010-01-13 20:49:58

Hi, again several hundred commits since my previous build. This build has of course a whole slew of fixes, new features and such. See the file with the log containingchanges from 25772 to 25969 for all the details.

For those interested in COLLADA there’s a fix by Arystan that addresses some rotation issues and naming issues.

Further there are fixes for crashers (opening properties window could crash, projection painting on subsurf or multires could crash. And there’s fixes for existing, but broken functionality, like edge slide after loop cut when face select mode was enabled.

Download the version you need for your Windows and give it a spin.

• Blender 2.5 r25969 – 32bit Windows
• Blender 2.5 r25969 – 64bit Windows

Remember, comments and other feedback (bugs, other issues) are always welcome!

Render Development Plans
Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project - 2010-01-13 19:48:28

I’ve moved to working on the rendering engine, which will be my main focus in the next 3 months. There’s still some fixing needed on the sculpt tools but I won’t do any big changes anymore there. The planned rendering development consists of four parts.

Shading System

The shading code will be refactored to make a clean separation between materials and lamps, and some corrections will be made to the current lighting calculations. But mostly the intention is a more modern system to design materials, one that is not so much geared to direct lighting from lamps only, but works well also for indirect light. Nodes will also be central to the way materials work rather than something glued on top of it. It’s basically a merger between physically based rendering materials that are design for advanced lighting algorithms, and production rendering materials that can do things like output passes or use some tricks for speed.

The current design is on the wiki. We most likely won’t implement the full thing for Durian, but the intention is to implement the foundation and the parts that we use ourselves. Improved raytracing can then be implemented by others later.

Further people have been asking about OpenCL for GPU acceleration. That is something we’re not planning, it wouldn’t be even remotely possible given the time constraints. Also the recently released Open Shading Language by Sony Imageworks would be good to have, but a shading language is not something we can spend time on now, though I think what they are doing is in the same spirit, bringing together physically based and production rendering. I’m looking at their design to see how compatible we can be so someone can implement support for this later, but it looks quite similar, the big difference being of course that we are building a node system and they’re making a shading language.

Indirect Diffuse Light

There’s already an incomplete implementation in trunk based on the approximate AO algorithm. We’ll try to extend this method to do proper shadowing. This could be done using either the recent micro-rendering algorithm (a bit simpler and more flexible) or the pixar technique (proven to work). The main challenge here is keeping performance high enough, it is expected to be quite a bit slower, but hopefully still faster than raytracing, and working on scenes that don’t fit in memory.

Disk Caching

Memory usage is a big problem, especially when rendering in 4K. The plan is that many data structures in the rendering engine will be cached to disk and loaded only when needed. The main implementation issues here are how to do this threaded efficiently and trying to avoid latency killing render performance. There’s many things that could be cached to disk, hopefully we can implement it for most of these:

• Image textures
• Shadow maps
• Multires Displacements
• Smoke/Voxel data
• SSS tree
• Point Based Occlusion/GI tree

Per Tile Subdivision

This is probably the most complex one, we want to subdivide meshrd per tile to render very finely displaced meshes. One challenge is that this requires a patch based subdivision surface algorithm that does not need the full mesh in memory. The existing subdivision library could be modified to do this, but it would not be very efficient. Another possibility is to integrate the integrate QDune Catmull-Clark code.

Other problems are grid cracks, though perhaps these are not too difficult to solve if we take them into account from the start. Another concern is the filtering of multires displacements, this is quite a complicated problem, if it doesn’t get solved we’ll need a simple workflow for baking multires to displacements maps. Existing displacement code also needs to be improved to do filtering properly.

Other issues are how to deal with threading, sharing diced patches between threads, and distributing objects/patches across tiles efficiently. Will be a fun challenge .

For Interested Developers

Of course these are just plans, we’ll see how far we get, though I hope we can do all of them. If you’re a developer interested in helping out, the disk caching would be a good project to pick up as it doesn’t involve that much knowledge of the render engine. Also approximate indirect diffuse lighting could be a good thing to help on, as most of the data structures are already there, the point cloud is already built, it is mostly a matter of implementing the rasterization.

Brecht.

A couple of quick UV updates
Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project - 2010-01-13 19:33:31

Hi all,

Export UV Layout is back in 2.5 and is nicer than it used to be:

Also, you can now edit the right half of a symmetrical UV layout / mesh and then mirror it to the left half:

Anywho, not the greatest examples -  just a quick post to let you all in on the joy of having this stuff working! Character texturing is currently going on at the moment so as you can imagine it’s quite handy.

- Ben.

Stilliskaba #37 – “Törmäys”
#blender.fi - 2010-01-13 19:27:04

Seuraava viikkoskaba on aiheeltaan “Törmäys”. Deadline keskiviikko 20.1.2010.

Skabathreadi löytyy tästä.

