Planet Blender

Summer is ending …
Blender Minutes - 2010-09-06 19:22:05

… and so is the ( not entirely voluntary ) break in the development of Ara’s Tale.

Real life demands left only small amounts of time for my short, which I invested into finishing the texturing for the entry set and experiments on texturing Ara’s dress.

After returning from a 2 week vacation in croatia, I had the opportunity to spend the last weekend high up in the mountains and used the gorgeous weather to use my DSLR not only for shooting texture references but also to do some real photographing again.

I thought I’d share some of my shots here on this blog as well.

I want my short spaceship movie to look like a car ad
Starbright Illustrations (blog) - 2010-09-06 18:55:51

I want my short spaceship movie to have the aesthetics and production values of a car ad. Something like this futuristic ad, that I found on YouTube.

Some immediate changes that I’m going to make are using the phrase ‘Introducing the all new’ to replace ‘presenting’. It also might be a good idea to come up with some kind of slogan. Here they say BOOT UP. LIFT OFF.

I’m definitely going to need better music too. And the text in the car ad is even shinier than the stuff in my video, chrome instead of gold, and it flies in from odd angles, you just get time to read it and then it explodes away.

I’ve seen a bunch of ads like this and I think the style would really suit a far future product like a spaceship. It’ll certainly be a much more interesting way of showcasing the model than a few renders and a bit of dry text.

Here is the latest version of the presentational video for my 3D spaceship model, so you can judge for yourself how far is still to go before it comes up to this real-world standard.

Once the video – and perhaps more importantly the model – are complete this movie will make a great basis to build a show reel around.

Blender 2.5 – r31790
Letwory Interactive - 2010-09-06 18:20:52

Hi, I’ve updated my builds over on Graphicall.org again.

Jaol’s Artejaol website got some updates.
BlenderNation - 2010-09-06 16:26:00

Remember Jesús A Olmos (Jaol) whose Butcher ranked the 2nd place from the Blending Life 2 contest, who also made this sci-fi woman on the right with Blender and ZBrush?  He told us he has been...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Rigging Goodie: Armature Layer Names
Tube - Epic Production Notes - 2010-09-06 15:55:47

Just a small utility I’ve been using to make my life easier, a little addon that lets you assign names to layers in an armature and hide/unhide them in the 3D View Properties area. Download it here, unpack then install via the add-ons area in user preferences. Works on current SVN (and the soon-to-come beta hopefully)

There’s also a ‘hidden’ operator you can use in the 3d view (search for change bone name layer) that allows you to switch selected bones to a named layer.  It’s a bit rough, but the panel at least beats having to hunt and peck one of those 32 nondescript little buttons

This isn’t really part of the gilgamesh rig, just a utility I’ve been using while rigging. The final UI (you can see a peak of it just under the layers in the screenie) has hardcoded layer names, and only those that are relevant to animation.

Renderfarm.fi and Wreckamovie.com launch integration
Renderfarm.fi - 2010-09-06 14:47:17

We're excited to announce that new integrated functionality between Renderfarm.fi and the communal movie production website Wreckamovie.com has been launched. Users of Wreckamovie.com are offered a simple way to create an account on Renderfarm.fi, synchronize the accounts and add their own sessions from Renderfarm.fi as "shots" on Wreckamovie.com. As this is planned to be the first stepping stone in integration, we hope that the future will bring users of both services many more cool features.

Wreckamovie.com - started some three years ago by the same people who gave life to Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning (the most viewed Finnish film of all times) - is a free to use web service that brings people together in order to create movies. The service recently achieved a milestone as the first full-length feature film to incorporate the concept of using community manpower from the beginning to the end of the production, Snowblind, was finished. Renderfarm.fi is a free community based rendering service that first opened to the public in summer 2009. The service aims at making accessible distributed rendering available to anybody who needs it, anytime they need it, regardless of their geological location or financial background.

Assembly 2010: Independent movies, Blender and Renderfarm.fi

The producer of Snowblind, Kalle Max Hofmann visited the Renderfarm.fi stand and presented about the creation of Snowblind with #blender.fi community member Hannu Hoffren at Assembly 2010 computer fair in Helsinki, Finland between 6th and 8th of August 2010. As BURP (the open source back-end technology used by Renderfarm.fi) head developer Janus Kristensen was also visiting Helsinki for the fair, we got interviewed for AssemblyTV about Renderfarm.fi, BURP and community based independent movie production. The interview was carried out by Brendan Ratliff (also known with his scene alias Syphus), who we thought did an excellent job in capturing the essence of the underlying technology and concepts. You can now watch the video on the Renderfarm.fi Youtube channel:

 

Julius Tuomisto, Janus Kristensen and Kalle Max Hofmann on AssemblyTV 7th of August 2010

Kalle Max's visit helped to encourage us about the willingness of independent movie makers to open up their productions to publicly distributed rendering. It now seems quite evident to us that there indeed is demand for a service like Renderfarm.fi in independent movie productions. These productions often have very small budgets in which additional costs related to using traditional cluster computing methods for achieving high quality renders can become a major obstacle.

