Blender – Jer's Life

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Blender – 1 Year Later

2016/03/16 / Jer / 0 Comments

Last week marks the one year anniversary of when I decided to finally buckle down and dive into Blender. Looking back, can see how much I have learned and I’m quite happy with how far I have come. Comfy with all the departments. I do miss my old desk though.

my render / comp test

Excuses aside, I can tell you that things have not stopped progressing. I’ve developed a few new unique effects, played a LOT with rendering, and cleaned it all up in compositing. I’m blown away. I really am.

One of the beautiful attributes of open software is that it grows with the community. Sometimes independently developed add-ons become features. Sometimes core features cause a complete overhaul. Through all this, the tool more and more represents the users.

Multiple times, I thought this software was reading my mind.

The sky is the limit and development is accelerating. We are talking about multiple feature release sets per year, that aren’t just bug fixes.

Blender – Duplicating Objects Around

2015/12/25 / Jer / 0 Comments

Should have said, “a round” or “a circle”.

As this Blender artist points out, ” when trying to make a circular array with that offset object as the center of the array circle, it always doesn’t behave quite like what’s expected. ”

It’s quite a powerful ability to create an circular array of instanced objects, but if the pivot for the whole object is in the center, well… it looses a lot of it’s use.

How to make a circular array using offset object as center presents some options.

Blender – Paint Effects

2015/11/16 / Jer / 0 Comments

Haven’t dealt with shots that involve footprints in the snow or walls being splattered with blueberry pies, my jaw hit the floor when I saw this. If you’re quick with the mouse, it takes less than 1 minute to set up.

Here’s the instructions.

http://www.miikahweb.com/en/articles/blender-dynamicpaint-basics

… and some examples.

Python in Blender

2015/10/13 / Jer / 0 Comments

It was only a matter of time before I started my journey into scripting in Blender. Learning MEL (Maya’s Embedded Language) was one of the most powerful things any Maya 3D artist can do. When it came go giving advice to students that were looking to break into the industry, learning scripting was the piece of advice that I could dish out with confidence. Even if you only learn a handful of functions, you can perform (what seem like) miracles. Spend a day going through a set of introductory tutorials on scripting (Intro to Python in Blender, perhaps) and you’ll feel what I’m laying down here.

My time with MEL has lapsed and now I’m in Blender. There is a confidence that I am experiencing, knowing that I am moving in the right direction. Putting energy into a language (python) and animation software (Blender) that will never be taken away (till an EMP takes out all electronics).

Resources

Blender 3D: Noob to Pro – Advanced Tutorials – Introduction – I am guilty of having not spent as much time in the Noob to Pro series as I should. I guess I get a bit sucked into videos sometimes, too often forgetting the speed and efficiency of text + images. This series is quick n dirty.

Blender 3D: Blending Into Python – Includes optimization guide, cookbook, APC, quickstart, reference, etc

Blender Cookie – Python + Blender – On this Youtube channel, this crew has demonstrated an ability to create quality video tutorials.

Blender.org – Advanced -> Scripting – RTFM!

Blender.org – API documentation – There’s also a link to download the contents in a ZIP file, for localized reference.

Nathan Miller’s Blender Python Notebook – The Proving Ground – Procedurally built architecture? Includes sections on mesh definition, modifieers, math mesh, random mesh and “supershape 3D”? Looks like a blast!

Blender – Muscle System

2015/09/24 / Jer / 0 Comments

This video demonstrates a relatively simple muscle system that does not rely on blend/tweening shapes in order to correct for the collapsing volumes that are common with most skinning solutions.

For an idea of how this works, you can download from blendswap.com.

Blender 2.76 – New Features

2015/09/21 / Jer / 0 Comments

Blender has a new version out, and the thing that first caught my eye was the image below.

The ability to smooth bone weight influences… smoothly (without using a paintbrush).

When I started learning Blender’s rigging tools, I noticed the lack of a proper workflow for smoothing skinning weights. I spent days trying to replicate a workflow that I have relied on for years in another software. DAYS. I even preparing a plan and was setting aside time to build a tool to handle this… but then… BAM! Here we go.

This is not the first time this Blender has read my mind.

*10 minutes later*

Installed and tested this on Ubuntu. Works!!!

I was so excited to see this feature added to Blender, I nearly put this as my Facebook Cover Photo. Hey! Don’t look at me like that.

Workflow is everything. Key word being “flow”. Flow is a difficult state to reach when doing something as technical as rigging and skinning is a process that most everyone hates, even riggers. I’m one of the few that enjoyed the process as was able to get to a nice zen state and just… well… flow!

I’m a big dork. Where’s my badge?

