Planet Blender

Blob Study I
Vimeo / Blender 3D - 2012-01-24 23:06:59

Made with Blender, rendered in Cycles.

Sounds stolen from :ö: myspace.com/ioioioioi

The .blend file (without the audio track) is available here stuffmatic.com/2012/01/behind-the-blob/

Cast: Stuffmatic

Tags: blender, cycles and blob

Using blam, the Blender camera calibration toolkit
Vimeo / Blender 3D - 2012-01-24 23:06:49

A tutorial explaining how to use blam - The Blender Camera Calibration Toolkit. Warning: this tutorial is slightly outdated. Check out the user's guide for up to date instructions code.google.com/p/blam/wiki/UsersGuide.

The image used in the tutorial can be downloaded here: blam.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/testimages/wire_house_35mm.png

See code.google.com/p/blam/ for source code and further information.

Music by soundcloud.com/leoparden

Cast: Stuffmatic

Tags: blam, blender, camera calibration, camera mapping, projection mapping, camera and 3d

Blender Fracture Tutorial
Vimeo / Blender 3D - 2012-01-24 22:59:22

A tutorial on how to destroy concrete in a cool way.

Cast: Ian Moore-Kilgannon

Tags: blender, 2.60, 2.61, fracture, break, ground and concrete

Working on a second part of sake set tutorial
Blender Journey - 2012-01-24 21:16:33

A lot of people wanted to see a more finished version, so I’m going to turn this into a three part tutorial. Part two will involve modeling a few more dining objects as well as a room in which the scene will be set. Part three will be the materials and rendering in… CYCLES. Hopefully [...]

Blob Study I
BlenderNation - 2012-01-24 18:00:52

By Stuffmatic. I’m a sucker for this kind of abstract animation :)

Kate Moss is the Face of Mango
BlenderNation - 2012-01-24 14:24:23

You have to admire Ton for pulling this off… Okay, sorry, couldn’t resist ;-) (/via AdventuresInBlender)

Tutorial: How to make a realistic sea using Cycles
BlenderNation - 2012-01-24 14:00:06

Peter Draculic posted a video tutorial on Youtube demonstrating how to generate a texture driven realistic seawater surface. He covers scene design as well as materials with Cycles and finale...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Cara Daftar Forum Blender Indonesia
Hello! - 2012-01-24 13:00:52

Sudah beberapa bulan ini pendaftar baru tidak bisa mengaktifkan akunnya di FBI (Forum Blender Indonesia) karena memang sengaja diatur demikian. Mengingat semakin banyaknya spammer yang mendaftar di forum dan belum ada cara yang lebih efektif selain dengan pendaftaran manual.

Melihat kondisi forum yang mati suri tidak seperti dulu, karena pertanyaan-pertanyaan teknis ditanyakan melalui fan page blender indonesia. Sebenarnya fan page blender indonesia hanya digunakan untuk share seputar berita dan kegiatan, bukan masalah teknis.

Oleh karena itu, untuk mendaftarkan diri dan mendapatkan aktivasi, silakan daftarkan diri melalui email ke pandu@blenderindonesia.org Dengan format:
Subject: Daftar Forum Blender Indonesia
Username: (username yang diinginkan
Email: (email yang digunakan)

Untuk password nantinya akan kami random, yang bisa dirubah setelah aktivasi dan login. Kami yakin bahwa mereka yang mau mendaftar secara manual benar-benar orang yang berniat berkontribusi dalam komunitas untuk berbagi (masalah, solusi, dll). Tidak hanya untuk meminta saja (download dan diam).

Sebenarnya forum bertujuan untuk mengorganisir pertanyaan-pertanyaan dan mendokumentasikan masalah serta solusinya, sehingga lebih terorganisir. Melihat di facebook banyak sekali pertanyaan yang isinya bisa dikatakan sama. Dengan adanya forum cukup dengan satu thread yang mudah diakses bisa memecahkan masalah banyak orang daripada melalui facebook yang mengharuskan orang yang lebih dulu tahu menjawab satu persatu.

Renderfarm.fi loves Creative Commons
Renderfarm.fi - 2012-01-24 11:09:11

Last spring I wrote a script that I hoped would transmit the important values that Creative Commons stands for in a funny but informative way. I wrote the original draft with the aim of explaining the six basic Creative Commons licenses Renderfarm.fi supports, but after applying for and receiving a small grant from the Cloudberry fund, I went on to write a story aimed at promoting Creative Commons both in the Nordic region and the rest of the world. This became the script for "BBB loves CC", a short film production that we release today.

I personally feel that Big Buck Bunny and the rest of his Blender Foundation colleagues represent a new chapter in an art form that is as probably as old as speech itself: storytelling. When creative materials are released under Creative Commons and other open licenses, people are free to take those stories to new directions and make up their own where they feel like. This freedom is where endless possibility lies in terms of the story. Fan art thrives, new stories emerge and characters are "kept alive" for generations - not for the love of money, but for the love of the characters and stories themselves.

Obviously not all characters have what it takes to survive in a world packed with information and in constant transition. Some do. Perhaps the most loved Creative Commons character to date is Big Buck Bunny. We have had the pleasure to work with him (notice the wording, we do not "use" him, that would be just wrong!) in many previous Studio Lumikuu productions (including Renderfarm.fi's very own "What is Renderfarm.fi?" video). It was indeed clear to us from the start that there was only one bunny big enough to pull off this enormous task!

