Planet Blender

Terror Revisited
Aligorith's Lair - 2010-09-07 23:48:00

Animation Control in Naali
Letwory Interactive - 2010-09-07 23:04:23

Tonight I pushed some code that enables the user to set animations to entities. Although not final, it already helps the user in picking a specific animation that is provided in an animation asset. This way the user doesn’t have to guess the names of the animations, just picking from a dropbox is so much easier!

See this short screencast what this is all about.

New video series: A Quick Blender Tip
goplexian.com - 2010-09-07 19:40:00

In this video I explain the merits of the "Align to View" feature, and give a practical example showing how this can speed up workflow. If you have problems with the embedded video, there is also a higher quality copy uploaded to vimeo. I apologize for the sound quality, I realize it sounds a bit hollow I'm not sure why, but hopefully by the next episode I will have that fixed. If you find this quick tip helpful I would appreciate hearing some feedback. Send me a...

Starting UV unwrap on my 3D spaceship
Starbright Illustrations (blog) - 2010-09-07 17:45:33

OK, this time for real, I’m actually starting the UV unwrap on my spaceship so that I can put a proper skin on it. I’ll be following the Vega Strike 3D model unwrapping tutorial so that the Franklin can be used in the Vega Strike game. (I’m calling it the “3D VIP Spaceship Model” for the purposes of the creative commons license. Just in case it is decided that it should be some other spaceship instead of the Franklin.)

Among other things the Vega Strike guide recommends this very concise little tut on how to use the live unwrap and test pattern. It’s so small it fits in one forum post.

One of the reasons this has all taken so long is that setting up video for my website in a HTML5 compliant(ish) way has been a bit time consuming. For example today Ogg was broke on my Ubuntu Firefox. Even the example video on the Mozilla ogg page wouldn’t play. Neither would the Ogg – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Of course this was making it difficult for me to check if I have successfully created and uploaded a functioning ogg file. (I can’t upload an ogv file because my stupid Yahoo hosting server tells computers to download it rather than play it – (unless that’s another symptom of my broken Firefox. Hmm..))

Anyway, the only solution was for me to install the new Firefox, Firefox 4. Apparently faulty ogg playback on Linux was an issue with 3.6 versions of Firefox, and that has since been solved. And I have to say, that although I was forced into this upgrade by broken Firefox functionality, I still like the new Firefox. Just not as much as I like Chrome.

I downloaded Chrome (it’s called Chromium on my Ubuntu lappy) to test the webm files I was uploading but I was very impressed indeed. It’s as fast as lightning and I didn’t have to download a bleeding-edge-beta just to play a video file. It looks great too. I’m very tempted to tick that box and make it my default browser.

More than one short! - Mais que um curta!
Detail Library (Paper Orange Project) - 2010-09-07 17:19:00

About one year ago The Detail Library stopped being only about an animated short, and now the project involves the connection of multiple narratives. Anyway we choose to start off with animation. For that reason we antecipate the next productions. We already have the animatic for the second short and we're working on the script for the third.

A Biblioteca de pormenores deixou de ser, à cerca de um ano agora, o projeto de um curta de animação apenas para abranger várias narrativas interligadas, no entanto, a àrea de atuação que escolhemos para iniciar o trabalho foi animação. Sendo assim, nós nos antecipamos e já preparamos o animatic completo do segundo curta da Biblioteca e atualmente estamos trabalhando no roteiro do terceiro.

Here are some concepts from the short Joana (wich already have the animatic)
Aqui estão algumas artes conceituais do curta Joana (que já possui animatic)


And here are some concepts arts from the short Burians (script in development):
E aqui algumas das artes conceituais do curta Burians (Roteiro em desenvolvimento):

News: Sintel Featured on the cover of 3D World's October Issue
Blender Newbies 3D Video Tutorials (Learn to Create 3D Graphics with Blender!) - 2010-09-07 16:31:00


Click image to enlarge.

More details on the Durian Open Movie Project blogsite.

Mastering Lowpolydesign – Tutorial
BlenderNation - 2010-09-07 16:00:11

This is a 5 part tutorial from Jimmyon with total length of 60 minutes teaching low polygon modeling for game meshes. He is using GIMP and Blender 2.49. From the introduction of the video: This...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

13 Ways to Reduce Your Render Times
Blender Guru - 2010-09-07 13:24:13

Nobody likes waiting for hours whilst their render finishes, but most people do.  Little do they know, they can cut these render times in half with a little bit of tweaking.

By default, the big CPU sucking features are turned on default the blender devs want to ensure that you get the best looking renders. However when you are still working on the scene and don’t need to see the final image yet, it makes sense to turn these off.

Here’s a list of 13 ways to speed up your render times:

[Read this post in Farsi]

1. Turn off Ray Tracing

If you didn’t know this already, ray tracing eats CPUs for breakfast. It’s not uncommon for ray tracing to multiply your render times by 10. So if your project doesn’t need reflections, ambient occlusions or ray shadows then turn this CPU sucker off.

2. Lower the SubSurf levels

You might call this common sense, but when you’ve been working on a scene for 5 months it’s easy to forget that you created a car tire at the start with 6 levels of subsurf. Glancing over your scene and checking for any excessive subsurf levels can save you lots of time in the long run.

3. Turn off soft shadows

Sure it’s pretty but is it really necessary? If you don’t want to waste hours rendering, set the Soft size and the Samples for all spot lamps to 1.

4. Turn off Ambient Occlusion

Ambient occlusion is great for adding that extra touch of realism to your scene by faking indirect shadows. However it’s also notorious for stacking on hours to your rendertimes. If it’s not completely necessary, turn it off.

