All of the CG shots were done in blender, though some of the fluid sim was done with realflow and then imported into blender as .obj files using a little python script I wrote. The rendering was all done in blender internal, and post processing with a mix of blender and After Effects. We mainly used AE for the depth of field as blenders defocus node is kind of slow and has some issues with foreground blur, whereas the Frischluft lens blur plugin for AE is pretty darn fantastic. The grading and other effects were all done with blender.

If you haven’t seen the original itself you can find it here.

Here are some models I made over the past year, I put together some turntable renders for a little showreel. Most of these are modelled in blender/sculpted in zbrush. The turntable renders were done with v-ray and composited back in blender.

Benoit Paille (photographer) My favourite photographer, I love the amount of texture and colour he brings out in his portraits, and the beautiful simplicity of his work. He does some fantastic post-processing to bring out such amazing colours from his photos and whenever I’m working on a character render I look to his work for inspiration. The best places to ogle his work (depending on how you like to follow people) are DeviantArt and Flickr. You can also follow him on twitter.

James Gurney – Artist James Gurney is the fantastic painter behind the Dinotopia Books, who also writes about art in books and on his blog – Gurney Jouney. His blog in particular is a favourite of mine, as it combines some fantastic tips on art theory and various bits of Gurney’s work with a frankly inhuman frequency of updates. His watercolour sketches are always a joy to look at.

Selwy – Sculptor One of my favourite sculptors, and one who often posts some great resources on his site. In particular I recommend you check out his post and time-lapse video for his sculpt titled “Disunion” (pictured). It’s a fantastic thing to watch. he also has a great skull you can download from the downloads page of his site.

McBess (Illustrator)

Look at his drawings. LOOK AT THEM. He has a blog and stuff that you should read.

Aaron Diaz (Author, Dresden Codak)

Aside from producing my favourite (through until lately frustratingly slow to update) webcomic, Dresden Codak, Diaz also writes a fantastic blog on comic book art theory and character design that is always a great read. His superhero redesigns in particular shine out as an example of genuinely well thought out character design. Well worth a read.

All the modelling was done in blender 2.49, with some sculpting and texturing in blender 2.5. Most of the texturing was done in GIMP, with a whole bunch of textures from CGTextures.com. Rendering was done in V-Ray, thanks to Andrey Izrantsev’s fantastic blender 2.49 to vray exporter (though the newer 2.5 version is even better). Compositing was done in blender 2.5.

Click images for full size (1920×1080) versions.

Alternatively if you want to see them all nice and large you can view them on flickr.

Some blender screenshots for those interested:

Done for Gecko Animation Ltd, which I am now a part of!

A short experimental piece featuring a blend of Macro Photography and CG Animation. It started with an idea from David Parvin, of  Two Rivers Partnership, involving abstract forms and macro photography. With the footage shot, Jonathan Lax and myself worked on constructing a narrative from the forms we saw by combining CG elements with the original footage.

The CG elements were all done in blender (though some of the fluid sim stuff was done with RealFlow) and rendered in BI. Lots of animated node materials for the shifting surfaces and displacements.

Credits:
Director of Photography – David Parvin
Live Action Shoot – David Parvin, Jonathan Lax, Tobin Brett
CG Animation and Effects – Ben Simonds, Jonathan Lax
Editing – Jonathan Lax
Music and Sound FX – Alistair Lax

I’ve been playing around with Alchemy for a while now, and it’s a suberbly fun little program for coming up with visual ideas. For those of you who don’t know of it, its a 2D drawing application with all sorts of chaotic tools for creating shapes and patterns, that you can then start picking out shapes to develop ideas from. With the recent addition of .xcf import to blender, allowing you to import layered xcf files and automatically set them up for rendering, I started getting some ideas about combining alchemy and blender via GIMP. Here’s a little  video showing the process I used to create the images above, plus a hint at how I applied the same method in 3D to create an animated abstract 3D  character.

Here are a couple of other results (click the second for an animated walkcycle):

Anyway, let me know if you think of anything cool using this technique.

