Planet Blender

sketches #12
thisroomthatikeep - 2010-08-03 22:02:00

A few tests with the new blender2.5 beta.

I'm growing tired of the way I sculpt fine detail, tried something a little different with the last one.

All of them, except the first one, started form a sphere. Had to go up to 6 million polygons with the last one, because there wasn't enough resolution on the face for detailing.

Good thing is, I've been able to render the mesh with render25 branch :)

sketches #12
thisroomthatikeep - 2010-08-03 22:02:00

A few tests with the new blender2.5 beta.

I'm growing tired of the way I sculpt fine detail, tried something a little different with the last one.

All of them, except the first one, started form a sphere. Had to go up to 6 million polygons with the last one, because there wasn't enough resolution on the face for detailing.

Good thing is, I've been able to render the mesh with render25 branch :)

Grey Justice will punch you out... MAN!
3rD Movement - 2010-08-03 21:16:00

Hey everybody!
I got the chance to follow along very closely with this year's Richmond 48 Hour Film Project with the Hand Turkey Studio Team... er... um well... I got to help out, I did some modeling. Last year I followed along with the Tinychat and the IRC channel, but this was a whole new experience.
Read more »

Mesh Painting In Blender
CGShark - 2010-08-03 20:55:27

Miika Hämäläinen, a dedicated indie Blender developer, has once again released a preview for another cool feature he’s been coding for Blender: mesh painting. Using a particle system, Miika’s mesh painting feature affects the texture of a mesh, giving it the illusion that something is being sprayed on the surface of the object. Here’s an [...]

More Snapping and Double Removal Options with Python
Tube - Epic Production Notes - 2010-08-03 20:03:01

Yet another python add-on for today!  I hope this is one that will be useful to a great many of you, even though its pretty hard to explain how it works… bear with me as I expect it will speed up your modelling work flow.

I’ve long been frustrated by the limitations of ‘Remove Doubles’ in blender.  Remove doubles searches for verts which are close together (in all axes) and merges them, which is great.  However sometimes its nice to be able to constrain this action to a single (or pair of) axes.  For instance if I have a row of vertices running along the X axis and I want all of them to have the same Y and Z coordinates I could select the entire row then press “s” (to scale), “shift-x” (to constrain to Y and Z), then “0″ (to snap all of them together) .  This is fine if you only have one row of vertices.  Say now that you have 100 such rows of vertices, all running roughly in the X axis direction, and you want each row to run exactly in the x-axis, so for every single one of those 100 rows you have to select each row, and press “s, shift-x, 0, enter”.  Does it get a bit boring?  Would you prefer if it was automated?

Have a look at the quick tutorial image below to see what I mean, and then if you want, download the add-on and install it.  As always let me know if you find any bugs in the comments below and I’ll try to fix them ASAP.  Happy (faster) blending!

DOWNLOAD: http://tube.freefac.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/snap_with_axis_constraints.zip

Tutorial:

On another note we’ve been out to the pictures a few times recently.  We saw a double feature of “I am Love” and “Winter’s Bone” on Sunday.  Personally I thought that the cinematography in Winter’s Bone was a refreshing break from the all-to-common extreme-DOF-fatigue that we got to see in the europudding (see Truffaut) of a movie that was “I am Love”, a film laced with religious salvation metaphor and comic (decency induced) visual-analogy-as-substitute-for-the-explicit.  Conversely the portrayal of value-less material items as symbolic of ‘our’ personal hollow ambitions for wealth (in the form of tacky debris spread around the dwelling; toy horses, kitsch garden ornaments displaying cherubic qualities), set against the wholesome immaterial but valuable actions of the film’s main character provided an interesting subtext for what would otherwise have been a straightforward plot.  Sadly some of our friends didn’t see it the same way and criticized the ‘off’ direction and cinematography.  One way to look at it is that they were only judging according to their own personal objective perceptions of how films ‘should’ be directed and shot, rather than to how an audience subjectively perceives a film.  Fire off in the comments; lets hear your own views!

Bishop 2.0
Virgilio Vasconcelos - Animation - 2010-08-03 17:04:48

The Bishop rig, one of the trademarks of Animation Mentor, received a HUGE update on its features. Now it's fully customizable:

[read the full article]

Blender Pro 2010
Virgilio Vasconcelos - Animation - 2010-08-03 15:43:04

This blog is lacking updates recently, mostly because this project I'm working on: a book about character rigging and animation in Blender. Soon I'll talk more about it, but I can say some chapters are already written and I'm working hard on it. Regardless of my available time, I have to stop by here to promote this news:

[read the full article]

Verse integration for Naali
Letwory Interactive - 2010-08-03 15:02:19

During the summer I’ve been working on a simple Verse integration tech demo for Naali (RealXtend). In short, Verse integration is for having a low-overhead and fast protocol for EC  (Entity Component) attributes. In this techdemo I’ve concentrated on setting light attributes and a way to have Naali keep book of world objects and map them to verse nodes.

I have recorded a short demonstration in which I show how the light can be set using an external tool that has Verse support, in this case the Connector scene graph editor from Quel Solaar.

Implementationally the Verse integration is done on the level of Primitive class, where Primitive will connect to a verse server when instantiated. Upon accept Naali will then subscribe to object nodes and for each object node it receives it will also subscribe to changes.

When a new object is created in Naali, also a verse node is created, to hold and communicate changes to EC_OgreLight.

To keep track of the different objects on different servers there are three maps, one to map RexUUID to VNodeID, one reverse VNodeID to RexUUID and then an extra RexUUID to entity_id_t to speedup lookups when receiving updates through Verse.

When Blender gets again proper Verse integration this will be especially interesting when thinking from perspective of content authoring using external tools. Blender is already a great modelling and content creation suite, and with Verse it’s easy to write simple, small tools to do a number of tasks (texturing, scene decoration, mesh changing, audio attaching, etc.)

Blender 2.53: How to use the Bevel Weight tool
Blender 3D Architect - 2010-08-03 11:14:31

Since the release of Blender 2.53 in Beta stage I began to test in my architectural visualization workflow. This is a much better release to start testing your modeling workflow, since a beta release is more stable than the previous alpha. But, like most of the experienced Blender users I`m unable to find some of [...] Related posts:

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The Process Diary interviews Blender Guru
BlenderNation - 2010-08-03 09:31:40

Paul Caggegi talks to Blender Guru Andrew Price. I enjoyed listening to it and learning about Andrew’s background. And yes, you pronounced it correctly! (Although Roel’s name could still use a little work ;-) Paul Caggegi writes: Paul from the Process Diary recently interviews Andrew Price aka: the Blender Guru. Some surprising, funny and helpful stuff! Andrew [...]

graphicall: Multires VPaint from source image by awesome Nicholas Bishop! http://vimeo.com/13812115
Twitter / graphicall - 2010-08-03 01:47:17

graphicall: Multires VPaint from source image by awesome Nicholas Bishop! http://vimeo.com/13812115