This is also not the only impressive improvement in the newest release. Checkout the list of new features here.

*UPDATE*

CGCookie just released a short video demonstrating this new skinning feature, along with the Mesh Data Transfer tool, which simplifies the process of transferring skinning weights.

Blender Day 18 – Misc Stuff

2015/05/14 / Jer / 0 Comments

Blender Guru’s article on getting rid of “fireflies” looks to be useful, as I dive deeper into the Cycles render engine.
http://www.blenderguru.com/articles/7-ways-get-rid-fireflies/

Paint Palettes addon will make texture and weight painting more simpler. Less jumping around in the menus.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Paint/Palettes

Second Life has lots of Blender users, which means lots of tips on skinning/weighting.
https://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Blender-The-Weighting-Game/td-p/1927927/page/2

This morning was spent reading through Oliver Villar’s Learning Blender book, on the topic of animation. Reading while talking notes. Now that I’ve got some colorized reference pages, and a character with a very simple rig all skinned up, it’s time to dive into Blender’s animation capabilities.

Blender Day 16 – Resizing UI

2015/05/12 / Jer / 0 Comments

How I wish more software developers put the effort in to make their user interfaces scale like this. Natural vision practitioners would be more successful. The “higher resolution equals smaller icons” way of thinking needs to shift… and it apparently has, thanks to smartphones.

Anyhow, take a look at this slick DPI setting, then grab Blender and play with it yourself.

Blender – 15 Days Later – Open Source is Home

2015/05/06 / Jer / 0 Comments

First question that most have is,

“What is open source? You mean free?”

Yes, it’s free and more.

Open source means that not only are you given the product, but you are given the blueprints as well. If you need to make changes, you have the ability to go in and change the software yourself (or find someone to do it for you). Thousands of copies/variations are out there floating on the Internet. Some flavours are simplified, some complicated, all are customized to various degrees. This means that even if you loose your copy of the product, another copy can always be found… somewhere.

NO ONE SHOULD BE ABLE TO TAKE AWAY YOUR TOOLS.

Web developers are very familiar with this concept, as may of their tools are open source. Some may use commercial software but, in the end, the media itself is open source. You only really need a text editor to do most everything for the web.

Some common things I hear whenever I mention Linux, Gimp, Blender or virtually anything that is open source:

“Because it’s free, it must not have powerful features.”

Over the past 6 years I have probably spent $15,000 on software. I own licenses to multiple versions of Photoshop, yet I still use GIMP because it loads super fast and I can install it on all my computers, or any machine I come to contact with (yes, it was me who installed it on your PC). There’s an unbelievable amount of online support from all over the world, and more tutorials than anyone could ever ask for.

“Linux is complex and the interfaces are confusing.”

Most open source software, in the beginning, can be pretty crude. That being said, most of my multimedia applications have been around for a decade or two, and most of this software is pretty finely polished nowadays. All the open source applications I use are MUCH simpler than the commercial counterparts. In many cases, this simplicity was the primary reason I migrated to many of the free tools. As an example, look at how effectively Blender lets me scale the entire interface. I’ve personally never seen something like this. As for Linux being crude, take a look a this UI demo.

“Gimp, Blender and other open software is buggy.”

I honestly don’t see a difference, though if someone twisted my arm… I would say that commercial software tends to crash more on me that the open source counterparts. This could be due to the fact that most of my commercial software is on Windows (sorry Microsoft) and that Linux is known to be more stable and recover well from crashes. Problems are bound to happen and, because open source can be altered, problems are never true show-stoppers. You are probably not alone if you are having trouble, so the answer is almost always already out there to be discovered.

“No professionals use open source software.”

Take a look at the following image.

Darwin by David Revoy

This was created by David Revoy, an artist that has been using open source software for 100% of his work. He uses GIMP, Krita, MyPaint, Blender, all running under Linux. While it used to be a pain to find compatible hardware for Linux… it’s pretty simple nowadays. Personally, I find that nearly all my devices (including my Wacom drawing tablet) were working without having to download or setup drivers. Real *cough* plug-n-play.

David shares why he chose to go to open source, back in 2009.

Am I happy about this personal choice ? Yes 🙂 and I can without any remorse put my old software license in a box for long term storage, just to show to my ( hypothetic and not yet existing ) grant-children what were …. the proprietary 2D software I started with.

To become more familiar with David Revoy’s work, I highly recommend purchasing his “Chaos and Evolutions” DVD. If you can’t afford the purchase right now, he’s made the video available on Youtube. He’s using some of the software mentioned above, including Alchemy (tool that Android Jones assisted the develop of).

