Have a nice 2010!

Animating hair

A short test with Blender's particle system, using the hair and soft body models. Nothing new for those who already searched for similar things in youtube, but I had to test it.

Modeling practice

In order to practice the modeling techniques, I'm trying to reproduce the world's most famous mouse. For the textures I've used a mix between UV maping and Texture Painting. In the first, you cut the mesh in pieces and transform it into plane surfaces where you then paint. In the second, you paint directly in your 3D model. There is another option, that is to create groups of faces and then apply a texture/material to each individual group. It's not perfect, but my daughter will recognize it for sure :)

Final Logo

After testing some variations with the previously created logo, we reached this final version:

Another open source software

Another software I'm exploring is Inkscape, an open source vector graphics editor. Vector graphics are designed with mathematical functions, so the file does not contain the final pixel information, but the information to generate it, so when you resize the image it redraws it, which makes them scalable without degrading.
One of the good things is that Inkscape works with the SVG file format, which Blender can import so for sure it will be usefull.
Vector graphics are used in many things, one of the most common is to create logotypes. That was in fact the first thing I made with Inkscape, where after some iterations, my wife came with this idea for the logo of our leisure artistic creations, which I then created in Inkscape:

It's composed of a "3" and a "R", representing the three members of our closer family, whose names all start with a "R". We know that it's possible that someday this logo will have to be changed, if a new member arrives, but until then this will be used.

Flag in the wind

Another example of the internal physics models of Blender, where I used the cloths and wind model to represent a flag of my hometown football club, Rio Ave F.C., with a portion of the anthem in the background:

Cloths and particles

While exploring the cloth model in Blender, I've made this simple test, where I included also a particle system to simulate this magical trick ;). I'm quite impressed with the quality of the cloth model, despite its simplicity.

Revamping

Blender is used not only to make animations (image sequences) but also to make single images. There is an annual event, the Blender World Cup where in fact artists submit their single shots related with a certain subject. This year's topic is "The other world...". I'm not sure if I'm going to submit something, probably not, but if inspiration comes, who knows?
For now I'm showing an example of a single image I made for a revamping of a blog title image.
The blog is Bolinha Baixa where I write as "quartoarbitro" and I show you here the previous and the new title images:

I'm exploring the particle object in Blender, which is used for many things, like smoke, hair or grass as shown in the image. It is also used when you want to replicate several similar objects, like a swarm of bees, for example, where you substitute each particle by the object you want. So the range of applications is very wide, as large as your imagination.

5th and final shot

Well, the last shot also does not show anything special, just a walk of the Bride, Groom and the children we expect them to have ;). This scene was the final one, here it is complete, I made it long enough to have time for the credits and so on. You just have to watch the first 30 seconds, unless you want to hear the music.

Technically, the grass is not very good, I've already found a way to create realistic grass, but for this scene that detail was not necessary.

4rd shot

The two final shots were simpler than the previous ones. In this one, no special characters moving, just one arm, and the rest is just camera moving and a new feature, the video texture. This feature allows that in a certain surface, its texture is changed every frame by the frame of an external video file, creating this effect of a video inside a video. Here it is:

3rd shot

The third shot was to make fun with a scene that in reality happened in a boat on a river. In the animation, the boat became a raft for simplicity. The main chalange here was to simulate the water environment. With a quick look at textures and some examples found in the internet, it was easy to reach this final effect, which was good enough for the purpose. The soundtracks of "Love Boat" and "Baywatch" are then enough to create a self-explanatory scene. One thing that could be better was the float movement when throwing it to the water, but, at the time, it was a detail.

2nd Shot

This was chronologically speaking the second of five shots made for the wedding. This scene was supposed to be one of the last in the whole presentation, so I wanted to be sure that it would be finished on time. So if something had to be cut it would be some of the middle scenes. Fortunately I could make everything on time (well, finished 4 days before the wedding). I used the same sexy walking for the female bottle created for the first shot, but had to create all the scenario and male bottle movements for this new scene. Enjoy.

1st shot

So here is the first of five shots made for the wedding. It has some imperfections but there was no time to put it perfect and for the final objective, it was already good enough. The thing is that when we are doing something and learning at the same time, once we find a way to do something we do it, knowing that is probably not the most efficient, but that will come with time.

The image quality could also be better, and I appreciate if someone could give some advices on the best way to compile the image sequences created by Blender into a video and to add sound. In this case, I compiled the images in QuickTime and added the sound in Windows Movie Maker, first the sound effects, than the music, but I notice that each time I export the movie from Movie Maker, it loses some quality so there are for sure better ways to do it.

Well enough talk, here goes the first shot:

The beginning

This blog is for posting here the things I do with Blender, an open source software for 3D animation.

My firtst contact with Blender was on May 30th, 2009, when while preparing a presentation for a friends wedding, one of the co-workers sent me this link to see if we could do something similar for the introduction. Some days after I've followed the tutorial and did it with no problem, without the need of knowing how to use Blender.

I then realized that the software was similar to 3D Studio Max, that I've worked with a few years ago for proffessional reasons, when we wanted to present building energy results in a fancy way, so I've explored a bit more of the potential of Blender.

After going through the first tutorials to understant the Blender unusual interface and to make the first animation of Gingerbread Man, and a little more advanced character animation tutorial, I've decided that it was worth exploring it and try to use it to improve the things we were making for the friends wedding. It was a race against time, since I had to learn Blender while making the animations and had only about 2.5 months (in the free time between work and family). I'll soon post the final result of my first work with Blender.