I’ve decided to hold off on the Blender stuff for a sec and try some other experiments regarding another passion of mine – animation. Ever since I was a kid I always dreamed of being an animator, and ever since I can remember I have been finding new ways to try and animate things from drawing in thick textbooks, stop motion with lego and eventually animating on a computer!

This is my latest experiment, learning how to do more action packed stuff like running and jumping.

Based on an old school genre of gaming that is long gone called “Adventure gaming” where you type in text to get your characters to do things. Does anyone remember Kings Quest?

Hope you enjoy it. Hoping to post about the animation side of things soon!

Continuing with my Blender experiments, I finally downloaded Blender 2.61 which has the fabled Cycles render engine in it. I was so excited I had to test it out for myself. You can see my experiment below:

It’s actually quite impressive how quickly this little render engine can kick out an image! I am super stoked to try a lot more with it in the future!!!

We finally had it! We had the bloody premiere! Although it came right in the middle of one of the most stressful weeks of my life, it was definitely all worth it.

Thanks to everyone who came out despite the crap weather, it seriously was a blast to have shown it in a theatre and a big thanks to the guys at Dendy Circular Quay for doing a ridiculously good job at looking after us.

You can read all about my film making experience over at Monica’s site if you’re interested.

I have currently entered the film into a few festivals to see if it goes anywhere. To be honest anything from here on in is a bonus and it’s nice to be able to finally get this film out in the world. I’ll let you know if it will be screened somewhere near you.

In the meantime here are some photos taken by Annette Sicari, the Production Supervisor of our film and an amazing director herself

In a lot of ways a resounding YES!

After using it for about 6 months I am finding i can achieve a heck of a lot more than I thought was originally possible. You only have to go and have a look at some of the stuff found online to see what can be achieved.

Here are some places I found really useful.

Blenderguru

Blendercookie

Blendtuts

There are A LOT of things that Blender can do that a lot of the commercial packages can do. As far as I know, the modelling side of things is practically the same. The modifiers all work on very much the same principles. And there are some things that I have been told are easier in Blender than say a $5000 package like Maya (so I have been told, I havent used Maya).

So why use Blender? Well it’s free and open source. That’s pretty much the crux of it. I think this program has definitely been written off because it is free, but I promise you, if you understand it, you can get a lot out of it.

Here are some examples of work I have been doing lately.

All this was done in Blender (with a few photoshop finesses but nothing much I promise).

Anyways give it a go. What have you got to lose?

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….

Ladies and Gentlemen, It is with great pleasure to unveil my new range of mograph softdrinks for the mographer who needs a little “boost” now and again..

Here is my prototype:

Again Blender is surprising me over and over again at how powerful and versatile it is. However it does have some drawbacks:

• no commercial supprot
• lacks some features of professional programs
• no money for development

But it is free! And seriously, how often are you going to need to model something that complex in a 3D program if all you need is 3d titles?

Anyways, before you marvel at my genius, check out the tutorial over at blenderguru.com . It’s frickin insane what you can do with this program.

And here is the tutorial if you’re interested:

peace!

Ok, so it’s no secret I am a little obsessed with Tron, but what better excuse than to make something that looks incredibly fun to model (and relatively simple to boot!)

It was a little tricky trying to get it to look right, but in the end I fudged it a little in After Effects. Would have done a little more animation, but I ran out of time (mostly cause I fight crime at night, and the criminals wait for no one!)

I am hoping to document this whole process so that you, the viewer, will be benefit from my vast knowledge and experience! ha!

anyways, erm.. check it!

So if you head over to Greyscalegorilla.com, he has this blog about 5 second projects. Essentially it’s all about encouraging you to get creative but giving you some restrictions to play with.

So I thought I’d give it a crack by making some 3D in blender and then finishing it off in After Effects.

This is my fourth experiment using the shape keys and parenting using verticies:

This is my third experiment using the physics engine:

This is my second experiment using the explosion modifier:

Here is what I made!

And here is the breakdown of what I did compositionally in After effects and Blender:

Whether you like or not isn’t so much the point, but just to try something I’d never done before. And so I did!

Anyways, I’ll be making a tutorial about something 3d in the future But the next one will probably be on final cut …

Happy Australia Day everyone!

Hey guys,

I have a new youtube channel – FIX IT IN POST.

The channel will be dedicated to the production process from start to finish and cover all those little things you may want to know about doing better video work! Some of it will be simple and other stuff will be a little more challenging.

Check it out here!
FIX IT IN POST CHANNEL

Oh and check out the Tron legacy tutorials here:

PART 1:

PART 2:

Merry Christmas all and a happy new year!
Well I haven’t seen Tron yet, but I love the style palette for this film. Very, very cool
Here is the title design from the movie:

You can download the tron font here.

Now this was an earlier test I did with After Effects :

Nick’s Legacy from Nick Khoo on Vimeo.

I was also given the challenge earlier this month that whatever you could do in After Effects, you could do in motion and since I will primarly be using a lot of motion in my new job, I decided to find out what this program could do. To my surprise, I was able to come up with this:

Tron legacy title (done in Apple Motion 3) from Nick Khoo on Vimeo.

I’ll be posting up how to do the titles in motion and After effects later on in Jan. Until then, enjoy your holidays!