Planet Blender

Tube in the press
Tube - Epic Production Notes - 2010-03-10 22:44:42

A reporter for the ‘Sophian’, Smith college’s local newspaper, came in to interview Bassam, Fateh, and Chris Perry on the incubator program. It gives a little insight onto how things operate here and touches on the use of FOSS for Tube and Perry’s considerations for software in teaching.

The article can be found here. You’ll notice Pablo in the picture, who was the cause of many e-mail responses.

A few errors to note: Chris Perry wasn’t an animator but a TD at Pixar, Fateh isn’t an employee but a producer and writer.

Progress on Snow Landscape
Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project - 2010-03-10 21:02:18

Hi all,

Just a quick post to show some progress on the environments.

Basic workflow:

1. Modelling (always a good place to start) the cliff

2. Uv unwrap. Seeing as it was going to be projection / matte work for the most part I just did an unwrap of all the faces laid out on one sheet in quads. Not paintable as a map in gimp, but much easier than trying to unwrap every column and spike.

3. Render bake with basic light and ambient occlusion. There are four our five parts to the mountain range, increasing in texture size per poly as we get closer to the characters. Starting each texture with a render bake helps with painting but also with consistency.

4. One main projection using the feature Campbell recently added to do the painting in Gimp and automatically transfer it back on the mesh texture.

5. A few smaller projections into Gimp to start fixing some of the larger occluded areas.

6. Seam fixing in Blender’s viewport with texture paint, the result of which is the posted image using a mix of clone tool and brush tool with right click often to sample nearby colours.

A few quick notes that go with the above:

I finally figured out that in Gimp you go to Tool Options – Paint Options Shared Between Tools – Brush (Turn off). Makes things less frustrating. For months I just thought Gimp couldn’t have individual brush tools. Still peeking through the settings for other things to fix and bugging David while he’s here this week on how to use Gimp in a more workable fashion.

I tried to record a fly through because the effect of the still image is different to seeing the scene in motion but not familiar enough to get screen capture stuff working and it’s getting a bit late. The team’s positive response seemed to be ‘It’s like a painting… but not’. Still plenty of room to push it detail wise, but about out of time yet again scheduling wise. Painting part of this set piece was all done today, much of that painting occluded areas from projections. Probably could have done some things a bit smarter but by the time you learn something here you are already on to the next asset anyway.

Colin and I swapped places for about 20 minutes this evening so any errors you can blame him. To be fair though if some camera work goes funky halfway through the film it’s my fault. Either way Nathan got a free Kit Kat out of the whole thing somehow.

–Ben.

Blender 2.50 and YafaRay – Unofficial exporter script
Blender 3D Architect - 2010-03-10 19:26:53

A few days ago a new update to the development version of the upcoming Blender 2.60 was released. The Blender 2.50 Alpha 2 adds more features and tools for artists interested on testing what will be the future Blender 2.60. Even with lots of new features for modeling, most architectural visualization artists still find more [...] Related posts:

1. How to use IES lights in YafaRay and Blender 3d for interior design An experimental version of the next version of YafaRay was...
2. First preview of the LuxRender exporter for Blender 2.50 The development of Blender 2.50 is going quite well, and...
3. Blender 3D as a CAD tool: Using the ProCAD script One of the oldest wishes of artists that uses Blender...

How you do you determine a realistic deadline?
Blender Guru - 2010-03-10 08:53:19

Nobody likes missing a deadline. Not you, or the client. It’s stressful, costly and looks bad for your reputation.

However, as artists it’s our job to tell the client how much time it will take to complete a project and how much they can expect to pay. But how do we predict the unpredictable?

To get more practice in this department I like to create deadlines for personal projects, regardless of whether or not there’s a need for one. I find this prevents laziness and endless test and adjustments.

My most recent project was a New York city earthquake animation. So before I started the project I wrote down a list of everything I would need to model:

• A bedroom (chairs, desk, bed, bookshelf)
• Detailed building (multiple floors, smashed windows, broken walls)
• A camera mapped city
• Smoke
• Falling debris

I didn’t have the luxury of working on this full time, so I estimated the project would take 3 weeks to complete.

And how long did it really take?

3 months.

Where did I go wrong? The biggest problem was failing to predict certain issues.