Please note that even though this video is aimed at encouraging people to use Creative Commons, we will not force you to do so here on Renderfarm.fi. Ultimately big decisions like this should always be left for the artist to decide. Still we feel that if you can afford it, using Creative Commons is a sure way to gain that many more loyal followers. Anyway, without further due, we'll let The Bunny (as in The Dude) do the talking from now in the Renderfarm.fi/Studio Lumikuu production "BBB loves CC":

 

Blender GPU Benchmark
BlenderNation - 2012-01-24 10:00:33

Help compare GPU speeds with the Blender GPU Benchmark. Sidy Ndiongue writes: I have started a blender gpu benchmark in cycles to compare the performance on different gpu’s in cycles. I have...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

BLAM – Photomatching in Blender
Dalai Felinto - 2012-01-24 08:19:26

My love for photomatching goes a long way.
Back in 2007 I did this project using the fantastic SketchUp Photo Match:

I used 20 photographies, a blueprint of a cross section and a blueprint of the original floor design. I was then hired to do the drawing of the façade with AutoCAD to be used for a study on preservation and historical register of this building.

Since then I realized that Blender was very far from catching up with tools designed with architects in mind.
Today I ran into an add-on for Blender that may help to reduce this gap.

BLAM is a Blender Calibration Tool that you can find here:
http://code.google.com/p/blam/

My original plan for tonight (to code support for green-magenta anaglyph glasses in the Blender Game Engine ) clearly would have to wait. It’s time to test the tool!

I was following the steps of the video tutorial - BLAM Video Tutorial
If you want to try yourself this is the picture I used:

It’s a picture from the University of Seattle. I traveled to Seattle last year and really enjoyed the university campus (and the BattleStar Galactica exhibition at the Space Needle alone made the trip worthwhile).

UV EDITOR

1. adding axis is nice and intuitive but it would nice to tweak the curves for fine tuning while seeing the 3d change (as a live ‘estimate camera focal length and orientation’ mode)
2. an option to automatically add the image as image background would be nice.

3D VIEW

My workflow:

• look at the picture, find where I want the origin to be and moved the camera until this point was in the scene origin [0,0,0]
• add a mesh, collapse all vertices (so we end with a vertice in the origin only).
• extrude this vertice in the Z axis

• change Pivot Point to 3D Cursor
• select camera and rotate it until a vertical line matches the reference line I created on (c).

1. It would be nice to have a Transform Orientation that follows the ‘view distortion’.
2. Actually all axis could be visible in real-time in the 3dview (drawn with bgl – the OpenGL wrapper of Blender) perhaps even clickable, completely removing the need for the uvview step.
3. Also important would be a way to quick apply camera image to selected object (or selected face).
4. I sketched adding a geometry to match the building but my tests ended here. Why? Because my picture clearly has way too much distortion for this workflow.

In this file you will also find the 3d geometry with the uv project and subdivide modifiers (before and after applied them) – grab it here (600kb)

Conclusions

I liked what I saw. It looks like the development is going in a good direction.

The reconstruction part (which it’s the more important but still) doesn’t seem to work nice with high distorted pictures. I like how the current solution dialogs with Blender tools (e.g. Grease Pencil).

edit: it seems I helped to spot a bug with vertical oriented images. See the comment from BLAM developer here. I’m yet to re-test the new version of the add-on.

Even though I’m biased towards SketchUp I can find myself used to this new workflow. It will be nice to see if we can have a solution that works well for multiple cameras and a quick integration with camera projection functionalities.

Dalai Felinto

[wow what happened to the site? I explain later, let me get things working first, then I update the whatabouts]

Growing IvyGen Animation in Blender
BlenderNation - 2012-01-24 07:07:21

By Nikhil Dhoka. Nikhil writes: Just tried the Ivygen Add-on in free time and here is what i got by using very cool modifier “Build” over the branch mesh.. same thing is done for leaves...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Tutorial: Fracture Add-On with Dynamic Paint System
BlenderNation - 2012-01-24 02:00:48

You all might now the fracture add-on in Blender. Ian Moore-Kilgannon just uploaded his latest video tutorial demonstrating how you can combine pre-made facture elements with the new dynamic paint...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Bullet Integration Updates - 24 Jan
Aligorith's Lair - 2012-01-24 01:21:00

Today I've just pushed through a bunch of updates to this branch, as well as pulling in some regular changes from SVN Trunk too. Here are the highlights:

1) Integrated Liero's script to copy settings from one object to a bunch of selected objects
2) Split Rigidbody settings in toolbar into a separate panel

3) Scaling of objects should now be taken into account
Because Bullet ignores scaling on the actual objects, the scaling needs to be applied to the collision shapes before simulation, and reapplied to the matrices obtained afterwards. There may still be some bugs here, but so far it seems to work OK.

4) Collisions shapes use triangle meshes by default now
This works better to allow complex convex shapes get used as collision targets (i.e. Suzanne falling onto rugged mountainous terrain). However, in tests so far, this has been found to cause a few troubles for flat ground-planes getting missed by targets falling down. Perhaps there's actually just a little bug here. Otherwise, it's over to the community which one would be nicer to have.

Enjoy!