Planet Blender

Jason Van Gumster on The Process Diary
BlenderNation - 2012-03-14 22:00:34

Paul Caggegi interviews Jason van Gumster. Paul writes: Jason Van Gumster has built a successful studio on the backbone of Free and Open-Source Software. He has written “Blender for Dummies” and co-written “The GIMP Bible“, and is active in the … Continue reading →

Mango: Source files & Storyboards!
BlenderNation - 2012-03-14 17:27:24

The Mango team has released the source files for their training short ‘QUIT BLENDER!‘, and all the storyboards for the movie (except for the last minute). The storyboards are amazing – the team has their work cut out for them! … Continue reading →

Aqsis 1.8 released
Blender to RenderMan - 2012-03-14 15:08:00

Aqsis 1.8 has been released as of Feb 29, 2012, a long awaited release build which brings some of the most exciting new features in this renderer in some time. Of these new features, the Point Based Global Illumination functions are the most obvious and anticipated. This release was not without it's problems however as the Windows and MacOS binaries were broken due to the move from FLTK to QT4, work is underway to fix this so expect a 1.8.1 patch release soon. The QT4 switch changed the GUI appearance only slightly, though in some tests Piqsl seems to respond much slower than it's FLTK predecessor, however the point cloud viewer program makes up for that. The PartIO library is a great addition as well, which will allow particle data to be used from various software such as Maya and Houdini. Despite the binary problems, this is one of the most exciting releases from the Aqsis team in years.




LONDON, UK - February 29, 2012 - Aqsis Team, the developers of professional open source rendering software, announced today the immediate release of Aqsis Renderer 1.8.0; its leading cross-platform 3D rendering solution adhering to the RenderMan standard.
This is the accumulative effort of many developers and community members around the world, resulting in an even more competitive solution.

Global illumination and software integration have been the primary focus for this release, with improvements including:

• Point-based global illumination, providing bake3d(), indirectdiffuse(), occlusion() and texture3d() shadeop support.
• Partio library integration, providing Houdini, Maya and PRMan compatible pointcloud support.
• New pointcloud viewer application (ptview).
• Qt library integration, providing native 64-bit support on all recommended platforms.
• BSD licensing for all new code.

In addition, key feature enhancements have been made with improvements including:

• Memory optimisations.
• PNG read/write support.
• Updated SLO interface, matching other renderer APIs.
• Improved RIB parser, including precise syntax error reporting.
• Reinstate command line support for frame selection using -frames and -framelist.
• MinGW support.

Further information regarding the changes in this release can be found within the release notes distributed with the software.
Aqsis Renderer 1.8.0 is freely available to download from the Aqsis website, with installers for Windows, Linux and OS X:
www.aqsis.org

Storyboards
Tears of Steel - 2012-03-14 14:41:01

As part of our new even-opener initiative, we’re releasing everything but the last minute (and the script)- that means we’re releasing a ton of storyboards!

Feel free to swing over and take a look here at the gallery. Or download the pdf with high resolution images (20 MB).

Reel: Ray Mairlot
BlenderNation - 2012-03-14 13:57:51

By Ray Mailot. Ray writes: This is my modelling specific demo reel, I don’t yet have a general demo reel done. Only the first project [the futuristic car - ed] in the demo reel isn’t done using Blender as it … Continue reading →

The Structure of Blender
Blender Total - 2012-03-14 13:52:41

Riven Phoenix nos apresenta uma incrível material, em uma sequência de vídeo aulas totalmente gratuitas mostrando desde a criação de um personagem até a produção da animação no mesmo, totalizando um conteúdo de quase 9 horas de duração! Veja os tópicos abordados: Criando o Personagem; Modelando as Roupas; Mapeamento de Texturas, Vertex Painting e Texture Painting; UV [...]

Team complete!
Tears of Steel - 2012-03-14 12:50:21

And, here’s the Mango Open Movie team in two versions, all of them still looking like fresh young happy people! From left to right: Nicolo, Ian, Sergey, Kjartan, Jeremy, Francesco, Sebastian. (Brecht is working from home still this month).

