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.