Cinepaint Developments
Blender to RenderMan - 2012-01-02 18:58:00

One of the most overlooked software packages in the Blender to Renderman arsenal has been given a new breath of air by the developers, Cinepaint 1.0 was released during the end of November (sorry guys). What makes Cinepaint so powerful and unique compared to it's parent GIMP is that it was designed for film work from the start, it is meant to handle 32-bit HDR images that are impossible to open in GIMP, which is why studios continue to use Photoshop among other things. After what seemed to be a very long stagnant period of lack of updates and uncertain future, Cinepaint has exploded into the scene again, even getting 3D World attention with an article, not bad for an open source software that was a fork of GIMP. At this time there is only a Linux source of Cinepaint and it has it's bugs, in fact version 1.1 is being delayed due to a nasty memory leak.

Aside from the issues here are some of the things that Cinepaint users might expect to see in the future as described by Robin Rowe

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CinePaint Multi-bit Image Engine

CinePaint will continue to have a multi-bit engine. Some programs support deep paint by setting bittishness at compile time. You can have an 8-bit or a 16-bit core in ImageMagick, for example, but not both. It depends upon how ImageMagick was compiled. CinePaint has a true multi-bit engine where bittishness is chosen at runtime depending on the needs of an image. When you open a JPEG, CinePaint will allocate 8-bit channels for it because that’s what the image holds. When you open a 16-bit TIFF, it will allocate 16-bit channels.

At present, CinePaint supports unsigned 8-bit, binary fixed point 16-bit, half float 16-bit and float 32-bit. That’s a lot of flexibility in channel allocation, but not quite as much as we’d like. OpenEXR files may contain unsigned 32-bit channels and TIFF may have unsigned 64-bit channels. It would be nice to be able to open those in CinePaint without a loss of fidelity.

Comic Book, Anime and Fashion Illustration, Heads at Any Angle

Adding to ideas expressed in an earlier story, it would be nice to have an interface that supports pulling images from a library of art created by the artist, such as having a character’s head drawn at many different angles. This would enable an artist to quickly drag in previously drawn elements to quickly build an illustration. It would be nice to be able to mirror clone when half of a face is drawn in order to quickly draw the other half.

Architecture

There’s a lot that could be done to make architectural drawing easier. One would be a cross-hatch brush that would draw parrallel lines at a fixed separation locked to the background position so that drawing later with the same brush will line up perfectly. The angle of the cross-hatch would be a setting on the brush. Another important brush for architecture would be a perspective brush that draws straight lines according to the horizon specified by the artist for the picture. At zero degrees it would become a railings brush and have no crossing lines. There could also be brushes that draw boxes with proper geometry per the background horizon. There could be a clone brush that copies with perspective, whether it’s drawing bricks or a window that needs to be repeated across a building.

Roto and Tracking

Adobe After Effects has an excellent auto-roto feature that will separate foreground objects from their background. Surprisingly, Photoshop does not. It would be nice if CinePaint had auto-roto. It’s not surprising that Photoshop doesn’t have tracking and image stabilization like After Effects. It would be nice if CinePaint did.

Colorization

There’s a plug-in for painting colors from a similar photo onto a B&W image. Would be nice to have that type of thing as a standard clone brush feature.

Slides and Sequences

CinePaint’s flipbook can be used as a PowerPoint-style slide presenter. That could be further developed. While you can load a sequence of numbered images in CinePaint, there’s no way to save that sequence as a sequence. It would be nice if it would.

Brushes

In addition to the architecture brushes already described, it would be nice to have brushes that draw borders and to paint Apple-style liquid buttons. It would be nice to have a bucket brush that bucket fills but will not seek out through gaps smaller than the size of the brush. It would be nice to have a “sloppy” setting on the brush the can exaggerate or reduce the jitter with which a line is hand drawn, something like in Smart Sketch. There could be brushes that draw flowers or any randomly repeating “image tube” as in PaintShop Pro. As the brush paints it lays down the next image (or flower) in the tube. Another nice brush would be a human pores brush that adds pores to portraits that have been magnified.

