Planet Blender

Deadstar I
Vimeo / Blender 3D - 2012-03-04 23:21:27

Anime style short film about man who must choose between saving his close friend and the world.

Cast: Brandon Wright

Tags: anime, blender, short, film, space, animation, animated, 3d, experimental, avant-garde, sci fi, sci-fi, science and fiction

Blender Rockz
Vimeo / Blender 3D - 2012-03-04 21:44:39

Doodled around with Blender 2.62 this Sunday.

Some shapeshifting controled rocks (Very easy to art-direct) and Cycles rendermagic (30s rendertime/frame using 100 samples). Finaly I edited some sound using Blender video editor :) Blender sure rockz!

Cast: Daniel Bachmann

Tags: Blender, 2.62, Animation, Rocks, Sound, 3D, VFX and Effect

Thanks Microsoft for saving the day
Dalai Felinto - 2012-03-04 17:07:55

What happens when an image fails to load in your system? It goes without saying that we need to find a non-intrusive way to analyze it.

It happened to me today. An image downloaded from the internet was failing to load in my project (a virtual art gallery for domes, more on that once it’s out). The internal framework involves to copy the image to the project folder and open it with Video Texture. For those unfamiliar with the Blender Game Engine, this is a python module to dynamically load and swap in-game textures.

In my tests all the images I tried were working. No exception. But of course it takes only a test-run with the client to get a crash One single image was enough to make me pull my hair.

Our beloved open image editor GIMP opens the image with no problems. In fact if I open it and save it I can open it in my project with no problems. So what’s wrong? Why can’t GIMP warn me about this problematic file?

Looking for ‘file inspectors’ I ran into this Binary File Inspector from Microsoft. It didn’t take more than a glance to spot the problem:

CMYK … Bingo! Opening the image in a station with Photoshop proved this was the issue.

For the adventure seekers out there, remember: open source tools are great. Yet you should be not afraid of getting out of your comfort zone once in a while.

Who could guess that Microsoft would be the cavalry to make it up for the lack of CMYK (and feedback) support on GIMP (or the lack of CMYK support in Video Texture, or me being short in tools for image forensics, …).

Have a great day,
Dalai

Blender Sequencer scripts you can’t live without!
BlenderNation - 2012-03-04 16:50:01

The ‘Blender’s VSE’ Blog has compiled a collection of awesome Sequencer Python scripts. Blender’s VSE writes: The Blender VSE or Sequencer is a very capable video editor. But it lacks some key features of other NLEs (Non Linear Editors). Fortunately … Continue reading →

Citizen Exclusive: Modeling a Car series – part 07
Blender Cookie - 2012-03-04 16:38:55

Welcome to another Citizen Exclusive! Each week we are working to produce Citizen content. If you’re not a Citizen, no worries and no need to start a website about sheep taking over the world and having to release monsters to eat them.  This isn’t affecting the amount of free tutorials/content to hit the site on a weekly basis. Basically we are just working harder. Of course you are welcome to sign-up today to get access to this exclusive and many more.

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Modeling a Car series

Hello and welcome to this Citizen Exclusive series on modeling a car! This series will be covering the entire process of modeling a very detailed, high-poly car in Blender 2.6x. Throughout this series you’ll learn everything you need to know about modeling cars with an edge-by-edge method that focus very heavily on creating clean topology that not only results in a good mesh, it also results in a car model that renders far more realistically.

In Part 07:

The seventh part moves the focus to the wheels to model most of the wheel rim while focusing on clean topology and techniques for planning out the model so as to avoid potential problems.

Car Blueprints:

You can find the blueprints used in this tutorial here: Here you are! http://www.the-blueprints.com/vectordrawings/show/3257/mini_coupe_concept

Weekly news
Morevna Project - 2012-03-04 13:17:08

OK, the main event of this week is the official launch of donations campaign. It took much of my time to prepare it, but I think it worth the efforts.

With that event the project enters new phase – keyframes drawing – and since the 1st of March Nikolay is working on them. And here’s some results.

Also, to celebrate the beginning of the new phase of the project we decided to update our website theme with the new banner to better fit with current status of the project. Nikolay quickly made some cool artwork and now you can see the result (you may need to clear your browser cache to see the changes). Goodbye, old theme!

We was so excited with new artwork so after playing with new banner we accidentally got a new wallpaper done.

That’s all stuff for today. Stay tuned – the next week is going to be hot!

Nicolo, Kjartan, Francesco arrived. First day together!
Tears of Steel - 2012-03-04 12:10:15

No blog updates? Unfortunately that means we have loads of fun together! It’s now sunday afternoon and it’s the first time in 2 days I can sit down a while and check the web and email and this blog! Here’s quick bullet point updates:

• Everyone’s installed in a room in a cool appartment. Especially the one in the canal area (at Keizersgracht, awesome views) will make your Dutch friends green with envy!
• Yesterday Ian and David presented their mindblowing storyboards and script. For the team it was the first time they saw the entire story worked out visually and in detail. Lots of questions, many open (design) issues to tackle, definitely a lot fun ahead! There’s shots in this film that’ll become epic & iconic :)
• We then went for the ritual after-weeky ‘beer at the windmill’ and ‘dinner in thai’ evening. Many more to come!

Right now:

• Sergey is doing is Russian citizenship duties! He’s now on a train to The Hague in Amsterdam to vote.
• Sebastian is doing recordings for the Track Match Blend DVD here.
• Francesco is finishing his Animation Mentor homewerk.
• David Revoy is at Schiphol airport waiting for this flight back to Toulouse.
• Kjartan and Ian are on a bicycle trying to find the bridge over ‘t IJ to the northern part of Amsterdam, enjoying some nature.
• Tonight Rob will bring the *horrible cheesy funny* Amsterdamned movie, to have a film evening with the guys.
• I’m going to write a funny silly short script to present tomorrow morning to the team; they’ll have to execute & finalize it in 5 days as getting-started workshop!

(BTW: it seems nobody is smiling at the pictures, but that’s a coincidence :) I’ve just done quick snapshots yesterday, didn’t want to miss a second).

-Ton-

Adventure
BlenderNation - 2012-03-04 08:17:21

By Zordan. Zordan writes: It’s done and I’m actually happy with it The sphere in the foreground is rendered with cycles and the background with BI. Turned out to work better than I expected. Software used: Blender, Gimp Link Adventure … Continue reading →