Planet Blender

MYCAP Studio 2012 - 3D Motion Capture Demo 2
Vimeo / Blender 3D - 2012-03-15 23:53:18

Finger motion capture demo using MYCAP Studio 2012 and two Logitech Pro 9000 webcams.

About MYCAP Studio 2012:

MYCAP Studio 2012 is a powerful motion capture solution being developed by Reban Robotics in the Netherlands and will be available sometime in April 2012.

Unique features:

-Fast camera calibration
-True 3D capture using two cameras (webcam/DV)
-Automatic marker identification and stereo matching
-Kalman filtering for clean, professional quality data
-Global motion stabilization
-BVH, FBX, ASC and CSV support out of the box
-Compatible with 3ds Max, Blender, Maya and Lightwave

Limitless applications:

-Digital puppetry/animation
-Human and animal gait analysis
-Kinematic modeling
-Robotics
-Structural analysis
-Multiple 3D point tracking
-3D scene reconstruction

Price: 99 Euros (excludes cameras)

For more information contact info@rebanrobotics.com

Cast: Reban Robotics

Tags: blender, 3ds max, animation, vfx, mocap, motion, capture, stereo, 3d, tracking and robot

MYCAP Studio 2012 - 3D Motion Capture Demo 1
Vimeo / Blender 3D - 2012-03-15 23:31:21

Facial motion capture demo using MYCAP Studio 2012 and two Logitech Pro 9000 webcams.

About MYCAP Studio 2012:

MYCAP Studio 2012 is a powerful motion capture solution being developed by Reban Robotics in the Netherlands and will be available sometime in April 2012.

Unique features:

-Fast camera calibration
-True 3D capture using two cameras (webcam/DV)
-Automatic marker identification and stereo matching
-Kalman filtering for clean, professional quality data
-Global motion stabilization
-BVH, FBX, ASC and CSV support out of the box
-Compatible with 3ds Max, Blender, Maya and Lightwave

Limitless applications:

-Digital puppetry/animation
-Human and animal gait analysis
-Kinematic modeling
-Robotics
-Structural analysis
-Multiple 3D point tracking
-3D scene reconstruction

Price: 99 Euros (excludes cameras)

For more information contact info@rebanrobotics.com

Cast: Reban Robotics

Tags: blender, 3dsmax, animation, vfx, mocap, motion, capture, stereo, 3d, tracking and robot

Character Animation Fundamentals V1 – Training Series
Blender Cookie - 2012-03-15 20:26:10

Character Animation Fundamentals in Blender By Beorn Leonard

This training series covers all the fundamentals of Character Animation in Blender. During this series, you will learn many of the fundamental skills that are essential for all character animators. This series makes use of both simple ball rigs and a complete character to allow you to really focus on what really matters, the animation. Some highlights of this series include fundamental exercises, timing and spacing, working with overlapping motion, animating walk and run cycles for film or games, understanding IK and FK, using the Grease Pencil for animation sketches, and much, much more! You can view the complete chapter breakdown HERE

This series makes use of a pre-built character named Clive, modeled by Jonathan Williamson and rigged by Beorn Leonard. Clive works as a great introductory character that lets you focus on the movement during animation, rather than a bunch of accessories and other items that would only distract away from the task at hand.

What you’ll learn

This training series takes you through many of the essential skills every character animation artist should know by heart. You will learn about timing and spacing, overlapping motion, squash and stretch for cartoon character animation. You will also learn how to animate walk and run cycles for film or games, be given an understanding of IK and FK constraints, including when and how to use them. Not only that, but you will also learn how to use the grease pencil for sketching out animation sequences and much more.

To see much of this in action, check out the video below by Beorn for a look at what he covers throughout the serie. It’s full of awesome! You can find complete details on what is covered, and view some sample training and animations from the series by visiting the full training page HERE

Who is Beorn?

Beorn is a very proficient Blender user best known for his work on Sintel, on which he did a large amount of character and creature animation. He also just recently finished working as part of the animation team on Happy Feet 2

Order Now on DVD or as a Digital Download

The series is available for order from our shop! You can order now by clicking the button below.

Robo-Rigging
Tears of Steel - 2012-03-15 16:01:18

I’m baaaaaack! Arriving a little later than everyone else but now the team is complete!

Making up for missing out on the “Quit Blender” fun, i’ve been spending my first few days playing around with some of the half finished models that have been laying around. This robotic arm (modeled by Kjartan from David’s awesome concept with little tweaks by me) is the first to be rigged up as a test.

In this we’ve got three main fingers each rotating it’s segments with a different style.

• The little finger as just a basic 2 bone/1 axis pivot.
• The big finger with a median plate between them and pistons coming of each side.
• And the Thumb with a 2 arm/1 piston type do-hicky…

With each of the fingers on its own rotating segment of the hand, as well as influencing “protector plates” on top of the hand and extra cogs in the forearm and wrist.

For the wrist itself I separated each of its rotational axis to 3 different positions, with the Z-axis split again between another 2 points, all controlled by the 1 bone!