Magnifier

It would be nice to have a magnifying glass like Apple Aperture.

Meta-data

It would be nice to support such things as keeping accounting data for the time spent working on an image.

Vector Graphics and Type

Artists seem to agree that moving between Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop is inconvenient, that we’d rather do to one app to paint. However, mixing vector graphics and rasters gets messy. A solution is to put vector objects, including type, in a separate layer.

Adjustment Layers and Nodes

It would be nice to have adjustment layers, that is, layers that dynamically enhance the image below instead of changing the layer with a filter. Layers and nodes can be thought of like waves and particles in physics. They’re two ways of looking at the same thing and yet seem quite different. It would be nice if CinePaint displayed nodes.

Scripting

CinePaint has supported many scripting languages, but it hasn’t been a satisfactory user experience. Preferably, CinePaint would record macros/scripts implicitly and at all times like Apple Shake. That would be a better solution than the Adobe Photoshop macro recorder that requires the user to decide when to record a macro first. Taking scripts a step further, it would be nice to have a text-based way to create image files. For example, to be able to quickly snap together a color bars image from a text description of the sizes and colors of the bars.

Sound

CinePaint has a flipbook movie player, but no sound. It would be nice to have JACK support so external JACK-compatible sound tools like Traverso would play in sync.

High Fidelity Color

CinePaint has a RGBA color space by default. Work’s been done to support advanced color management and other color spaces such as CMYK in CinePaint. It requires a domain expert in the printing industry to really get this right. Enhancements provided by a German open source developer have been difficult for CinePaint users to comprehend. To advance in this area we first need a color expert who speaks English, someone who can explain to me what we really need in the color interface and who can test that we got it implemented right.

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Announcing Eat Sheep
Blender Cookie - 2012-01-02 18:55:45

With a New Year, comes new adventures and goals. One of them this year is CG Cookie’s first internal studio project. If you happened to download this years present on the site you may already know this, but for those who did not download the present, we wanted to officially announce one of our current projects called “Eat Sheep”

What is Eat Sheep?

Eat Sheep is CG Cookie’s first internal project to create an iOS game with Blender and Unity.The iOS game has been in production for about 4-5 months at various levels, most of the artists working on the project have full-time jobs outside of CG Cookie.

Being an education company, we are and will be documenting the processes we are taking to create the game. This will inturn be turned into tutorials, downloadable assets and documentation on our pipeline and lessons learned throughout!

Visit eatsheep.com or

facebook.com/eatsheepgame

Story

Sheep were bred at record rates in the early 60′s after a direct relationship was realized between getting a good night sleep and the amount of sheep in the world. But unfortunately this has gotten out of control. To help fight against this epidemic of sheep in the world monsters have been released into the wild to consume sheep and save the world!

(Read full story on http://eatsheep.com)

Game Play

This is a 3D top-down puzzle game which you are in charge of navigating your monster through to eat sheep before they enter the safe havens of the barn. Along the way you have access to power-ups, placeable obstacles, and can upgrade to a different monster.

The Team

Constructed of various artists that have contributed to our sites or studio work, we are pretty jazzed to have them playing a role on the project.

• Wes Burke: Project Lead and UI
• Jonathan Williamson: Character Lead
• Paul Hoefener: Environment Lead
• Tim Vonn Rueden: Concept Artist
• Nubia Palacios: Concept Artist
• Patrick Boelens: Developer / Engineering

The Documentation

One goal of this project is to work and document as much as we can through our process of creating this game and translate that back to the community here as Tutorials, Post mortems, and tips/tricks when creating your game. We are also releasing majority of the assets as Creative Commons, with some of them available now at http://eatsheep.com

What is an internal project at CG Cookie?

Cg Cookie also operates as a Media House that takes on various gigs in the commercial and VFX industry. Though we wanted something to completely call our own, so we’ve started our “Internal Projects” initiative. Where at CG Cookie we will work to have an active single project going at all times and anybody at CG Cookie can become the “Project lead” on the project.