I created a couple of base meshes recently to give me something to start with when sculpting heads and bodies. I thought I’d make them avaliable. I’ve also included a GLSL matcap material I created that works quite well for sculpting. You’re free to use them for whatever you want. If you just want the matcap you can download the image directly to use in whatever application you prefer. Here’s a sculpt I made with the bust basemesh:

Download Basemeshes (zipped .blend format, at BlendSwap.com)

Download Basemeshes (zipped .obj format)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

When in edit mode, select the bones you want to change and put the following in a new text block, comment out any operations you dont want to perform, and hit alt-P to run the script:

import bpy

bones_list = bpy.data.armatures['RIG NAME'].bones
bones_selected = bpy.context.selected_bones

##Some tools for renaming bones and removing trailing numbers once you’ve renamed them. Handy when duplicating parts of your deform rig to create your control rigs. Switch bones_selected for bones_list to perform an operation on every bone in your rig.##

for item in bones_selected:
    item.name = item.name.replace(“DEF-”,”CON-”)   
    item.name = item.name.replace(“.001″,”") 
    item.name = item.name.replace(“.002″,”")

##Some tools for changing bone properties. use_deform turns off the bones “deform” option, always do this for bones you don’t want to directly deform your mesh (control/helper bones) . show_wire makes bone shapes visible in solid view mode, even if they only have edges.##

for item in bones_selected:
    item.use_deform = False
    item.show_wire = True

##Here are a couple of useful ones to try in pose mode. rotation_mode lets you set whether your bones use Euler or quarternion rotations, and custom_shape lets you set the bone shape used for all the bones you have selected. ##

bones_selected_pose = bpy.context.selected_pose_bones

for item in bones_selected_pose:
    item.rotation_mode = ‘XYZ’
    item.custom_shape = bpy.data.objects['NAME OF BONE SHAPE OBJECT']

I got Virgilio Vasconcelos’ new book, Blender 2.5 Animation Cookbook in the post from PACKT publishing the other day, and they asked me to write a review. I’ve  been doing a bit of rigging of my own lately, so it came along at a useful time for me; I’ve already picked up a couple of useful tips. It seems like a good guide to rigging so far, with info on most common rigging tasks, and I think enough information for beginners to get their heads around the topic.

Whilst the title suggests that the book centres on Animation, the book is really split about 50/50 between rigging and animation, which means as long as you can model it covers pretty much all you need to get animating, even if you don’t want to use a ready made rig like Mancandy or Pantin. The rigging portion takes you through rigging all the common aspects of rigging a biped, and whilst I’d differ on how to implement one or two aspects of some of the rigs, I’m by no means a champion rigger. It never hurts to know more than one method either. The book covers both creating and weight painting a deform rig, and then creating separate control rigs for different control methods (i.e. IK/FK), and keeps the two nice and separate (as they should be!). I think the lack of much discussion on using python for rigging is a bit of an oversight, given how useful knowing even a little bit of python can be when building a rig. Also a few of the controls that Virgilio outlines, like the isolation controls for the head and shoulders, only switch between on and off, and it isn’t difficult to make controls that smoothly interpolate between the two (go see Nathans mammoth rigging tutorials on CMI VFX for how to do that). Overall though the coverage is pretty solid though, and the book takes you through all the common hang ups, like creating a foot roll rig, stretchy and bendy limbs, rigging eyes, facial rigging with lattices and shapekeys, and creating interfaces for options like IK/FK switching, limb isolation and changing parent spaces. The book is particularly focussed on cartoony rigging, but it’s all applicable to more realistic rigs too.

On the animation side (which I know less about) the book teaches the layered technique, and has a nice progression through creating key poses, then extremes, breakdowns, and finally refining timing and tweaking curves in the graph editor. After demonstrating the basics the book moves on to a few common animation tasks, like having a character interact with props, creating walk cycles and animating speech. There’s also plenty of discussion of the principles of animation, which really is more important than the technical side. Anticipation, moving holds, squash and stretch, and symmetry are all talked about, and there are also some great tips on rendering silhouettes and mirrored previews of your animation to help spot your mistakes. There’s also a little discussion at the very end of the book on using grease pencil to plan and refine your animations. As I’m not much of an animator I can’t speak to any shortcomings the book might have but the book has a nice breadth, and I like the deference it pays to traditional animation too.

All the source .blend files for the book are available through Virgilio’s website, which are a great resource when trying to pick apart how a rig works so you can implement something in your own projects. If you’re interested in buying the book, I’d suggest you go and check them out. Also available is the main character rig “Otto”, used in the book. All in all the book should be a nice reference for anyone looking to start with rigging and animation. It’s an easy book to flip through and find the topic you’re stuck on, and whilst I disagreed with a couple of solutions, the book has an answer for most problems that might stump newbie blender-heads.

I’ve started doing some anatomy practice based on the idea outlined at the Art of Anatomy forums, to try and improve my anatomy knowledge. The aim is to study each part of the body piece by piece, and I’ve started with the feet.

Exercise One: Ref hunt and label anatomical landmarks.

Exercise Two: Draw from reference.

Exercise Three: Draw from memory.

Exercise Four: Sculpt