Sebastian Koenig - V-Ray - Introduction - The Blender Connection - Streaming Video Review
Adventures In Blender Diary Entries - 2010-01-13 16:51:00

Sebastian Koenig - V-Ray - Introduction - The Blender Connection - Streaming Video Review

Interview at Blendercookie!
Montage Studio - 2010-01-13 15:43:25

Hey guys!

Jonathan was kind enough to invite me for an interview at www.blendercookie.com. Just head over here to see it: http://www.blendercookie.com/2010/01/11/interview-jean-sebastien-guillemette/

Have a nice day!

Jean-Sébastien Guillemette

Fresh Batch of Cookies
Blender Cookie - 2010-01-13 14:49:13

Here is another fresh batch of Artistic Hotness across the interweb fresh out of the oven. This is not software specific, but meant to serve as an inspiration to the rest of us. Some of it may not even be 3D. Every week or So we are going to try and post a “batch” of [...]

http://blendercookie.com

How to control hard edges in architectural modeling?
Blender 3D Architect - 2010-01-13 13:19:32

For architectural visualization projects dealing mostly with external views of buildings, the amount of detail that we have to add to those elements like chamfers in hard edges won`t add much to the final result. Since the camera is placed far away from the 3d object, those edges won`t be visible enough in the final [...] Related posts:

1. Table with mesh organization tips for 3D polygon modeling What is required to learn and develop even more your...
2. How to improve edge modeling in Blender 3D? One of the techniques to create 3d models for architecture...
3. How to correct the topology of a 3d model for architectural visualization? One of the most interesting things about 3d modeling is...

Is Plumiferos going to be premiered ?
malefico's spot - 2010-01-13 12:34:37

Recently a Facebook page about Plumíferos showed up informing about an imminent premiere date: February 18th 2010. Some people have congratulated me on this, and some others asked me if this is true or just another false rumor. Since I didn’t know whether to be happy or not in the first case, or whether if it was true or false in the second, I decided to return the salutations with real data.

Since I do not have any contacts with the producers at Manos Digitales, studio I’m detached from since a couple of years now, I didn’t have any news on the subject. However, I do have a friendly relationship with Plumíferos’, director Daniel De Felippo, someone I respect deeply.

I met him, and the conclusion is that the producers do have in mind to premiere the movie (which was incomplete a year and a half ago) next February. In fact, the studio was working secretly, without telling anyone not even the director, all past year. Almost like an army of tiny elves.

When I left the production, there was nearly 80% of the movie finished. 90% of the animation was blocked, a few scenes needed to be lightened, and only around 20% of the shots were rendered/composited, maybe more.

Plumíferos was going to be the first 3D movie made with FLOSS, even more, it was going to be the first argentine 3D movie ever done. Today it can still be, although those who finish it are not the same who started it. My sincere congratulations to the team that took the torch and guided to good harbor our most pampered creature.

However, little or nothing has been said officially. There is no big promotion. Actors and actresses do not show up in TV shows giving interviews about it, and the producers do not show their faces in any media. In fact I have only heard about it to a couple people completely external to the original production team.

I do hope the movie get to the theater this February. I’m proud of the work I’ve done. I did it honestly and have nothing to regret but my own human mistakes.

Hope we all can watch it soon !

Twitter: 2010-01-13
Matt Ebb - 2010-01-13 10:01:00

• Linked from google's blog post: report detailing Chinese cyber-spying on Tibetan targets including office of DL http://bit.ly/6PCE87 #
• Google announces it'll stop filtering results in china – "Do no evil" in practice, well done #google ! http://bit.ly/5BElrH #

Scorpion
Vimeo / Blender3D [Animation/Videos] - 2010-01-13 06:21:32

comment and other video on luceri.it

Cast: fernando luceri

Hail to the bug fixers
Watch Mike's.... - 2010-01-13 02:53:57

The original reason I got into Blender was its stability. I’d been working with Maya, but bugs were constantly plaguing me. When I switched over to Blender, I finally could sleep at night, not worrying about the kind of crashing that would happen tomorrow, or the day after.

And while Blender had its limitations, that was fine. Limitations are understood, and can be planned for. Glitches, bugs, well not as much. Unless you read the bug tracker every hour.

Currently, 2.5 is still Alpha. And yes, in Alpha, its normal for some instability. But developers have really been stomping out a lot of bugs. Sadly, even though this is really important, the community doesn’t seem to recognize this.

It seems users either praise bleeding-edge features, or simply ask for more. No one seems to glorify the bug-fixes. So here’s to you, bugfixers. I’d fix them too, if I knew how!

Not Listening
ArtofInterpretation.com: Recent Images RSS Feed - 2010-01-13 02:00:00

A Biblical meditation (Matthew 13:13) in a modern context (and a taste of synesthesia). From my "Common Objects Uncommonly" series. Technical note: Pure Blender internal render.