Planet Blender

v2-beta4 'Turning Pages'

... where Blenderheads live. Aggregate of blogs by Blenderheads
  • Love Birds Valentine Vector Image with Inkscape
    Starbright Illustrations - 2010-02-15 22:00:09

    This image is called Love Birds, and it is, of course, in honour of Valentine’s Day. I’m focusing on producing images in Inkscape right now. Since the death of my XP laptop and my consequent inability to use my new Bamboo graphics tablet – Linux just doesn’t like it (even my brand spanking new Mandriva install from a disk on the cover of a magazine – I have been forced to shift my attentions from free-hand drawings in Gimp to much more mannered illustrations where composition and mood is a very important element.

    So with my graphics tablet off line for the foreseeable future, how was I going to get a sketch from my brain to the screen. I started by spending a few hours with a cheap pad from a supermarket and an expensive 0.5mm pencil to create the composition and shading for the image. Then when I was happy with the composition I had created I scanned it in. Then I fired up Inkscape and imported the jpeg that I had created with a scanner.

    With the scan now in Inkscape I resized it to entirely fill the background layer of the page.

    I decided to start tracing the smaller objects that would be nearer the front of the image first. It isn’t easy to see what you are doing if you start by tracing the larger elements of the image. If you trace out the sky first, then it’s hard to see where to put the birds. This may seem blindingly obvious, but it’s the opposite of the way I was used to working with a graphics tablet and Gimp or Photoshop.

    In Gimp I would first drench the image in colour and then start making marks with the graphics tablet to turn that into a completed image.

    One of the things I like about Inkscape is the control you have over the outlines of shapes and how they are shaded. It is very hard to make a picture from these simple – relatively – shapes just using your imagination on an empty screen, but when you have a sketch scanned in the power of Inkscape really starts to become apparent.

    I’m almost glad tha waiting for some kind Linux nerd to crack the Wacom driver has forced me to take a break from all the graphics tablet work I was doing. It’s forced me to really engage with Inkscape and discover how powerful, and fun it is.


  • My new little “Speed Racer”
    ThruDreamsgate's Blog - 2010-02-15 20:33:49

    So after months of dealing with a slow, unreliable computers I finally got a new computer. And it is a little “speed racer”, especially compared to my old one. Amazing, three years ago, my laptop was pretty trick and cutting edge, but now is an obsolete dinosaur. So I have spent the last two weeks [...]
  • Canine Confinement
    Open Source Animation - 2010-02-15 19:34:45

    So far, my animation has leaned on situations rather than expressiveness to drive the story forward. My characters tend to eerily glide around my sets, forcing the audience to use musical and situational clues to guess how a character is feeling.

    My latest project aims to eliminate this problem through its design. The protagonist pooch is confined to a tiny space and the animator is confined to her face to show the audience how she is feeling.

    I approached Laika’s model with these restrictions in mind. Since she can’t walk or turn around, making armatures and detailed models for her feet is unnecessary. Instead, I was free to focus on her face, which requires the right mix of realism and cartoony expressiveness.

    Initial wireframe model


    The facial structure of a dog is elongated and low, as you can see in this reference image.

    Everest, the reference husky

    With expressiveness in mind, I raised the area around the eyes into only a slight slope down the muzzle. For the skin I used UV mapping, which I painted over a furry texture in the GIMP. The UV texture maps a 2D image onto a 3D object, as seen below, and ensures that the distribution of brown and white fur is seemingly random.

    UV Mapping

    I then duplicated the mesh. One became the skin and the other, with help from Blender’s hair simulator, became the fur.

    Frizzy Dog

    I had a hard time with the fur, in part because of limitations within the Blender simulation and in part because of the tricky guesswork involved in varying lengths of the hair over different regions of the head.

    Slightly Better Fur

    Much of the realism of digital fur depends on the lighting, so I turned my gaze to her eyes. They are based on the same models I have been using for years, with concave irises to collect as much light as possible from the rest of the scene. After experimenting with brown eyes, I decided on green eyes to match the beige green “70’s refrigerator color” of the hardware inside the spacecraft. I made the irises much bigger because dog’s don’t seem to show much white and to exploit their cuteness.

    Big, green eyes

    The nose is visually delicate. It still looks like it was simply glued onto the rest of the mesh, which is essentially what happened. One problem is that the skin was visible behind the nostrils, which can be easily fixed by a shadow of blackness. The harder problem was figuring out how to represent the pattern of tiny holes near the mussel.

    Bigger eyes, wider tongue

    I like the idea of imposing limits on my work to force a better film. There is no reason the audience should not read the dog’s face to figure out exactly how she feels about being launched into space against her will.

    Much of the remaining work on the dog revolves around the animation. I need to decide whether to focus on realism or toonisim in Laika’s restricted motions. And so I expect the final mesh will undergo some minor motion-inspired tweaks before the final version.