The introduction of the world's most popular open source software, Blender, and the open community based rendering power of Renderfarm.fi promises to offer independent producers and freelance artists the tools to incorporate visuals of a complexity level previously only seen in high budget film productions. The mix of Blender, the openly available rendering power offered by Renderfarm.fi and the talented indie movie community of Wreckamovie.com has potential to break new ground in film making. We also believe that the added involvement and sense of community that people experience in the making of the movie makes them more likely to be interested in the final version of the production.

Vampyre Princess 3D and Materia: The Awakening first to be featured

Among the first collaborative movie productions hosted on Wreckamovie.com that will use the new integration features are Kalle Max Hofmann's new full feature length stereoscopic vampire movie Vampyre Princess 3D and Samuli Jomppanen's Blender short movie production Materia: The Awakening. Although Blender was already used in the making of Snowblind, Kalle Max's previous production, this time it is set to take center stage with many more effects shots planned to be implemented using the open source software. Samuli Jomppanen's Materia: The Awakening, on the hand, is a Blender short movie production whose part one has so far reached over ten thousand views on Vimeo.

In light of this cool bit of news, I'd like to now invite all Renderfarm.fi users to check out Wreckamovie.com. While you're doing so you could join some movie productions, swap ideas in them and finally donate your computing resources to them. As last week saw the first Wreckamovie.com integrated shot being rendered on Renderfarm.fi, you can check out how the shot looks like on Renderfarm.fi and how it looks like on Wreckamovie.com.

A welcome to Wreckamovie.com users

For users of Wreckamovie.com who've joined us on Renderfarm.fi, I'd like to warmly welcome you all to the community. In case you have any questions or opinions about the technology or concepts, check out the About and Frequently Asked Questions pages. Also please don't hesitate to ask on the Forum. For starters, you should go install BOINC, join the service and start helping in the creation of 3D art.

sketches #15
thisroomthatikeep - 2010-09-06 14:15:00

Dumping what I've done lately...

Changes to Blender Guru
Blender Guru - 2010-09-06 13:15:20

As many of you may be aware, I’ve been producing Blender tutorials on a weekly basis for quite some time now. And whilst this has worked great for the site, I am now wanting to explore more broader themes and challenges than just tutorials. Which is why I’ve decided to implement a few changes:

Watch the video

Articles

Something I’ve missed writing about is the fundamentals of Blender and best-of community artwork posts. They aren’t video tutorials but they are necessary for artists to develop their skills and think of the bigger picture. So from here on out you’ll be seeing a lot more of these posts on Blender Guru. Starting with tomorrow’s post about how to reduce your rendertimes.

Focused Critique Segment

Some of you may remember that back in May, I announced a new segment called ‘The MakeOver’, but due to my poor time management I never had a chance to follow through with it! Well all that is about to change. I’ve relabeled the segment ‘Focused Critique’ and will be launching the first segment this Thursday. It’s already recorded and ready to publish. Stay tuned! :)

Guest Tutors

Every once in a while you will see a tutorial from someone other than me. Crazy I know! But there are lots of artists out there (better than me) who have valuable information to share and I’d be fool if I didn’t let them share it here on this site. I am hard marker so only the highest quality of work will appear here.

If you are interested in applying, go here.

No monthly themes

A downside to these changes is that I will have to end the monthly theme idea. It was fun while it lasted but with article posts, guest tutors and other changes it will be impossible to keep up. I may start it up again in the future, but for now I’m going to leave it.

So what do you think of these changes? Do you have any further tips on how Blender Guru could be improved? Let me know in the comments below.

Meeting minutes, 5 September 2010
BlenderNation - 2010-09-06 10:06:19

This week’s meeting.  As usual a few subjects were discussed. This includes word wrapping, sequencer, new splash and etc. Ton Roosendaal writes: Hi all, Here are notes from today’s IRC...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Subtitle for DVD
KICHAVADI - 2010-09-06 06:59:00

Doing subtitle for our production with Linux.















After trying with Subtitle editor and facing problem of not able to playback footage then tried Gnome Subtitle editor. Stable and good piece of software.

rename
inblender.blogspot.com - 2010-09-06 06:34:00

untuk merubah nama objek(rename) ada banyak cara, dan yang paling cepat dan gampang adalah menggunakan kombinasi keyboard dan mouse (ctrl + klik) pada outliner. cara ini juga bisa kita terapkan pada file browser blender

play video disarankan menggunakan flash player 10 untuk hasil yang lebih baik
saya menggunakan blender 2.53 beta untuk tutorial ini. atau yang terbaru dari graphicall.org

Teaching Blender at India School for 4-8th grade
BlenderNation - 2010-09-06 06:25:18

Eris Pakyayo writes: I have come across this post on BlenderArtists.org about a blender school in india. A truly inspiring story that deserves mention on BlenderNation! Uriel Deveaud posted this...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

graphicall: Paint Effects by miikahweb finished! http://www.miikahweb.com/en/blog
Twitter / graphicall - 2010-09-06 00:03:35

graphicall: Paint Effects by miikahweb finished! http://www.miikahweb.com/en/blog