Ahoy!

So for those who don’t know, I am going to be a regular contributor to Church Media Design! I’ll be mostly submitting tutorials and how-tos to the site so that you, the viewer, will benefit from my vast amount of knowledge. Vast!
well maybe not.

Go check out the episode here!

Hey guys,

I just made a new tutorial on how to get the Hollywood style colour grade you see a lot of movies like Die Hard 4, Transformers and Harry Potter.

You’ll need to download these FREE plugins to do this tutorial:

Andy’s plugins for FCP (for the Region Blur plugin) :
web.me.com/​andymees/​Free_and_Easy/​main/​main.html

Too much too Soon plugins for FCP (for the color balance plugin) :
mattias.nu/​plugins/​

Was trying to mimic the some of the styles of Magic Bullet looks found here :
redgiantsoftware.com/​products/​all/​magic-bullet-looks/​

So you CAN use HDR Images in Blender, HOWEVER, it won’t light the scene for you and is mostly reduced to just a spherical map. But it does give for some interesting reflections for materials and does add some life to your scene. Currently Blender 2.5 doesnt support Yafary or Lux so this is the best I could do inside Blender 2.5 with the internal renderer (Blender 2.49 seems to be screwing up on me which is really annoying). Anyways have a look at what I have achieved so far with a robot I modelled in about an hour (yeah its rubbish, but you’ll get the idea of what you can) She kinda looks like Eve from Wall-E. Friggin love that movie

It’s a sobering feeling to know that in parts of the world (and even in our own backyard) natural disasters are taking a toll on so many lives. One moment you can worrying about so many things and suddenly, when disaster strikes, those issues all seem ridiculously trivial. I cannot fathom what the people in Sendai must be going through.

To kind of know the level of the destruction check out his video of the aftermath:

There are heaps of ways to donate:

Save The Children: Mobilising to provide immediate humanitarian relief in the shape of emergency health care and provision of non-food items and shelter. Call 1800 76 00 11 or visit http://www.savethechildren.org.au

Red Cross: Donors can contribute to the relief efforts by calling 800-733-27677 or visiting http://www.redcross.org. Each text message is a $10 donation to the Red Cross, which will be added to the donors’ next cellphone bill.

Mercy Corps: Mercy Corp has not sent its own team to Japan but it set up a donation fund for its partner, Peace Winds Japan, and its emergency assistance on the ground. To make a donation, call 888-747-7440 or visit http://www.mercycorps.org/donate/japan.

Medical Teams International: Medical Teams International is also on alert and staying closely in touch with its nine partners along the coast and in Japan. To donate to Medical Teams International, visit http://www.medicalteams.org.

World Vision Canada: World Vision is among the first organisations to begin relief work by distributing emergency supplies and sending highly-trained staff to assess and respond to the most urgent needs. To donate, visit http://www.worldvision.ca/give-a-gift/Pages/Pacific-Tsunami.aspx

Medecins Sans Frontiers: Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an international humanitarian aid organisation that provides emergency medical assistance to populations in danger in more than 60 countries. MSF workers are already on ground in Japan, assessing the situation. For more visit http://www.msf.org/msf/donations/donations_home.cfm

So everyone I implore you to dig deep and look into you hearts. Let’s help make a real difference in the lives of people you will never meet but will be eternally grateful.

Hello citizens of Earth,

I was looking over at the folks at GreyScaleGorilla who have made themselves a citykit for cinema4D which looks very tasty. No idea when I would actually need to create a city from scratch but needless to say, it would come in very handy should you ever need to use that plugin!

But listening to one of the commentaries about the kit, Nick Campbell said that they tried really hard to make sure that they were able to keep the poly count down but still keep a high level of detail. So I decided I would set myself a task to see if I could recreate a fairly low poly count city in a similar fashion to Nick’s citykit.

I chose Blender as my weapon of choice and armed with some very useful tutorials from Andrew Price at Blenderguru.com I learnt a lot about modelling, texturing and lighting.

First I made a few buildings I could see out of my office window


Then I started construction the city:


Added in some colour and texture to the place:


And finally scrapped most of it, remodelled a few more buildings and relit the scene (touched up in photo shop with some highlights and curves):

And this is the video experiment :

Overall I think it turned out alright, and I guess I will probably make the cross over to cinema 4D once I get the money, but in the meantime, I guess Blender will be my free weapon of choice. Mind you, it’s pretty mindblowing what a program like this can do….