Planet Blender

Never even think something is already done …
Blender Minutes - 2010-10-03 22:06:50

After fiddling with the skin shader and lashes for Ara, I thought it a good time to start to experiment with some lighting and compositing work. The main idea being to have an environment to test the different shaders for Ara and to spot some possible problems.

I chose the very first shot as test bed for my experiments.

I use all linked assets into my scene files and the last addition to Ara were her lashes – as separate objects – so I linked those as well and … first surprise ! The lashes imported but never linked correctly to my armature proxy. After some fiddling I decided to completely reimport Ara and associated objects. I have the feeling that I might might be doing this more often in th future, so I made a quick howto for me to not forget all the small little details to get it right.

Next came the baking of the cloth simulation. I had already invested quite some time into this topic, so it should just be a setup-click-and-wait kind of thing.

Ha, so wrong !

I the past I had concentrated on the skirt part of Ara’s dress and quite neglected the upper part. Now I had a wider view and recognized that the current setup just isn’t working. This insight resulted in a separate collider object for the dress, a reworked weight-painting and remodelling of the dress mash and dress colllider as well as a slightly different setup for the cloth simulation itself.

Its better now, but I see now that I will have to refine this from shot to shot.

Ok, next came the lighting setup – no real surprises here (for the moment) – and accompanying the compositing part.

The topics I wanted to cover were

• separate layers for each light group (main, ambient, moon, cage lights ..) for each part (background, Ara, cage) to have maximum freedom for balancing the lighting
• vector blur for all objects
• DoF
• Play around with some nice glow effects
• Find a way to light a night scene with a path in the shadows of moonlight were the main light source is coming from a cage.

Well, the first point in the list was easy. The funny things started when I tried to use the vector blur. I have Ara and the cage on different render layers and combine them using the Z-Combine node. Well when using the vector blur ( or any other blur node) this will not work correctly anymore, as the z information is sharp and not blurred at all ( and this isn’t possible anyway). I have not yet a solution, but I have to somehow create a mask originally derived from the z-buffer of both layers and apply the same filter operations on this mask as well. At least thats my theory for now.

Pure alpha-over will not work, as I have intersections ( Ara holding the cage).

Another thing which is bothering me is that I do not seem to get a vector blur on my background, which is realized as set ( set in the render panel, where you do not have any selection possibilities). I have to investigate this further.

Another immensely annoying thing suddenly popped up again: all seams on Ara’s dress  were clearly visible again. I thought that baking the normal map from bump maps in blender 2.5x was the solution for this ( see this post for more info ). As it turned out, this is not he solution, as blender 2.5x has the same behaviour.

After long ( very long) experimentation I finally found the culprit which causes this:

It seems (no pun intended) that around seams blender is using areas of the texture map beyond the actual uv-mapping, maybe for blending/smoothing purposes. The default setting in texture paint mode for the projection painting is to have a bleed value of 2, which means that blender will paint also 2 extra pixels outside the uv-mapping. This value is ok for color maps but obviously too small when drawing bump maps. An increase to 4 or higher solves the problem – in principle.

What it means for me is that I have to repaint all seams in the bump maps on my relevant models with a higher bleed value.

The DoF point was another source of new work. In the early animation phase I created a camera rig with all nice controls for positioning, targeting and controlling the lens value. What I didn’t think of at that time was to include a control for the focus point as well … Ok, time for a new reimport session for the camera rig.

And finally I quite clearly see that a lot of polishing will have to go to the animation done so far. But that was to be expected.

All in all a very informative and in the end productive weekend. To show you the outcome of all these explorations I have uploaded a 4 sec shot of the shot. It’s a very early glimpse of what is to be expected and still no vfx ( glowing lights) done here. The irony here is that in this clip Ara’s  hands are rendered black due to rendering time constraints.

More texture for torpedo spaceship
Starbright Illustrations (blog) - 2010-10-03 21:50:32

The simple spaceship I’m using for experimenting with textures is steadily improving.