  • Sintel Face Rig, The Beginning!
    Durian Open Movie Project - 2010-02-15 19:11:12

    So, the face rig for Sintel has pretty much been a big train wreck up until now. I started off trying to do a primarily bone-based face rig, since it would be easier to automate and adapt to other characters. I made some progress with this, and it’s still a direction I’d like to pursue after Durian for background characters in future works. Here’s where I managed to get things:


    face_test_02.ogv

    Unfortunately, the R&D for such a system was just taking too much time, and was progressing way too slowly. The controls were very under-constrained (not in the good kind of way) and way too finicky. And the weight-painting was positively painstaking. And contrary to what I might wish, we have to finish this movie within the time allowed by our budget.

    So in the end we scrapped that system in favor of the tried-and-true shape-key method. Angela quickly blocked in some of the basic shapes, and I hooked them up to the rig. Here are the results so far:


    face_beta_01.ogv

    (Keep in mind that there are still more shape keys to be added, and the ones that are there are not final yet.)

    I’m not at all sure about this control interface. I’m rather averse to the slider-and-box gui’s of most face rigs, but I’m also finding it very difficult to come up with an alternative that isn’t a horribly cluttered mess. There’s so much to control on a face. So we’ll see.
    Unfortunately, whatever I’ve got in place when we start facial animation in earnest is what we’ll be stuck with, so the control scheme may end up being somewhat less-than-awesome. But such is the way of production rigging.

    You’ll also note that there are occasionally some nasty artifacts in the deformations around the eyelids (particularly noticeable in the above video when I’m blending in and out of the last face pose). Rest assured, this will be fixed before the movie comes out. ;-)

    –Nathan

  • MOTA Animatic
    The Penguin Movie Project - 2010-02-15 17:26:00

    Here is the full animatic to Masters of the Antarctic. Please comment, we'd love to hear your input.

    http://vimeo.com/9182137

    We are still seeking 3D modelers and animators, so please contact us if you would like to help us bring this movie to life.
  • Intro to Animation Fundamentals (Drag, Follow-Thru, and Overlapping Action)
    Blender Newbies 3D Video Tutorials (Learn to Create 3D Graphics with Blender!) - 2010-02-15 16:41:00

    The Camera Fly Mode Tool

    This blender video tutorial provides an introduction to some fundamental animation techniques. The techniques covered are Drag, Follow-Through, and Overlapping Action.


    You can check out the tutorial at BlenderCookie.com
    Version Compatibility: 2.4x+
    Tutorial Level: Beginner

    technorati tags: , , ,

  • Intro to Animation Fundamentals
    Blender Tutorials Downloads Videos & Education - Blender Cookie - 2010-02-15 13:38:10

    This blender video tutorial provides an introduction to some fundamental animation techniques. The techniques covered are Drag, Follow-Through, and Overlapping Action. Support the site – Download includes: High resolution .mov Video .blend file at the state of the tutorial

    http://blendercookie.com
  • Blender developer meeting minutes, february 14, 2010
    BlenderNation - 2010-02-15 13:00:13

    Blender 2.50 alpha 1 mentioned for the first time! Ton Roosendaal writes: Current projects Campbell proposes way to have a proper default/install path for extension scripts. This invoked too much confusing discussions; conclusions will follow. Blender 2.5 Installer issues have to be solved… Ton, Campbell + Brecht will review a proposal and put online for discussions. Andrea volunteers to check on proper [...]
  • Feedback Episode 02-10
    The Process Diary - 2010-02-15 11:00:00

    Announcements:
    Feedback this month comes from various sources including comments sections for Vimeo and Blender Nation.

    Special mentions:
    Thank you to all who listen and download this podcast.











    Subscribe to iTunes Feed


  • Death of Little Ninja Project
    BlenderNation - 2010-02-15 05:00:56

    Here is a short low-poly game style animation by Shane Newville.  “It’s sort of a spoof / ending for the original animation released back in July of 2009. I hope there is something enjoyable in it for you. Shane” BlenderArtists Thread Death of Little Ninja Project from Shane Newville on Vimeo.
  • graphicall: GraphicAll's Instant Builds now let you download Debug Builds of current SVN Trunk for Linux 32b, use it for your backtraces and bugreports!
    Twitter / graphicall - 2010-02-15 02:47:10

    graphicall: GraphicAll's Instant Builds now let you download Debug Builds of current SVN Trunk for Linux 32b, use it for your backtraces and bugreports!
  • graphicall: Animated Textures drawing in 3D View! both Video and Images Sequence, via GLSL, thanks Ton! in trunk since [26867]
    Twitter / graphicall - 2010-02-15 02:45:17

    graphicall: Animated Textures drawing in 3D View! both Video and Images Sequence, via GLSL, thanks Ton! in trunk since [26867]
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