As I mentioned before, I’ve easily spent $15,000+ on software over the past 6 years (since going independent). I’m putting energy into open source tools because of my own personal issues with licensing commercial software, as well as issues I’ve witnessed my clients struggling with.

I am not saying that commercial software isn’t needed, I’m just saying that it should not be the foundation of a creative production. If the core of a project is open source, this means that all the base products will be available to everyone on the project. If animators want to do a bit of audio testing with their animations, they have Audacity to do some light sound editing of their own. If a project manager wants to make some slick diagrams in Inkscape, a tool is available to them without spending a few hundred on Adobe Illustrator.

Please keep in mind. These software are not trying to clone commercial software applications. They have developed and grown over the years, based on feedback from users all around the world. There’s always a learning curve but, like when you learned touch-typing, you’ll be zipping along faster than before, once you get over the initial hump.

Not convinced? Perhaps you have preconceptions based on what you saw 5-6 years ago. Well, I’m here to tell you that times have changed. Checkout Vimeo and Youtube for some tutorials and you’ll be amazed at what you find. If you’re fortunate enough, perhaps the Vimeo video has a “Download” option available. If that’s the case, then you can save a local copy and watch the video in VLC, where you can use the “[” and “]” keys to control the speed of the tutorial. I typically run at 130-150% of normal speed. 😉

If you’ve got your checkbook out, you might want to support the current Krita Kickstarter. They’re planning on adding animation functionality, amongst other features.

Blender Day 13, 14 & 15 – Rig & Skins

2015/05/04 / Jer / 0 Comments

Spent a few hour hours getting to understand building an Armature (skeleton) in Blender. So many tools available by default and soooo many more can be made available as addons. If you have a cat mesh that needs to be boned, there’s a dozen ways to skin it. (couldn’t resist)

While digging around for videos on skinning, I came across this Blender character rig that has some killer animation options. Because of the custom control bones, I forgot I was watching a demo of Blender.

This lead me on a Blender rigging adventure, which revealed the following rigging websites.

Nathan Vegdahl – Cessen (rigger on Big Buck Bunny and author of Human Rigging DVD $30)
CGCookie’s Animation Toolkit – training series for character animation – $15
CGCookie’s FlexRig (character rig used in their Toolkit series)
Brian Tindall’s “Art of Moving Points” – iBook by Pixar rigger
Gord Goodwin – Author of the embedded “Nathan Rig” video above and admin at Rigging Repo blog, which includes a nice list of rigs, scripts, Blender artist websites and rigging tutorials like this:

Blender Days 11 & 12 – Materials, Cycles & L-Systems

2015/05/01 / Jer / 0 Comments

Initially setup the materials for Blender’s default renderer and noticed that when I switched to the new Cycles renderer, I lost the materials. A quick Internet searching revealed a handy addon called Convert Materials to Cycles.

The materials_cycles_converter.py script created a set of buttons at the bottom of the Properties Editor in the Materials context. You can convert the current material or convert them all. I’m using Blender 2.69 and the script, which is written for 2.71, worked good for me (color and bump came over).

L-Systems was next up for exploration.

A question came to mind on whether or not the same beautiful branching could be created in Blender, as I had created previously in Houdini. Searching revealed the VegGen addon, which I’m going to give a whirl (after some compositing and rigging tutorials). Looks promising, though doesn’t have the ability to write my own turtle rules. This doesn’t provide much control… so probably simplest to just write an L-system engine in Python myself… probably using the VegGen script as reference (Yay! Open source!).

other links:
Blender UI detailed breakdown
Blender.org forum
BlenderArtists.org forum

Blender Day 10 – 3D Cursor and Painting

2015/04/28 / Jer / 0 Comments

Sidetracked by this Frankenstein texturing video, which shows an earlier version of Blender’s built in texture painting tool, which also performs cloning of photos right onto the 3D model.

Finally, I’ve realized I need help. Learning on my own can be painful as software is never perfect. There are going to be pitfalls (bugs) and IRC and Blender forums can help me save time navigating known issues. Going to linger on the #blender IRC channel for a few days to get a feel for the culture, before jumping in.

Blender – Day 9 – Cycles Render Engine

2015/04/02 / Jer / 0 Comments

–
Who likes waiting?
–
I must confess that I was never a big fan of the rendering process. Clicking a button and then waiting minutes while an image (or portion of an image) appears, is… painful.

Perhaps it was all the years working in I.T.. I calculated it ounce, based on a few projects that I worked on. I spent over a year of my life staring at progress bars.