Blender Conference(s) Doodles Book
BlenderNation - 2012-03-14 10:30:46

Blenderheads around the world have doodled in Pablo’s Book. Pablo Vazquez writes: So! Were you in any of the last bcon’s around? Such as Blender Conference Amsterdam, Blendiberia in Spain, or BlenderPRO in Brasil? Well, then maybe your drawing is … Continue reading →

Snap tool during transform
inblender.blogspot.com - 2012-03-14 09:51:00


 demo menggunakan Snap tool/ Snap during transform blender 2.62

Sintel on a Linux-powered Video Wall
BlenderNation - 2012-03-14 09:46:35

Gotta get me one of those to play the 4K version of Sintel!

graphicall: @Mohammed_A_A here some info http://t.co/CrN1Ct6R
Twitter / graphicall - 2012-03-14 08:45:48

graphicall: @Mohammed_A_A here some info http://t.co/CrN1Ct6R

Female Body Character Modeling Series – Part 11 – Arms and Legs
Blender Cookie - 2012-03-14 02:34:21

Hello and welcome to this character modeling tutorial on creating the female body in Blender!

This character modeling tutorial series for Blender 2.6, Jonathan Williamson takes you through the entire process of modeling a detailed, female body with clean topology that will deform and animate well. This tutorial puts a strong emphasis on topology and anatomy, making use of photo references from 3d.sk

What you’ll learn

Throughout this tutorial series Jonathan will walk you through all the steps necessary to construct the entire model, piece by piece with clean topology using the Edge by Edge modeling method. This method gives you very good control over your topology by laying down the topology first and then filling in the surfaces.

Part 11 of this character modeling series takes you through modeling the arms and legs with a very simple extrusion technique, then followed by adding edgeloops and tweaking the shapes.

Up next

Once the modeling is complete in this series we will move onto texturing the final model.

Reference Images were purchased and licensed from 3D.sk. To learn more about 3D.Sk please visit them today.

Massive Desktop with Multiple Projectors
Dalai Felinto - 2012-03-14 01:52:17

What do you do when you have 2 idle projectors by your computer? The answer is obviously a high definition projection area to be filled with lo.v.e. (lots of valuable experiments).

Two short throw projectors in one seamless desktop

I’ve been following the work of the Vision3D since 2009. This lab in Montreal is specialized in computer vision (recherche fondamentale et appliquée sur les aspects tridimensionnels de la vision par ordinateur). Lead by Sébastien Roy they have been producing (and sharing!) on calibration of projection surface (e.g. domes \o/), multiple projector systems, and content toolsets.

lt-align manual calibration process

The Vision3D lab main tool in that area is Light Twist. This tool was presented in the LGM2009 with a live showcase of the system in a cylinder. In the last week I tried to have light twist going with a multi projector system (aiming to use this for a dome later on) but so far I’m stuck in the playback of content (and I suspect the calibration stage is wrong). Anyways, light twist will be a topic of another post, once I get it up and running.

Plugin enabled – video in the middle of the screens, desktop working normally

Since 2009 the light twist project shifted its focus from labs to end users. In 2011 they finally presented a new project called lt-align and lt-compiz-plugin. The lt-align is a software to quickly calibrate the screens alignment, very easy to use.

The Compiz plugin requires some fooling around with ubuntu settings, but once things are in place it works like a charm. I’m yet to make it work with Unity, so I can have real fullscreen across the desktops.

Recording of the alignment process and video playback

Elephants Dream – Stitched Edition

Note: there is an extra package you need to compile the lt-compiz-plugin:`sudo apt-get install compiz-plugins-main-dev. And I didn’t have to restart compiz with ccp to make it work. Also I changed the shortcuts to start the plugin because Alt+F* were taken by other OS commands.

Time to make it real and project in a large wall

In this picture you can see Djalma Lucio, sys admin that oversees all the computer installations at Visgraf on IMPA. A great professional and a very funny guy to work with. Think about someone that actually enjoys opening a xorg.conf file. And you can also see in the right Aldo Zang. Check it out his ARLuxRender project – a plugin system for LuxRender “which allows to render scenes with mixtures of real and virtual objects directly, without post-processing”.

I hope to post more in the coming months in domes, projections, a special video project … I went on a 3-month leave of my work at UBC to join the research lab at Visgraf/IMPA, under the coordination of prof. Luiz Velho. This is the second week only, but it’s been already a great experience. And above all, it’s nice to be back home (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil).

Happy Twisting,
Dalai