So after Eat Sheep is complete, new internal crew proposals for the next project will be reviewed. So the next project could be something completely different and ran by a different lead. We want to give anybody involved with CG Cookie, Inc the opportunity to Lead their own project. Similar to how Pixar handles their projects, just about .000000000001th the scale.

Hope you guys are just as excited about getting this game as we are to get it in your hands. Hope you enjoy and see you on the next update.

Join the mailing list

Blender Cycles tutorial: Creating grass for architectural visualization
Blender 3D Architect - 2012-01-02 18:28:53

One of the most interesting tools added to Blender recently was the new render engine called Cycles. With this new and incredible addition to Blender, architectural visualization artists can work with options that were only available on external render engines like YafaRay, LuxRender and others. The Path Tracing integrator of... Related posts:

1. Creating grass with particles in Blender 2.5 There are lots of different ways to create grass in...
2. Using Blender Cycles for Architectural visualization In the past few days a los of experimental versions...
3. Rendering a bedroom with Blender Cycles In the near future we will have a great addition...

Mango: Digital Makeup
BlenderNation - 2012-01-02 17:17:20

WTF?! In 5… 4… 3… Sebastian König writes: The actual start of Mango-production is getting closer and closer and time is flying. Since we have an awesome script now and even some...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Digital Makeup
Mango - Open Movie project - 2012-01-02 16:46:12

The actual start of Mango-production is getting closer and closer and time is flying.
Since we have an awesome script now and even some great concept-art we can really start to think about HOW we are going to make things happen, technically. I mean, camera-tracking good and fine, but how will we, for example, do the makeup? Can we afford some actual makeup arists, who will turn our actors in some jawdropping vfx characters, covered with gore, blood, bolts, cables, jelly or whatever is required?
Or can we do that all digitally?
The basic idea for digtal makeup is easy, as long as you do not think about it too long. Just have a digital double, track the head, body, limbs or whatever, apply the textures, props or clothes to that digital version of your actor and composite it over the actual footage of your actor. Here’s an example:

This was not too hard to do, but it was a perfect situation:
Enough markers, ok lighting, lots of perspective shift, no fast movements, everything quite in focus, not too far away. And most importantly: No deformation! As soon as the markers move and deform in relation to each other you can forget about doing object tracking.

But think about a real filming situation:
The actors talk, move their face, raise their eyebrows, scream, laugh, jump, run, do sudden and quick movements, have long hair hanging in their face etc. etc.
All this will make a proper object-track impossible. The markers in the footage would be all blurry or totally invisible. There would be not enough information about perspective and movement. The grid of markers would deform.

So in this case we cannot rely on object-tracking, but would have to do planar tracking, as described in this article.
They used the popular tracking software Mocha from Imagineer Systems with a technique called planar tracking. Basically you can track a whole region of your footage, even if it deforms. You don’t need to use any markers, as long as that region has some more or less distinct features. That allows you to easily apply patches with textures on your footage that smoothly follows your actors face and movements. It also makes all sorts of rotoscoping much easier. By the way, let’s not mention that rotoscoping is a whole new area for much needed developement as well… ;)
Unfortunately we don’t have that kind of planar tracking yet, even though our awesome libmv developer Keir Mierle has something in the pipeline called “affine tracking”, which might help in this case. So with some luck we can do digital makeup without object-tracking too. And we really need it!

Now we have a question for you guys: How do YOU do digital makeup? How do YOU do marker removal? We are sure you have some nifty techniques as well, so if you have some ideas you want to share with us, we would be very open for that! After all, this is an open movie, so we would be glad to open up discussion and development for these kind of techniques too, since as far as we know there have not been *that* many attempts to do things like digital makeup in blender before. Or have there?

To open up the discussion, we have created a wiki page where you can post and discuss techniques and ideas. Please feel free to contribute!

