2011 Models
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.
Abandoned Power Station
Hmm, maybe it was a power station, maybe a factory or a warehouse. All we know now is it’s falling apart. A project I began a long time ago, which has been gathering dust on my hard drive, so I thought I’d post it up. At some point in the future I might resurrect it in its originally intended animated form, but for now here are some stills.
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.
Assembly: Life in Macrospace
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
Creating Concepts with Alchemy, GIMP, and Blender
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.
Basemeshes
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.
Book Review: Blender 2.5 Character Animation Cookbook by Virgilio Vasconcelos
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.
Depth of Field in Blender
Depth of Field can be a beautiful effect, adding both aesthetic interest to an image, and serving a narrative purpose in drawing the viewer’s attention to the centre of attention. But getting DoF right using Blenders compositing nodes can be tricky, as there are a few things to know about how the defocus node works, and some limitations it has that you need to know about. This post documents my own investigations, and hopefully should be useful for those new to the topic. It also touches on a few things that I haven’t worked out how to fix yet, so if there’s anyone out there with input I’d love to know your opinions.
Aquatic Dude
Sculpted in ZBrush and rendered in blender. Just a rough sculpt but I liked the look of him.
Blender Cookie Tutorial: Texturing and Rendering a Head in Blender
I made this guy for a tutorial on blendercookie.com. The tutorial covers baking textures in blender from a high poly sculpt to a lower resolution mesh for rendering , then painting textures in GIMP, and using them to create a three-layer node based skin shader in blender. Part one covers the baking and texure painting, and is up on BlenderCookie already. The next part will cover setting up the materials and rendering, and should be up on BlenderCookie soon.
Part I: Texture Baking in Blender and Painting in GIMP
Part II: Skin shading and rendering in Blender
I also recorded a timelapse of the modelling and sculpting process. About 95% of the sculpting process is covered here, and all of the modelling – I did some final tweaks later on that I forgot to record.
Shapekey/Face Rigging Tests – “Michelle”
Testing out the rig and shapekeys for a face I made.
Infinite Head Scan Skin Testing
Some testing with blenders v-ray exporter and Lee Perry Smith’s awesome free head model and textures (link). Just trying to match some lighting from a few movies.
I also did some testing with blender internal using a three layer setup (see my tutorial for more on that), and was pretty impressed at the results:
Free Rig: Jake
This is a rig I created as a test for the Two Rivers Partnership, a small animation and VFX studio in London I work for. They’ve kindly allowed me to release the rig to the blender community.
You can download the rig here.
“I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle.”
The models I made for the CGTalk “Icons of Sci-Fi” HMC. I didn’t actually get around to finishing them on time for the challenge, but they were fun to do. The Hitchhikers Guide has always been my favourite Sci-Fi series, and I’ve listened to the radio shows more times than I can comfortably comprehend. The movie was a really fun adaptation of the series too, and in particular I think they nailed the look of the characters and the world… er… galaxy.
Marvin was modelled mostly in blender, Arthur mostly in zbrush. Rendered in V-Ray and postwork in Blender/GIMP. I might find time to texture Arthur at a later date, but for now I’m leaving them as a clay render.
I think you ought to know I’m feeling very depressed…
Just a little WIP render from my current CGTalk hardcore modelling challenge entry. I’m doing Marvin and Arthur from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (movie).
Hair in Blender
Hair used to be something I really hated having to do in CG, and to this day you’ll see more than a fair share of baldies amongst my works. However with more and more updates to blenders hair tools, it ‘s getting easier (and even fun!) to create characters and creatures with hair. This tutorial/guide covers working with hair particles in blender, including particle systems, combing/cutting/styling hair, and using the child particle settings.
Hair testing in Blender 2.56
The most recent release of blender has some really nice new tools and options for getting nice hair. I’ve been playing around with creating hair particle systems, particularly trying to get nice long hair.
Some of my favourite new features are:
- Child particles for long hair. This option seems to give much nicer results for long hair, with more of a layered look compared to the fuzzy, kinda random look with this option turned off.
- New parting controls. With the new settings it’s really quick to make a parting within a single particle system, Just turn up the parting setting and comb your hair system to give the parting. Instead of filling in the gap with fuzzy interpolated children, the child particles are forced to pick a side, maintaining the parting. In practice I think it’s still easier to use two separate particle systems for more control, but this is a great addition nonetheless.
- Re-arranged roughness controls. There’s no real difference in how they work, but the labelling makes much more sense now.
Edit: And because a couple of people asked, I did a quick dynamics test:
From Scratch
This was a fun little exercise in building a face/head from the ground up. Starting with the skull, then placing the muscles and cartilage, and finally to skin. I learned a lot from it actually, as doing things this way illuminates a lot of little subtlties in how the face is constructed and why certain parts look the way they do. I’ll have to do more of it in future.
Go Go Gadget
This was my entry for the current CGTalk Harcore Modelling Challenge: Comic Book Masters. The aim was to do a character in the style of a favourite comic book artist, and I decided on doing Inspector Gadget in the style of the fantastic Jamie Hewlett, of Gorillaz and Tank Girl fame. Anyway here it is, along with some WIP/making of stuff after the jump.
Sculpting Brushes for Blender 2.5
I’ve been trying to replicate some of the brushes I’ve been using a lot in zbrush in blender, in particular the rake brush, which I find very useful. Here are three brushes as well as some extra alphas to try with them (or whichever other sculpting app you use).
Included are:
- A rake brush, great for refining forms (see for examples).
- A rasp brush, basically a textured scrape brush that removes material and adds a fine texture to the surface.
- A slash brush that scrapes wrinkles/scratches into the surface. Use it softly to create a base for wrinkles, or scrape harder to Create rough, rocky surfaces.
You can download the brushes from Blendswap.com.
And here are some rake alphas I made:
Creature Feature
Did this guy over the weekend. Might play around a little more with him, but I thought I’d post it.
Old Dude
Sculpting old characters is always fun. Sculpted and textured in zbrush, retopo and rendering in Blender.
Rocky
It seemed a fitting name for him. This was a project I worked on just for fun, that I recorded as a timelapse. I thought I’d put together a post here as well with some supplementary information. Here is the timelapse video to get things rolling:
(more…)Anatomy Practice
Some practice at écorché style anatomy sculpting with blender 2.5. Rendered in blender internal (though actually the material looks just the same as a GLSL preview, I just wanted nicer antialiasing).
