Planet Blender

Bon Voyage Henri!
Tube - Epic Production Notes - 2010-09-03 22:27:36

Our intrepid intern Henri recently returned home to finish his studies. At the ritual farewell farmstand ice cream, he instinctively adopted the posture of all Frenchmen bearing gifts to this country. I’m happy my return from Tosmi allowed one day of overlap before his departure. With any luck we’ll meet again soon at Blender conference or elsewhere. I hope he stays on the project from home in his spare time. Henri, roller derby just won’t be the same without you

graphicall: LuxRender Blender integration demo http://vimeo.com/14430889
Twitter / graphicall - 2010-09-03 22:21:50

graphicall: LuxRender Blender integration demo http://vimeo.com/14430889

An evolving animation to show off the 3D spaceship model
Starbright Illustrations (blog) - 2010-09-03 18:17:57

Up to now, as I’ve been working on my spaceship model and as it has been evolving, I have been showing off my progress by producing a few renders here and there, like the spaceship renders on this page.

But… I’ve been thinking, instead of a few still images like these, it would be better to produce an animated movie of the spaceship rocketing through space. The spaceship will bank and roll as it flies so that you can see it from every angle and get a much better feel for the model than a series of still renders can provide.

To succeed in using an animation to show of the model, instead of renders, I’m going to need to overcome a few hurdles though. I’ll need to produce png image sequences quickly, which means I’ll have to find some way of cheating and expediting the rendering process. Even five minutes per png image is a long time at 25 images per second, or 24 I haven’t quite worked that out yet. It seems that changing the antialiaising setting from 8 to 5 makes little difference to the quality. And if I render at 400 pixels by 200 pixels the video renders ‘quite’ quickly.

I’ll also need to make the model in the animation file a proxy model of the real evolving model, so that it updates and changes automatically when the original is revised and improved. I think that was successful – but I haven’t really tested it yet.

I’ll also need some music. Luckily I’ve gone looking for music for my animations before, and I’m quite confident I’ll be able to put something together. I’ll use a bit of classical guitar for now, but in the future the soundtrack is hopefuly going to be more futuristic.

Using ogv as a format means the video will only show up in Chrome, Opera and Firefox for now. But apparently there is a way to fall back to another format, AVI. MOV or Flash. So I’m considering adding this functionality.

Hopefully now the model and promotional video will evolve in tandem to make one kick ass presentation in the end.

And don’t forget the spaceship is creative commons open content. If you want it you can download the blend file containing the 3D spaceship model from this page.

LuxBlend25, LuxRender Blender 2.5 Exporter
BlenderNation - 2010-09-03 16:00:15

Doug Hammond, the author of LuxBlend25 has compiled a screencast showing some of its core features and how well it integrates LuxRender into Blender 2.5. Thanks Doug! Here’s the video,

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Let your neurons grow connections
Tinker Code - 2010-09-03 13:46:05

Yesterday nigth I have finally make some progress getting the EditMeshDerivedMesh in the Unlimited Clay modifier, it will be the key to sculpt over the EditMesh to get the dynamic subdivission and also have automatically access to every mesh editing tool current and that may appear in the future, this approach is much more flexible [...]

Node system to the next level
BlenderNation - 2010-09-03 13:00:38

Lukas Tönne is bringing the node system to the next level, by representing almost everything as nodes. From his previous work, his goal seems to be the improvement of the particle system but this new...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

2 Unity Games, Monster Truck Hero and No, Human
BlenderNation - 2010-09-03 06:51:12

Here are 2 games with different styles, Monster Truck Hero (PC/Mac) and No, Human (iPhone). Both games are Unity based. The first video, “No, Human” game play trailer: Monster Truck Hero,...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Interesting animation with similar genre – Jotun
Reign of Fury - Blender Short Film Production Blog - 2010-09-03 05:52:13

Here’s a great animation made a few years ago called Jotun. Thanks to Anton for reminding me about it, I had seen it quite a while ago, but it was good to revisit it. The website is also good to see a little into their pre-production process.

The film’s web site is at http://www.jotun-lefilm.com/ and the film was created by Vladimir Eskandari, Jean-Denis, Coindre, Vincent Schneider,  and Francois Mauge in 2007. The music is apparently by the band Gjallarhorn. Enjoy!

Exclusive: Modeling the Female Head 06
Blender Cookie - 2010-09-03 04:38:58

In this Citizen exclusive Blender 2.5 video tutorial, we begin the process of modeling a full female head. The series will be taking an in-depth at the techniques needed to accurately model the subject, including accurate anatomy and topology. In this final part 6 tutorial of this head modeling series we take it a step further [...]

http://blendercookie.com

Detailed guide and tutorial for SmallLuxGPU and Blender
Blender 3D Architect - 2010-09-03 02:59:37

The use of GPU power is one easiest ways to speed up the rendering for any type of project related with 3d visualization. Today we have a lot of tools that help use to use all those cores on our shiny graphics card, and work in real time generating realist images. For Blender 2.50 we [...] Related posts:

1. LuxRender using GPU with SmallLuxGPU for Architecture In a few months the use of GPU power to...
2. LuxRender may use GPU power in the future Since the announcement of Octane Render last monday a lot...
3. Interactive real-time render for architecture in Blender 2.50 The SmallLuxGPU is an experiment to use GPU power to...

Boids Boids Boids Blend File
Reyn's Blog - 2010-09-03 01:25:00

There had been a couple of problems with my recent article on Blender Particles (http://www.packtpub.com/article/advanced-effects-using-blender-particle-system-sequel) lately, being the .blend file on one of the boids examples corrupted/incomplete on Packt's link. My apologies to those who have tried and failed in opening the file.Anyhow, I'm now reuploading the file myself. If there's any