Here’s a list of the most time consuming tasks that completely skipped the planning stage:

1. Learning Time

I had never modeled a destroyed anything before, so it goes without saying that I would need to learn a few things. Learning takes time, a lot of time. When you don’t know how to do something your entire production grinds to halt whilst you stumble around the internet trying desperately to find an answer.

2. Software Issues

I was using Blender 2.5 Alpha. That last word there should have been a neon flashing billboard that spelled TROUBLE. However, this completely overlooked this fact. As a result, I had to deal with dozens and dozens of unpredictable bugs. The most noteworthy bug was a ’segmentation fault’ that caused the software to crash during rendering. I spent over a week trying to find an answer. The worst part is, I never got one. It was in Alpha stage. Nobody knew.

3. Over-estimating my skill

Everyone knows how fast they work. Or at least they should. But when I was estimating on how long certain tasks would take, I severely overestimated my skill. Tasks such as modeling the inside of the bedroom took a mere day in my head, but when I sat down and actually started working on it I realized a week was more realistic.

4. Video production

Model, Texture, Light, Render = Finished! Right? No. There’s also, re-rendering problematic frames, compositing passes, buying sound effects, exporting in various formats for different media, uploading and distributing. They are all crucial tasks, but they never entered the planning stage.

5. Being a perfectionist

After I spent a week detailing rooms of the building that the audience would only see for a split second, I realized that I was being a little OCD. Every artist wants their work to be perfect. After all, that’s what makes great art. However, there comes a point when you need to step away from the computer and and accept that it’s not perfect, but it will pass.

The project was an enormous learning experience for me. It made me wonder:  Is determining a realistic deadline a skill that can be taught? Or is it something that only comes with experience?

At completion I jokingly thought that perhaps in the future I should just triple my original estimate. But on a second thought, maybe that’s even such a bad idea?

I put the question to my twitter followers and facebook fans. Here were their suggestions for determining a realistic deadlines:

@r3dp_01: I breakdown the layers of the project, 3d , matchmove etc. then the level of the artist(s)

@francoisgfx: The first thing they teach me when I started at Ubisoft: Always triple what you think

@DarkCellar: Complexity, team size, commitment, experience, skillset.

@OscarMopperkont: Realistic planning.

@Laxy: I work out roughly how long it’ll take then double it. But that’s me dealing with my optimistic calculations

Renato Sousa: Multiply by two…

Brian Knezevich: By figuring out how the project is coming along. Of course you determine it by the time and the work you all ready have done.

Mark Walder: Depends on the desired outcome, Time, detail, texturing lighting, placement and strength of lighting, HDRI background as part of that lighting and Ambient effects, In my experience it is hard to follow real world lighting so to keep rendering and adjusting has been the key for me, and that can make determining a deadline difficult at times.

So how do you create realistic deadlines? What methods have you found that work for you? Share your experiences and lessons learned in the comments below!

Animating to Make People Smile
The Rigging and Animation Blog - 2010-03-10 07:41:21

London rap artist Leano produced the following inspirational short film, bringing together 15 animators to inspire people to smile. I think this is an awesome use of animation, and one I’d love to see more off.  I often think as animators we focus far too much much on meaningless entertainment, rather then telling real stories [...]

Babioles
BlenderNation - 2010-03-10 07:17:45

The pilot episode of television show Babioles, is finished! Mathieu Auvray writes: I have the pleasure to announce that the first episode of ‘Babioles’ is finished ! We actually did all the 3D with blender 2.49b. Unfortunately I cannot show it entirely because we need to send it to TV network and [...]

Rendering a Light Saber
Blender Cookie - 2010-03-10 03:05:58

In this Blender 2.5 video tutorial we tackle something that is on most people’s “create before I die” list, a light saber. This tutorial focuses in on the post-processing aspect by setting up a node network to create the effect of the glowing blade of a light saber. Modeling is not covered in this tutorial, [...]

http://blendercookie.com

Travel in Argentina and Chile
Oenvoyage's Blender Blog - 2010-03-10 01:32:49

It’s been now about a month that my wife and me are travelling in Argentina and Chile and we simply love it ! First we spend a few days in Buenos Aires, discovering some aspects of the argentinian culture, we also made a little game by counting the national  football team shirts (the blue white [...]

Blender Basics 4 Teaser
Art + Logic - 2010-03-10 01:14:00

Blender Basics 4 is now available at CartoonSmart.com!