It’s difficult to get the lines I draw on the UV texture to look precise. They seem to end up being very pixelated and blurry.

That’s OK I guess in an image that I might just use as the basis for a digital painting that I work into with GIMP but they are a bit too indistinct to stand on their own when they are just rendered or used in a game. I’m going to have to go googling about for an answer to that little problem.

Here’s the spaceship from a more dramatic angle. Here the lines on the spaceship are still looking blurry, perhaps I’ll have to use a texture jpeg with bigger dimensions, but the only problem with that is that it tends to slow down and crash my computer to work on anything over 3000 pixels to a side. Or perhaps I can increase the resolution. I’ll keep experimenting and see if I can work out a fix.

I’ve also been reading about some other stages that might be required, like baking rust and weathering into the texture. I’m going to have to discover some shortcuts to UV unwrapping and painting textures.

I’m getting a little frustrated with this simpler model and I’m looking forward to getting back to the more complex spaceship model. I’ve started a work in progress thread at the Blender Artists forums for the more complex model to try and get some advice from the Blender experts that hang out there.

Interview with Sintel’s art director David Revoy
BlenderNation - 2010-10-03 14:10:09

Alexandre Prokoudine writes: Libre Graphics World published an interview with David Revoy who did an awesome job as both art director and concept artist of “Sintel” short animation movie....

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Artwork created by inkscape
blog.animux.org - 2010-10-03 13:42:45

Showcase of amazing art work using Inkscape.

http://inkscape.deviantart.com/favourites/

Converting Bitmap Image to Vector Images using Inkscape
blog.animux.org - 2010-10-03 12:38:00

This tutorial teaches you how to convert bitmap images to vector images with examples, so that you can scale images from a small thumbnail to a huge banner without loss of detail and proportion.

Currently Inkscape employs the Potrace bitmap tracing engine (potrace.sourceforge.net) by Peter Selinger. In the future we expect to allow alternate tracing programs; for now, however, this fine tool is more than sufficient for our needs. Keep in mind that the Tracer’s purpose is not to reproduce an exact duplicate of the original image; nor is it intended to produce a final product. No autotracer can do that. What it does is give you a set of curves which you can use as a resource for your drawing.

Details

Mirroring in Inkscape
blog.animux.org - 2010-10-03 12:27:33

This tutorial teaches you how to use the mirroring functionality in Inkscape to create symmetric objects. It is explained in a clear simple and step wise manner using the clone functionality included in inkscape. 

Click   for details

Nicolas Mina showreel
Materia - The Awakening - 2010-10-03 09:28:27

Just picked this up from Nicolas Youtube channel. He’s made a showreel showing some of his work, including few things for Materia 2. Check it out.

Blender Foundation: Status Update Week 39
Letwory Interactive - 2010-10-03 09:27:27

And another week has gone by, full of bug fixing and report tending. I closed over 30 reports of which 5 I fixed, the rest were either duplicates, todos or rejected. I fixed some unreported bugs too.

I cleaned out the trunk from the project files, and I fixed our CMake for Windows project files to properly copy the correct Python DLL and modules. For this I also committed the Python modules unpacked to our dependencies directories.

I enabled multilayer EXR files as textures.

I am slowly taking more ownership over our COLLADA code too. I fixed camera import and export and the odd crash that could happen when exporting uvlayers with image textures that didn’t have images set. I also fixed our COLLADA import to name the uvlayers as per <bind_vertex_input> semantic; for this I patched OpenCOLLADA and submitted the patch: here. The Windows libraries have been updated, Linux and OSX users need to patch themselves until committed. Test builds for Windows have been updated too, for that see the right sidebar.