0%…. 10%…. 50%… 51%…. 52%…. 53%…

*passes out*

–
Blender
–

This brings me to Blender’s relatively new render engine, Cycles. Separate from Blender’s built-in render engine, this wonderful addition can create stunning lighting with photo real results…

… though don’t expect anything “photo real” coming from me anytime too soon, I’m still working to get there.

Blender’s Cycle render engine renders stuff on the fly, refining the render more and more, as time progresses. This is making it very simple for lighting setup.

Cycles can also utilize a GPU for faster render speeds, though installation of CUDA is required (for NVIDIA graphics cards). This isn’t something I’m going to mess with yet… but double or tripling render speeds would be so so sweeeeeet.

Blender – Day 8 – rendering

2015/04/01 / Jer / 0 Comments

Looking at this texture video and going to see what I can do in 2 hours. Full article is on BlenderGuru.

Later, use this to do some automatic corner shading.

And checkout the updates to this interesting point data transfer tool.

Blender – Day 7 – Rendering

2015/03/23 / Jer / 0 Comments

Haven’t started messing with the new Cycles renderer yet, but have done some playing today with Blender’s default renderer.

The default renderer does have ambient occlusion and soft shadows, but light doesn’t bounce, so you have to be very creative and use a ton of lights to get the right look. Here’s my first tests, using some models I created using Blender’s modeling tools (which are fun to work with).

Oh yes. Learning a new 3D software is a humbling experience.

Blender – Day 6

2015/03/15 / Jer / 0 Comments

Setting up a new Linux build w/ Ubuntu 14.04.

Have you tried it yet? Imagine booting from a USB stick and being able to test drive Linux. Without even having to install Ubuntu Linux, I was able to connect to my local library’s WiFi, read my Gmail and use my Wacom tablet. I then double-clicked the “Install Ubuntu” icon that was sitting on my desktop and let the installer run in the background… as I continued to browse the internet. If you haven’t yet, I recommend trying it.

I’m not a big fan of the Unity user interface, which is the default UI for recent versions of Ubuntu. However, installing Gnome Classic was stupid easy *clicks button*. This style of UI is more comfortable for most users.

Next, I’m testing out the graphics card using the Sintel character rig in Blender. All looks good, and we’re mobile!

Oh yeah… isn’t this supposed to be about Blender?

To finish off the day, I felt I should actually create something… anything. Why not follow a geeky trend on 3/14 and pay tribute to Pi? I followed this tutorial and was able to being in an SVG file to extrude in to a 3D shape. Not incredibly impressive, but for those that are spooked out about 3D softwares… well, I say, “Ave no fear! Iz EZ!”

Blender Tutorial Collections 1

2015/03/12 / Jer / 0 Comments

33 Brilliant Blender Tutorials

…including”

45 Epic Blender Tutorials

…including:

Tax time for me, which has to take priority. Plan on putting a bit more time tonight into testing out what I’ve learned by dumping a image online, no matter how crude it might look! o_O

Almost forgot! Should have mentioned the obvious. There’s also a collection of tutorials right on the…

Tutorials on Blender.org

Blender Day 3

2015/03/09 / Jer / 0 Comments

Saturday I spent some time with Frank, going through some modelling basics for about 30 minutes. The more I see, the more I like in this program. I’m staying open, and learning to accept the differences, focusing on what I’ve gained.

Already, the forced workflow difference is showing benefits. Some very intuitive gems scattered all over the place. “Ahhh… freshness.”

I just watched and really liked Darrin Lile’s intro to Blender. Nice light little walk, that covers a lot of basics in only 10 minutes. His narration is super-clear.

Today, I was learning camera navigation and was very impressed by all the options in which one can setup their cameras. Pressing alt+b, then dragging a selection box over the viewport, in order to determine what objects are visible… is odd and beautiful.

Blender – Everyday – Day 1

2015/03/06 / Jer / 0 Comments

Talking about it enough, but time to “put my money where my mouth is”. I will never really know just how viable Blender is as a base 3D animation software, till I try it.

Once per day, for about 2 hours, I will invest time into learning Blender. One I get the basics down, I will challenge myself to producing sharable artwork.

Here’s some inspiration to drive me. Blender is no longer just a hobbyist’s 3D animation software… and hasn’t been for some time. Seems that “first world” countries are the slowest places to catch on to a growing trend.

Started with some interface basics here.

Pure “Play” has been missing from my work.

2014/01/14 / Jer / 1 Comment

Beeple, you’ve inspired me. “One a day“? Ok, I’ll try, but maybe end up starting with “Twice a week”, first. This should be a good way to learn Blender.

I am going to start with this tutorial from BlenderTuts. Something simple, yet organic and (if rigged) animated!!

How to create a SnowMan in Blender (Part 1) from Oliver Villar Diz on Vimeo.

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