Its still a bit buggy at the extreme angles and there are still a few holes with joins and pivots and stuff to fill up. But for the most part its 99% working!

Now to add the mini chainsaw and other hidden blades of death!!!

Workshop in Barcelona
BlenderNation - 2012-03-15 14:00:35

The Fine Arts faculty of the Universitat de Barcelona hosts a Blender training on March 19, 20, 21, 22 and 27. Raimon Guarro i Nogués writes: Next week Labmedia at the Fine Arts faculty of the Universitat de Barcelona will … Continue reading →

Development update: Cycles & S-curves!
Tears of Steel - 2012-03-15 13:32:23

We didn’t forget what Mango is really about; which is of course to help improving Blender!

Last Monday we had two meetings with the devs & artists, on cycles and general issues. Yesterday we discussed pipeline designs. This morning we worked out a design idea for curve editing for masks. Time for an update :)

Cycles topics

• Number one missing feature: Motion blur! It will (can) be added in three ways: 1) Camera motion blur (almost free) 2) Object motion blur (an extra matrix per ray) 3) Deformation motion blur (requires pre-proces as current vector blur in Blender.
• Cycles will then also deliver vector pass in render-layers, for vector blur node.
• For rendered masks, cycles should support Index passes (Object, Material index numbers). Also the old Z-mask option should be brought back, but hopefully can be combined with better visualization (in 3d window)
• Shadow passes! This took a while to get pinned down precisely, mostly because from Cycles point of view the idea of “shadow” doesn’t really exist. It’s light bouncing around :). A good definition we found is to add two Shadow pass types. 1) Direct shadow (shadow caused directly by area or point/spot/sun lights) and 2) Indirect shadow (shadow which includes bounced light, GI, contributions from environment.
• Anti-aliasing: Brecht will investigate to implement FSA for cycles. That method (1 full composite per sample, then merge samples) is still the way to deliver optimal quality AA. Alternative ways could just be to internally render things bigger, composite once, and merge down. Under investigation.
• Mixing render engines in 1 scene: Since the ‘render database’ of Blender Internal and Cycles is not shared, individual render-layers of a Scene can also not use different render engines. For this it’s adviced to set up multiple scenes to render (which can be used in 1 composite anyway).
• Volumetric render: will be possible in Cycles eventually, but we can fall back on Internal if needed.
• Ramp shaders & Curve nodes: being worked on.
• Biggest challenge for Cycles the next months is render speed. It’s still on the slow side for production scenes. Some shaders (caustics) can be avoided, other slow shaders (soft glossy) not so easily.
• Sergey will research the topic “methods to attract lighting circumstances from footage, using 3d reconstruction”.

Other Blender topics, lessons from past week

•  Blender’s library system is far too static with paths (relative, non relative, moving stuff). Needs a good tool & UI to manage.
• Asset pre-viewing and browsing (in other files too) would be cool
• Compositor is too slow! We need Jeroen Bakker’s new OpenCL compo!
• Check on Alembic style baking for for animation playback.
• Smoke sim should really allow objects to animate and interact with the smoke.
• Bullet physics/fracture goes via game engine, can this be unified now? How is Joshua Leung’s Bullet branch going?
• We need efficient ways to share animation data (like control 1 modifier property curve on 50+ objects).
• Mesh modeling: bevel needs fix, “Inset” tool would be great. And are we getting realtime AO or Cavety shader for modeler now?

Pipeline meeting

Sebastian presented a cool diagram showing the data and workflow. Jeremy explained the data structure has we used in past (for sintel). Agreed is that Sebastian will become our “pipeline manager” and report and design issues further, he will pick this up next week when his tracking dvd training is done.

Mask curve editing: S-curves!

This morning we had a fun session together (Sergey, Sebastian, Francesco, Ton) on efficient ways to draw and edit masks, with efficient but advanced control over local feathering. This lead to a design proposal I nicked S-curve (Sharybin curve :)

• Curve shape and curvature gets edited using 1 perpendicular handle (like X-splines).
• Curve feather shape can be controlled using additional points (as many you like on a curve), which will have a user-defined distance from the original curve shape – but always remain perpendicular.
• That means that feather–points can be dragged out of curve to define a soft area, but also can get ‘slided’ over the curve shape to position it.
• Technically: the feather point is based on the U coordinate on curve, plus a Dist (or weight factor) to define distance.
• Bonus: non-closed curves will always draw as a two-sided feathered string.

If this S-curve idea works will be figured out later, but the theory & design is promising. Back to coding! :)

Reel: Sixthlaw 3D Visualisation
BlenderNation - 2012-03-15 12:43:15

By Sixthlaw. Sixthlaw writes: So I have finished the promotional video for my business Sixthlaw 3D Visualisation All modelling was done in blender, rendering in octane, and some final post-pro in...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Modelling Teeth Timelapse
BlenderNation - 2012-03-15 06:44:23

By Alfondo Annarumma writes.

[read the full article on blendernation.com]