I started changing yesterday the graph creation scripts, so until that’s done I now give just the numbers:

2010.09.27
        2010.09.27: schlaile closed 1 issues
        2010.09.27: aligorith closed 1 issues
        2010.09.27: dingto closed 1 issues
        2010.09.27: jhk closed 2 issues
        2010.09.27: jesterking closed 4 issues
        2010.09.27: campbellbarton closed 7 issues
        2010.09.27: blendix closed 4 issues
----- total 20 bugs closed. New bugs for this day: 20
2010.09.28
        2010.09.28: jesterking closed 12 issues
        2010.09.28: jhk closed 4 issues
        2010.09.28: campbellbarton closed 5 issues
        2010.09.28: blendix closed 2 issues
----- total 23 bugs closed. New bugs for this day: 10
2010.09.29
        2010.09.29: damien78 closed 1 issues
        2010.09.29: jhk closed 4 issues
        2010.09.29: jesterking closed 8 issues
        2010.09.29: nazgul closed 1 issues
        2010.09.29: campbellbarton closed 2 issues
        2010.09.29: blendix closed 2 issues
----- total 18 bugs closed. New bugs for this day: 7
2010.09.30
        2010.09.30: aligorith closed 3 issues
        2010.09.30: blendix closed 15 issues
        2010.09.30: jesterking closed 5 issues
        2010.09.30: campbellbarton closed 3 issues
        2010.09.30: jhk closed 4 issues
----- total 30 bugs closed. New bugs for this day: 12
2010.10.01
        2010.10.01: jesterking closed 7 issues
        2010.10.01: campbellbarton closed 8 issues
        2010.10.01: blendix closed 4 issues
----- total 19 bugs closed. New bugs for this day: 16
2010.10.02
        2010.10.02: nexyon closed 1 issues
        2010.10.02: blendix closed 14 issues
        2010.10.02: damien78 closed 1 issues
        2010.10.02: nazgul closed 2 issues
----- total 18 bugs closed. New bugs for this day: 15
2010.10.03
        2010.10.03: blendix closed 2 issues
        2010.10.03: jesterking closed 1 issues
----- total 3 bugs closed. New bugs for this day: 3

* During last 7 days we had 5 days where we closed more than there were new reports opened
* 288 opened and 425 closed since 2.54 beta

C++ Yuckiness...
Aligorith's Lair - 2010-10-03 03:34:00

BGUI 0.03 Released
Moguri's Blog - 2010-10-03 01:59:26

The big change for 0.03 is theming support (more info here). Here is the changelog: 0.03 New Features * BGUI now has themeing support (for mow info go here: http://stokes.dyndns.org/redmine/projects/bgui/wiki/Theming) Bugs Fixed * BGUI widgets could sometimes clip with scene elements Other Stuff * Widgets are now stored in OrderedDicts to allow for control over [...]

The Producer's Report #127 - Offical Countdown to Picture Lock Begins
Phil McCoy's Posts - Project London - 2010-10-03 00:00:00

Today at our weekly management meeting, Ian presented Project London v.15 to the Producers. It incorporated new solutions to address the key story problems we detected at the last two screenings. We now believe we have the film we want to finish in hand. Ian is using the coming week to finalize the necessary script elements needed to record new voice overs for Oma, Nebraska and Chicago, and a reshoot of the "Arizona speaks from the dead" speech. There are also several new visual effects to incorporate, but since we are in a race to get to picture lock, we are only going to take them to the animatic level so that we can declare picture lock so sound design can start, and then go back and refine and finish those visuals. This is huge. We should be able to predict a date for picture lock in just a few days.

Thank you to Phil Rogan and Soren Laulainen. They worked with Ian to reconcile quite a number of story elements, addressing key items necessary to creating a great popcorn movie experience. Phil's contribution has earned him a "Script Consultant" credit along side Soren who had already earned this credit. Thanks guys!

It feels so great to make the shift from exploring solutions to make the story work effectively to now focusing on finalizing and finishing the movie. Today is a great day!

Cheers,

Phil McCoy, Executive Producer
on behalf of Nathan McCoy (left), also Executive Producer and Phil McCoy (right)

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