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).
Physics and Creating Plausible Materials.
Something that is really handy to bear in mind when creating a material, is how it would interact with light in the real world. Even if you aren’t interested in creating photo realistic renders, it’s likely that you still want to be able to create materials like wood, metal, glass etc, and a vital part of knowing how to do this is knowing how real world materials interact with light. Thankfully this is simply a matter of knowing some basic physics, and being able to apply this knowledge to blenders material editor. The following are a few rules from the real world about how light works, and how this applies to CG.
Frog
I like this little guy. Sculpted it today and painted the textures pretty much 90% in blenders texture paint mode. Usually I’d faff around in GIMP with lots of photos, but I was in the mood for some hand painting. I did use a couple of photo textures just as masks for painting over, but mainly it was done just with a regular round brush. As I’d had to do a retopo to recover from blender losing some of the multi-res data (oh the joys of development builds!) I had a nice low res baked mesh anyway, so I thought I’de render it in the Game engine. The image below is pretty much what I was getting in real time with the game engine, just with a litte DoF and bloom added in post.
Click after the jump for a couple of WIP shots.
Matcap Generator
Edit: I’ve updated the .blend download to fix an issue with the rendered matcap images not aliasing correctly when used as matcaps, but to get the most out of the matcap images at the bottom you may want to crop the outer few pixels from the outside of the image. Alternatively if you’re using them in blender, just set the “size” option in the texture mapping options to 0.98 in each direction.
Whilst doing some sculpting today I found myself casting around for some nice matcap images to apply to my sculpt. Whilst zbrush central has some great ones that are well worth checking out, these all come in a rather unhelpful .zmt format, which if you dont have zbrush are difficult if not impossible to export to something you can use in blender. So I thought it would be simple enough to build my own matcap generator in blender that I could use to generate whatever material I liked and render it as a matcap style sphere. It was a fairly quick process and the results work rather well as matcap images for my sculpts. I thought I’d share the generator .blend and a few of the matcaps I generated for anyone interested in doing some sculpting in blender, or just showing off the results.
You can download the generator .blend file here , see after the jump for the matcap images themselves.
Blender 2.5 Sculpting
With the recent google summer of code project by Jason Wilkins to improve the sculpt tools, there have been some massive improvements to blenders capabilities for organic and even hard surface sculpting. I wanted to share some experiments of mine plus a few tips.
3D Anaglyph Experimentation
I got a pair of 3D anaglyph glasses off amazon the other day, and had a go at creating anaglyph 3D images. The method is actually extremely simple – all you need is a right eye and a left eye image (place two cameras slightly apart but pointed at the same point in the scene, and render both), which are combined to make a single anaglyph. (more…)
Modelling Timelapse
Modelling a head in Blender. This video covers me modelling the head poly-by-poly and then doing some low-detail sculpting to fill out the forms.
The basic modelling was done in Blender 2.49, and I switched to JWilkins’ Google summer of code sculpt build for the sculpting, so I could play with the new tools. In particular I think the improved clay brush and the scrape and fill tools are brilliant, and well worth seeking out a build yourself if you’re into sculpting. You can find a recent build at graphicall.org, just look for a JWilkins GSoC build appropriate to your OS.
Hopefully I will find time to follow this one up with a timelapse of some higher detail sculpting and maybe texturing at a later date.
Quick Tips and Tools for Texturing With GIMP
GIMP may not have the technical bells and whistles of photoshop, but if you know your way around it, it still gets the job done. The following are a few of the tools and techniques I find most useful when working on textures in the GIMP.
Lighting tips from the Masters
What do I know about lighting after all? After my previous post on setting up a three layer SSS shader, a few people asked for tips on how to light their characters to best show them off. As it happens, this something I’m rather interested in, and I’ve had a blog post on the subject brewing for a while, so I’ve finally found the motivation to finally write it up. I didn’t want to spend too much time talking about specific settings for this tutorial, so instead you can download this blendfile from BlendSwap.com for some ideas on the specifics of how to set up your scene.
Three Layer SSS in Blender Demystified
Something that gives a lot of people trouble when creating characters is implementing convincing subsurface scattering (SSS). Blender’s SSS shader comes with a wealth of options that make it easy to customise how light scatters under a surface, but also makes it tough to hit on what options exactly make for convincing skin. Using a node based approach, one can create a three layer SSS shader that gives good, and reasonably physically correct results, and also makes making adjustments fairly straightforward. in this tutorial I use blender 2.5, but I used almost the exact same setup for my blending life entry in 2.49 and got much the same results (just without such fast ray-tracing, thanks blender devs!).