Mango: Script is Ready!
BlenderNation - 2012-01-02 15:07:05

Director/writer Ian Hubert has posted a glimpse of the Mango script. ‘No story, maximum impact’? Click and see.. Ian writes: When Thom decides he’d rather be awesome in space than keep...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Hello Blender World!!
Blender Journey - 2012-01-02 14:36:02

Aloha and thanks for stopping by! I started working with Blender about 2 months ago.  I’ve always been interested in computer animation and had fantasies when I was younger of working for Pixar or something like that.  I figure my time has passed for that, but I’m not going to let it stop me from [...]

Bubble of Consciousness
BlenderNation - 2012-01-02 13:38:01

By Jeepster.

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Developer Meeting Notes, January 1st, 2012
BlenderNation - 2012-01-02 11:18:24

I think it’s fair to say that a good part of the Blender Development community was hung over yesterday ;-) Ton Roosendaal writes: Hi all, Happy new year for everyone! It was a lazy sunday apparently, we only had a … Continue reading →

Have a Blenderful 2012!
BlenderNation - 2012-01-02 09:17:42

I trust that you’ve all had a good party and that you’ve recovered from it by now (at least partly ;-). To kick off this year at BlenderNation, let me wish you a Blenderful 2012 – may nothing stand between … Continue reading →

Digital Makeup in Blender
Vimeo / Blender 3D - 2012-01-02 08:21:22

A little demo about digital makeup in blender. Can still be enhanced a lit, but will come in handy for mango.blender.org/

Cast: Sebastian König

Tags: Blender and Matchmoving

Top 10 Tutorials from 2011
Blender Guru - 2012-01-02 03:51:09

Wow, what a year! We’ve seen some massive changes to blender in 2011, along with some massive tutorials right here

So to round up the year, here’s the Top 10 Tutorials from 2011:

10. How to Make a Realistic Asteroid

9. Create a Realistic Water Simulation

8. Create an Eye Catching Energy Drink Advertisement

7. Create Realistic Outdoor Lighting

6. Create a Flame Thrower

5. Smash an iPhone

4. Create a Realistic Earth

3. Introduction to Rigging

2. Introduction to Cycles

1. Create an Underground Subway Scene

Thanks for sticking around and making this year a blast!

I normally don’t share my new years resolution, but since you’re all here, let’s talk…

Blender Guru’s Goals for 2012

• Cycles focused – All new tutorials are to use the new renderer, Cycles.
• New Product range – Textures, models etc.
• New staff
• Regular fortnightly tutorials

What else should be on the list?

If you can take a moment to fill out the survey below and tell me what you want out of Blender Guru this year, I’d really appreciate it!

Complete the Survey!

Here’s to new year of blender tutorials!

PS. Sorry I haven’t posted a new tutorial in a while. I am moving to South Korea in 4 days, where I will remain all this year. So I’ve been a bit preoccupied with that. Expect to see a new tutorial mid-January after I have settled in. Thanks for your patience

Tutorial: Intro to Blender 2.61
processdiary.com - 2012-01-02 03:10:37

Hi folks! I’ve decided to kick off 2012 with a quick overview of the latest official release of Blender. Many of you from the illustration world have been asking about Blender, but are still shy about dipping your toes in. I’m aiming this specifically to you folks.

In this tutorial. I take you from the official website, how to install and customise the layout, and finally how to find things in two separate menus. I shall be covering more specific topics in future.

For those of you who like to know some technical details, I screen-captured this using Quicktime on Mac OsX Lion. I edited it in FCP as usual. While the standard def version plays automatically, I urge you to click on the HD button on the player and go full screen. The HD file is only 178MB (for over 1/2 hour! Pretty neat). I keep the SD version to work within the boundaries of the RSS feed and iTunes.

Hope this gets you eager to try it out! Any comments, queries, etc welcome in the comments below.

Welcoming in the New Year
Aligorith's Lair - 2012-01-02 02:17:00

This year, the fireworks display for New Year was in Hagley Park, the first time in over a decade. This meant one thing: fireworks visible from our yard (without having to contend with drunks ready to smash your windows at any moment in time).

Read more »