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!!!
3D is very time consuming. I can see why people say spend as little time in the 3D app as you can and the rest in the compositor. But that being said, after a lot of weeks of experimentation, posting on forums and learning things, I came up with this little animation for all the fruits of my labour.
30 hours
for 30 seconds of animation…*groan*
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.
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?
I have definitely been exploring a lot of new ways to do things in the last few months. Especially in regards to incorporating more 3D into my existing toolset. This one is no exception:
Oh and if you haven’t already bought the Magic Bullet Suite, maybe this video will convince you too:
April fools everyone!
My favourite prank has got to be this ad advertising for a Krispy Kreme donut hole puncher:
Well my latest Blender experiment shows how I feel rockin it out on the train home. Well it isn’t all that bad. PLUS daylight savings is coming to an end so I doubt that the light will be this good for much long.
I rendered it with the Blender internal renderer.
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 
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!
