Planet Blender

A work for charity
The Process Diary - 2010-01-05 23:37:00

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
-Margaret Mead

Monday, January 11th is National Human Trafficking Awareness Day. To participate, we formed the Comic Creator's Alliance--a group of over eighty comic book creators (both web and print) who volunteered our artistic talents to raise money and awareness for this cause. You may not know it, but there are currently 27 million enslaved people worldwide- more than double the number of enslaved Africans during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. UNICEF estimates that 1.2 million children every year are sold into slavery, most of it sexual. The US Department of Justice estimates 16,000 victims of human trafficking are brought into the United States every year. Unlike slavery in the 19th century, what is happening today is happening in secret. So it won't end until awareness is raised, and people like you and me take a stand.

So here's what we did: each creator contributed an original drawing of one of our own female characters, and combined them into a single wallpaper image. The wallpaper features characters from The Phoenix Requiem, Girls with Slingshots, Earthsong, Looking for Group, Shadowgirls, Marsh Rocket, The Uniques and three IDW Publishing titles: Fallen Angel, The Dreamland Chronicles and The Dreamer, and lots, lots more! Donate today to download this unique, once-in-a-lifetime wallpaper. The Donations Drive will last for two weeks, from January 11th - 24th. All proceeds will be split evenly between Love146 and Gracehaven House- two organizations working on rehabilitation of victims and prevention of this crime.

To learn more about the Comic Creator's Alliance visit www.comicalliance.weebly.com. To learn more about the problem, visit http://love146.org/slavery. (Note: contains adult themes and actual accounts of sex slavery.)

I submitted this rendering of Minauld Wallace from Character Development to the cause:

From The Process Diary

I've added a selection of screen shots outlining the process of this image at my personal website. It also has the processes and finals of two more characters from the series

Twitter: 2010-01-06
mke3.net - Matt Ebb - lighting/shading/td/code - 2010-01-05 23:01:00

• status: Node Make Links tool http://mke3.net/weblog/node-make-links-tool/ #

Twitter: 2010-01-06
mke3.net - Matt Ebb - lighting/shading/td/code - 2010-01-05 23:01:00

• status: Node Make Links tool http://mke3.net/weblog/node-make-links-tool/ #

King St Autos
mke3.net - Matt Ebb - lighting/shading/td/code - 2010-01-05 22:44:36

Bonané
Vimeo / Blender3D [Animation/Videos] - 2010-01-05 21:49:16

Design du personnage: BLENDMAN
Musique: Altai Hangai
Logiciel: Blender

Cast: dono et frenchman

Tip: Adding Custom Brush Hotkeys in Blender 2.5
Vimeo / Blender3D [Tutorial] - 2010-01-05 21:48:21

One of the recent additions to Blender 2.5 is the ability to easily add custom hotkeys to any brush, including custom brushes in Sculpt Mode. This quick tip demonstrates how to do it and also gives a brief overview of some of the changes to the brush system.

Note: this feature is not available in Blender 2.5 Alpha 0, you must use a more recent build from graphicall.org. Any build newer than January 1st will work.

Cast: Wes Burke, Jonathan Williamson

graphicall: from Brecht: DON'T use builds from 25736-25743, files with drivers saved with this versions will crash on load, use revisions above [25743]
Twitter / graphicall - 2010-01-05 19:02:05

graphicall: from Brecht: DON'T use builds from 25736-25743, files with drivers saved with this versions will crash on load, use revisions above [25743]

Tip: Adding Custom Brush Hotkeys in Blender 2.5
Blender Tutorials Downloads Videos & Education - Blender Cookie - 2010-01-05 18:56:53

One of the recent additions to Blender 2.5 is the ability to easily add custom hotkeys to any brush, including custom brushes in Sculpt Mode. This quick tip demonstrates how to do it and also gives a brief overview of some of the changes to the brush system. Note: this feature is not available in Blender [...]

http://blendercookie.com

New year, new attack plan!
Durian Open Movie Project - 2010-01-05 16:52:55

Well, not so much a new plan but a fleshing out of the plan Ton has been busy working with. Yesterday we had our first Monday kick off meeting for the year with the team at almost full strength again after the holiday season and Ton went through the effectively complete production schedule. We all knew it was tight before hand, but seeing the project all accounted for and blocked in was for me at least a very key moment to get my head around things. A lot of discussion followed during the day on everything from different tools needed for scenes, when certain major landmarks in art assets and code should be reached, who was taking ownership of which segments and so on. Normally I’m not a fan of lots of discussion, especially when we have a whole lot to do in limited time but it was good to nut a lot of these things out. Helps in both mentally planning and even in gaining a bit more confidence to get on with the tasks at hand. Now that we have the concept art, script, storyboard edited in animatic form, a full schedule and Colin working on the ‘layout’ for the film - (effectively a roughed in animation with camera placements in the proxy scene) we are invincible!

Ok, just better organised than we were.

Better get back to work, but the team has been up to some cool stuff so expect more posts soon.

Hope you are off to a flying start this January! Even if that means making the most of your local beaches / ice skating rinks.

- Ben

Tip: Texturing the Alien Continued
Blender Tutorials Downloads Videos & Education - Blender Cookie - 2010-01-05 14:09:41

On this tip I am showing how the textures could be taken a bit further. This is a time lapse with narration of furthering the detail of the texture and normal maps. We don’t normally offer downloads for TIPs, but this one warrants the updated textures. So have one on the house and enjoy. [...]

http://blendercookie.com

Sculpt/Multires
BMesh Integration Blog - 2010-01-05 12:46:59

I’m in the process of porting over the new sculpt/multires tools to bmesh.  It’s not working quite yet, but I don’t expect it to take too long, brecht did a good job making the new code easily extensible to ngons. I’m excited, because sculpt/multires was the biggest thing blocking inclusion of bmesh in trunk.

Node Make Links tool
mke3.net - Matt Ebb - lighting/shading/td/code - 2010-01-05 11:20:01

Rewrote the node ‘make links’ tool. Now you don’t need to select individual sockets, it automatically makes a best guess about how to connect them up (following a left -> right flow).

Allows fun things like in the video above pressing F multiple times.