5. Turn on Simplification

One of the little known features in Blender is the Simplify option. This allows you to set global limits on subdivision, shadow samples and AO and SS so that you can quickly create preview renders. Definitely keep this feature close if you need to do a lot of testing and adjusting.

6. Turn off blurry reflections

A fairly recently feature is the ability to create blurry reflections. They certainly look pretty but be prepared to pay for that in rendertimes. By default blurry reflections are already turned off, but if you accidentally change the Gloss amount to anything less than 1 you can suffer the consequences of awful rendertimes.

7. Turn off Subsurface Scattering

If you do a lot of character modelling you probably already know this, but for those that don’t: Subsurface Scattering multiples rendertimes like crazy! Only turn this feature on if you are creating the final render.

A quick test revealed that turning this off could reduce your render times by 6 times!

8. Turn off shadows

If you aren’t rendering the final scene it can help to turn off the shadows whilst you are rendering previews.

9. Turn off Anti Aliasing

Another feature that can add hours to your rendertimes is the anti-aliasing option. Turned on by default, this option ensures that all the edges in your scene are smooth and unjagged. But if you aren’t rendering the final scene yet then turn it off! You’ll shave your render times in half!

10. Increase tiles

‘Tiles’ are the little boxes that you see appear when Blender is rendering the scene. Increasing tiles are recommended when rendering to a large size and need the CPU cores to render smaller segments. This will ensure that all cores work on the render until it’s finished without one core finishing before another.

11. Start Baking!

Everytime you hit render, Blender has to calculate all the shadows, ambient occlusion and lighting in the scene. If you are creating an animation it’s highly recommended that you bake all this data so that Blender only needs to calculate it once. If you don’t know how to do this, check out the wiki entry.

12. Make materials non-traceable

By deselecting Traceable in the materials section, you will make that material discarded from the ray tracing calculation. This has saved me HOURS of rendering time. If you have a complex object that doesn’t need shadows or reflections, then turn this off. You’ll be amazed at how much quicker your scene will render.

13. Reduce the dimensions

An obvious trick, but easy to forget. Setting the resolution percentage to 50% will render the scene 4 times faster!

Pretty simple hey? Hopefully these little tricks will come in handy the next time you need to render a large scene ;)

Do you know any other useful time savers? Share them in the comments below!

Paint Effect System finished
BlenderNation - 2010-09-07 11:45:53

Miika Hämäläinen has been developing a very interesting system to achieve a higher level of simulation realism. By allowing either meshes or simulations to affect textures’ value of nearby...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Sintel on 3D World’s October issue!
Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project - 2010-09-07 10:40:27

Hoi! (now you know how to wave in Dutch!)

So! exciting times here at the Blender Institute, today is our very-really-thistimeforsure last rendering day, next to some color grade we need to do still, but then is time to grab those big .EXR files and convert them into friendly DPX’s for the guys at Cineco to do magic with it and turn them into 21312 stills of 35mm chemical glory.

That means we’re getting close to our (real!) Premiere, so in order to help us make some noise, 3D World is widely covering Blender topics on October’s issue, Sintel will be on cover + interview time with Ton (Producer), Colin (Director), and William (Animator), and even BBB got a column in “A list of the all the Best CG shorts out there”

About the cover image:

Sintel and Scale’s were posed by Lee, but I ended up changing Scale’s face expression ( !) and moved around the arms to fit better the magazine layout.

I had the honor to light the picture used on cover, which I’m sharing with you here, this is a scaled down version of the original in 6k, wich you can find on the DVD (I even tried 12k just for fun and Blender survived! ).

Lighting consisted on 4 Area lamps with raytraced shadows + Raytraced Indirect Lighting (1 bounce, Irradiance Cache 8 samples) + AO (multiply), (yeah I’m getting spoiled on this super computers), but still the Render Branch is doing a great job on this, sometimes is actually faster to calculate than Shadow Buffers at the beginning (mostly due to multithreading, this computer is 8 cores HT, so 16 threads).

Render time was only 38 minutes for 6k!, using about 6 Gb RAM on its peak (only Sintel though, the background was rendered separately but only took 8min or so).

At the end, a bit of paint-over was done by David, mostly fixing things like a weird specular on Sintel’s eyelid, fix hair intersections and stuff you only see on still images when you get very close to them

Thats pretty much it!, hope you like it, I saved this blend file on our SVN so it will be on the DVDs, same as the hi-res version of the characters on PNG with alpha.

Gotta get back to work, sorry for the lack of updates, we’re busy believe me
Hasta luego!
Pablo

3DZentrale at CAVA “Conference for Animation and Video Artists”
- 2010-09-07 08:11:22

Back in May 2010 we were invited to hold a lecture about our work on an industrial promotion film at the 1st CAVA Conference for Animation and Video Artists in Leipzig. Finally the organizers uploaded a video of our presentation on their blog that you can watch below. It has become a pretty long lecture [...]

remove double
inblender.blogspot.com - 2010-09-07 06:44:00

untuk memisahkan face dari rangkain face yang lain pada satu objek kita bisa menggunakan tool split ( Y ) atau bisa juga memisahkan face berdasarkan garis/edge yang kita pilih dengan mengunakan rip( V ). dan untuk menggabungkan kembali face atau edge tadi salah satunya bisa menggunakan tool remove double

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

Interview with Bobby Beck – Animation Mentor
BlenderNation - 2010-09-07 05:51:24

I sat down for a one on one conversation with Bobby Beck CEO and President of Animation Mentor at this years SIGGRAPH conference. Prior to starting Animation Mentor Bobby had worked at Pixar...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]