Blending Life 2010
After learning so much from last year’s blending life competition, I couldn’t wait to test out what I’d learned since in making my entry this year. It was tremendous fun to do and I had great feedback from the BlenderArtists community as I went along. Anyway, I thought that as the competition still has a few weeks left I’d do a bit of a making of/tutorial type blog post along with the final image, to hopefully give some tips to those still working on similar projects. More after the jump.
Durian Open Movie Modelling Sprint
Today the Durian open movie guys had a modelling sprint, to help flesh out their asset lists for the upcoming Sintel short film. There was a HUGE amount of participation and director Colin Levy livestreamed his feedback from Durian HQ. I produced a couple of models, and I can’t wait to see if they appear in the final film.
You can see all the great models people produced over at Blendswap.com.
BWC ’09 Entry Update: Best Modelling Spot Prize Winner!
Here is my entry for the 2009 Blender World Cup. The theme was “Another World”. I came up with a crashed fighter pilot marooned on a strange jungle planet, inhabited by giant bugs. It’s pretty busy, so view full size to take it all in.
Update: My entry won the spot prize for best modelling. I’m really happy about this as I think it reflects the elements I did best on. Next year I’ll focus on other areas, to try and up my game and take one of the top prizes.
Panic Elbow Album Cover III
The third piece of album art I’ve produced for Panic Elbow, and probably my favourite. This one was inspired by an alchemy sketch I did whilst listening to one of their songs – it had a darker feel than their other music, and obviously given the name, I thought it made a fitting accompaniment.
As usual, I encourage you to go and listen to their music on their MySpace page.
Panic Elbow – Every Cliche
Another piece of cover art I did for a friends band: Panic Elbow. Made with blender and the Gimp. The album isn’t out yet but I wanted to show it off. In the meantime you can check out their current music on the band’s myspace page, check them out!
I also did them an EP cover a while back.
Painting With Polygons
Here’s a great technique that popped up on the forums, based on a siggraph paper by Isaac Botkin (link), here’s their video:
What intrigued me about the technique is that it doesn’t rely on any fancy algorithm, plug-in or rendering technique. Instead it uses displacement mapping to perturb the surface of the model and then motion-blurs the results of several displacements per frame to give the result. If the displacement is applied cyclically, i.e. it oscillates once per frame, then this is consistent over multiple frames and can even be used for animation. I’ve been having a play at doing this in blender and here are the results I’ve had so far:
For the truly interested, here’s a blendfile. More after the jump…
Modeling Timelapse – Belle 2.0 Part II
The second part of my steampunk style android project.
Creating tileable patterns with GIMP, Inkscape and Blender
Trying to isolate a tileable pattern from a photo or sketch to use in your 2D and 3D projects can be a pain, and often involves tedious tracing of patterns by hand. I’ve come up with a method for generating tileable raster/vector/3D curve based patterns from photos that automates some of the tedious parts and gives good results, using the free and open source softwares GIMP, Inkscape, and Blender. (more…)
Modelling Timelapse – Belle 2.0
A while ago I had a project to create a steam punk style android in Blender. I’ve decided to revisit the idea with an oriental twist, and thought I’d share the process. (more…)
One Model, 15 Expressions
I participated in the current CGSoc Hardcore Modelling Challenge, in which the aim was to create a single model and then create 15 different expressions on that model. I used Rowan Atkinson as a reference, and whilst the resulting likeness isn’t 100%, I’m happy with the range of expressions in the results.
And here is a video of the model morphing between the expressions (Click to visit vimeo for correct aspect ratio and larger size):
It’s highly addictive!
A bit of Futurama fanart, makes a nice wallpaper I reckon. Click for full size.
Blender for modelling, Inkscape for the label design, Luxrender for rendering, GIMP for Postwork/Text.
Back view, for laughs…
Camera Mapping: In the forest
In the forest – Camera Mapping from Ben Simonds on Vimeo.
A camera mapping test done in Blender, stock photo by Pandoralore Stock on DeviantArt (thankyou!).
HMS Victory
Finally got out a decent rendered turntable of my HMS victory model, so here it is:
This was a major project of mine. I worked on it for a couple of months on and off in all. There is a WIP thread over at blenderArtists.org on it’s progress. There’s also an OpenGL rendered flythrough tour, showing a bit more detail.
In addition I produced a short tutorial on making ships in blender. See the pages link above labelled HMS Victory model tutorial, or click here.
The Duke
Dug up something from late last year that I thought was worth putting up here. The original 3d portrait was for the Blending life competition at BlenderArtists, but I incorporated that into a sort of mixed media thing that was really fun to do.
Full size version here: DeviantArt
Here are the original renders:
