Planet Blender

Rendering a Drink Can in Blender with Cycles – Exclusive
Blender Cookie - 2012-03-11 22:58:12

Hello and welcome to this Citizen exclusive tutorial on rendering a drink can in Blender with Cycles!

In this video tutorial for Blender 2.6, Jonathan Williamson will take you through the steps needed to render a very cool product advertising shot of the fictional CG Cookie Essence drink can in Blender with Cycles.

What you’ll learn:

Through this tutorial you will learn how to use mesh light in Cycles to illuminate your scene; including fill lights, key lights, rim lights, and more. You will be shown how to set up better metal shaders with the node system and how to add bump maps to your shaders. You will also learn how to separate parts of your scene out to different render layers for complete control of the lighting and composition of your scene. Finally, you will also learn how to use the different render layers to composite the different parts back together, make color adjustments, add filters, and fine tune your final image through the node compositing system.

Scars by Phantom
My World of VFX - 2012-03-11 22:46:48

Got a quick assignment to edit & decorate some wonderful Delicode Visualizer Kinect material, which was recorded and created by Julius Tuomisto (Coordinator/Director) & Janne Karhu (Visualizer Programming) for music video “Scars” by Phantom. I think I’ve never had so many (14) simultaneous tracks in any of my edits before and it was quite a struggle at times to decide which was the best material for the cut.

Anyway, it still was fun to edit and even more fun to decorate it in After Effects with Red Giant’s Magic Bullet Suite. Also, some Trapcode Particular was used. Check out the video below, the track “Scars” by Phantom is really great!

Lazy sunday in Amsterdam (and some research)
Tears of Steel - 2012-03-11 16:18:17

Today we did a little tour to the Oude Kerk here in Amsterdam and enjoyed the first sun of spring. Blogging in the sun while hanging around in the beanbag in the Blender Institute is also quite pleasant, I can tell you!

Anyway, the light in the church is beautiful! We have to find a way to put this in the movie while at the same time have it destroyed by robots. Also the trees and bicycles in front of the church and around the redlight district might become a masking nightmare too. Or we just cover them with futuristic tech-stuff. But let’s see what happens.

I couldn’t help but film and track something in the church. But I have other things to do than putting something in it, so if you guys are interested in some compositing fun, here’s the track and footage. Do something cool and link here! :)

http://download.blender.org/ftp/incoming/libmv/sebastian/kerktrack.zip

Soldier Model
Morevna Project - 2012-03-11 15:39:42

Meanwhile Nikolay struggle with keyframes, Erik Castillo has finished the promised 3D model of soldier. I was a little worried about the lack of such model, because we need it in shot 35 for keyframes drawing (this is a very complex shot where the soldiers are thrown into the air). Luckily Erik did best to cover us here. Now I can proceed to playing with shot 35.

Also we will need soldier models in shot 07 – it is where camera does a long turn around Ivan and Morevna and soldiers getting up from the ground and surrounding them. For this we will need 5-6 variations of this basic soldier to use all them in shot 07. It will be the next step. Stay tuned!

Promo Video: Global Entrepreneurship Week Venezuela 2011
BlenderNation - 2012-03-11 10:40:14

By Luis Robles. Luis writes: Good day, fellow Blender users! I’m really happy to show you my recently completed video, comissioned by a local client hosting a global event. It was completely animated in Blender, with a few textures created … Continue reading →

graphicall: YafaRay invasion on GraphicAll! http://t.co/L5oGPLCH Every platform is covered thanks to megasoft78, have fun! #b3d #yafaray #rendering
Twitter / graphicall - 2012-03-11 07:35:04

graphicall: YafaRay invasion on GraphicAll! http://t.co/L5oGPLCH Every platform is covered thanks to megasoft78, have fun! #b3d #yafaray #rendering

Keyframes drawing workflow
Morevna Project - 2012-03-11 06:11:52

Today I want to write a little about our keyframes drawing workflow.  The described workflow is not something that we come up at once, but this is something that formed up spontaneously during the last week.

Nikolay uses MyPaint to draw the keyframes and some edits are done in GIMP or Krita. Thanks to the GIMP’s ora plugin and native support for ora files in Krita we can seamlessly edit MyPaint files everywhere. Well, in fact Krita’s ora support isn’t that perfect (2.3.3 here), but we can live with that.

So, our basic working format is OpenRaster (ora). My task is to prepare all animatic images – compose them together with all reference data into ora files, so Nikolay can proceed directly to the drawing. We have a special production sheet to identify pending, prepared and finished keyframes. I also mark keyframes which are considered relatively “easy”.

Nikolay looks at this sheet when he needs to choose next keyframe to draw. After the keyframe is drawn he sends me ora file for review. My job is to look for style consistency and general quality issues. If the keyframe is accepted then Nikolay moves to next one in the list. If there is a issues then I put my notes onto separate layers together with some explanation sketches, send the file back and process repeats. On the images below you can see how it’s usually looks like.

Having a production sheet allows Nikolay to proceed with other keyframe while I’m doing review, so the work keeps to be intensive.

Also we can’t go without phone conversations – although Nikolay is quite familiar with the matter it takes from 10 to 30 minutes for discussions on each keyframe. Discussion can take place at any moment, so the mobile phone is an only option for that.  Although Nikolay lives in other town, we are lucky to reside in the same region – that allows us to have all talks at the flat rate.

Needless to say that we have certain conventions about file naming which allows us to keep all data in the order. I will not cover them here as it may sound boring and there is a high probability that those conventions will change with a time.

That’s all my notes about the current workflow. If you would like to see the finished keyframes please watch the recent images page at our wiki. Cheers!

Workshop @ Cancún, México
Blog - PabloVazquez.org - 2012-03-11 05:55:16

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Yep! Time for more workshops, this time in Cancún, México! Like I did back in 2010 right after Sintel.
I’ve been also giving talks and workshops here in Pachuca, also México.

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Places involved:

A female jedi knight
Starbright Illustrations (blog) - 2012-03-11 05:51:21

I’ve been working with my graphics tablet and GIMP for the last couple of hours, just so I would have something to post for Illustration Friday. Well that’s not quite true, I’m killing two birds, as it were, because if the illustration is good enough, it will end up being the cover for a role-playing game called Heroes in Time.

The female warrior, seen in the painting with her back to the fire on the bridge of a doomed spaceship, is actually just a detail of the finished painting. The picture will also have a barbarian in a cave, representing the other end of time.

In the game, the player characters can choose to play as different types of adventurer from the very beginnings of time, to the very end. So they can be a robot, a magic user, an investigator from modern times, or the most primal of cave people.

It was when I was cropping out a nice thumb to paste on Illustration Friday that I noticed that the female jedi could easily be the subject of her own painting.

I like the urgent and energetic the image has right now, but I’m aware it will need some smoothing out, some detail, and a few more hours of attention before it really reaches a place where it could be called a finished piece of digital painting.

I keep coming back to this image though – attracted by the juxtaposition between brutal cave thug and sophisticate spacewoman – so undoubtedly it will eventually get to that coveted polished state of a completed painting.

The barbarian standing beside our woman from the future looks a bit naked I just noticed. I think the next stage will be to paint him in some clothes :-).

cihangir
Matt Ebb - 2012-03-11 03:33:30

istanbul