I’ve been working on building a portfolio for the Blender Foundation’s upcoming open movie project, the Durian Project.
My skills are probably not up-to-par to be accepted to the core team, but oh, it would be so awesome if I made it.
So, keep in touch and check out my deviantART page where I’ve been uploading new artwork to my portfolio: http://artislight.deviantart.com/
Enjoy and God bless! I appreciate your prayers and best wishes,
-Benjamin Bailey (banor)
Someone gave me a very nice comment on this blog, so I thought I would give a shot at updating this blog by giving you this post.
Since I last wrote, I have become a Blenducation editor (see my presenter info at the bottom of the page here,) and I should be doing my second public class on Thursday evening, though I may do a two-hour class to see how that goes (instead of a one-hour class.) See the post about my first public class here, and watch the the video recording version of the class here.
I have also been modeling more of late. Here are some thing’s I’ve done:
So, those are some things that have been happening with me. I hope to continue design on my personal/professional portfolio website, advertising my services.
Cheers and God bless, and may you have a blessed Sunday,
-b
Still working on the Dancing Taco project. Hope I will finish it. Here is the current render of the tomato:
Current version of the tomato (new render)
However, previous versions were quite embarrassing:
A very embarrassing render of a tomato (first render)
Also, I am considering designing a T-shirt, which will be a neat experience. We’ll see if that happens. I found this neat PDF document that has some good guidelines regarding making a custom design. I may use CafePress to print my design, but it may not have enough options for what I want to do. We’ll see.
Cheers and God bless! Hope you are enjoying the new year. I better get to writing my JaNoWriMo novel. ;D
-b
P.S. I have recently downloaded The Mancandy FAQ videos from blip.tv (through Miro,) so I may get into learning a ton more about rigging soon!
Here is an animation test with my jalapeño pepper for my Dancing Taco short film.
The Dancing Taco Project is a personal project I adopted just a few days ago, and depending on how well the work flows out or if I run into any big stumbling blocks – or it takes way too much time and I loose interest – I may not complete it. But here’s to hoping that I it will come to glorious completion!
JaNoWriMo has started, but I have barely started. Instead of writing on my 2007 in hopes of completing it I may use the time to write script material for my live action show I might create. Who knows? We’ll see which route I end up spending most of my time on.
God bless and Happy New Year!
2009 rocks!
-b
P.S. A big thanks to Tim Formica for helping me with the materials/lighting. Also, thanks to Doom9.net for the excellent help on using QuEnc. My video went from being too compressed and the wrong aspect ratio to what it is now. Thanks, Doom9.net! And thanks for all your help, Tim Formica!
P.P.S. This test animation was made with Blender, an excellent open source 3D modeling, animation, and rendering app. Check it out, it’s free!
I’ve been working on a Blender project (since yesterday) called “Dancing Tacos.” Here is my result so far:
Jalapaño pepper from Dancing Tacos (work in progress)
It started out as a simple rig exercise, but as I worked on it I modeled it into a hot pepper (a jalapeño, probably.)
The rig consists of two bones in one armature, linked to the mesh with the Armature modifier. I am using envelope to influence the mesh’s deformation. The first model I rigged was quite objectionable and ugly.
The ugly vegitable. Jagged shadows and ineffective texture
But before I went on I decided to change this object into it’s true calling: a hot pepper! 
The jalapeño model. The blocky shadow is still apparent.
But as you can see, I had a problem: the texture made it look as though it were some green jewel, and besides that the shadows were extremely blocky and jagged.
So I sent some renders and a .blend to a friend of mine, Tim Formica who kindly fixed the pepper’s texture and the scene’s lighting, and sent me back the file. When I rendered his result it was like “Wow, this is weird… it’s cool, new, and weird to have my Blender work modified and enhanced by someone else.”
Tim Formica's result
Then I reverse engineered what he did, which was fun. 
Tim added subsurface scattering, fixed the lighting, added a plane, added the red to the tip of the pepper stem, and deleted the background colors. Thank you Tim for all your help!
From there I added the mexican background, the mist effect in the World Buttons, and ultimately came up with the result I showed at the start of this post. Here is what it looked like when it was rendering:
Rendering the jalapeño pepper for Dancing Tacos
I will probably tweak the pepper some more before I’m satisfied with it, particularly the red in it.
Anyhow, I hope the quick concept turns into a final animation, featuring bouncing vegitables and a mock taco ad. 
God bless and Happ New Year 2009!!!
-b
P.S. Gotta hit the hay, but I will be rendering a little animation overnight…
P.P.S. JaNoWriMo starts … today. Well, in about 10+ hours for me… (JaNoWriMo is similar to NaNoWriMo, but some friends and I are doing it in January.)
It is Christmastime. You think of snow, and bright, cheerful mornings that you can sleep in on as long as you want, and a cup of coffee waiting for you downstairs. After all, it’s Christmastime.
Success lies behind you: six months of accomplishments, pushes, and failures. But that’s OK, you’re making it. The key is to never give up.
Anyhow, onto the rest of the post…
Sorry for the lack of posting here on Minosa Films. To make up for the delinquency, here’s my first post of many (at least I hope so.) Let’s say I’ll try to write 1 post a day, till New Years (that’s 2009.)
To catch up, here’s what I just finished working on today: my entry for the BlenderArtists Weekend Challenge #316. The theme was “The Toymaker.” I started on December 19, 08, and posted my entry some 15 minutes prior the deadline (December 22, 08, at 1200.) Hope you enjoy!
My entry for "The Toymaker" (BlenderArtists.org Weekend Challenge #316)
My use of the SSS (SubSurface Scattering) messed up his skin. The poor ear and hand modeling is sad, but I really like the hat. And the face turned out to have quite a bit of character.
The Toymaker (screenshot from Blender)
I prepared the windows in Blender to show off some different features of the Toy Maker. Notice the awkward teeth?
You gotta love the hat (screenshot from Blender)
Like the caption says, that hat rocks. Do I get one for Christmas?!
If you would like to see other entries and vote on who the winner should be, check out the poll thread for the challenge on Blender Artists! (I voted for “Evil Toymaker” by fly.)
Now I better wrap things up for the evening and leave some news to report on for the next few days. Oh, and I need to rustle up a report for BlenderNation.com…
Anyhow, God bless and goodnight!
-b
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Hey, check it out! The “Yo Frankie!” open game project is complete and open for free download! Go ahead and go check it out now!
Besides that I have been working on a modeling tutorial for Blender. I really hope it turns out well. I am modeling a character that I made, called “Snorks.” He is a little man with a big name (his full name is long,) and is a professor at a college. I am using this tutorial to guide me as I model him.
Anyhow, that’s some news… working on an article on 3D Arkitektur, also hoping to compose at least one song by Christmas.
God bless,
See ya later,
-b
This needed release is an important bug-fix release for the excellent 3D content creation suite Blender.
Check out the article on BlenderNation.com here: http://www.blendernation.com/2008/10/23/248a-update-release/
And you can download the new version here: Blender 2.48a.
God bless!
Happy Blending!
-b
P.S. A little background story on why this release is needed can be found here: http://www.blendernation.com/2008/10/22/yo-frankie-delay/
P.P.S. God is good… He is always good, nomatter what you or I face…
P.P.P.S. Looking forward to doing some “personal filming” sometime… my own music, you name it – the whole she-bang… hopefully…
P.P.P.P.S. A friend of mine told me about Owl City, an unsigned music artist. Well, I started listening to it today (once I remembered,) and, lo-and-behold, I liked it! That artist’s work is now the official “focus for listening” for October 23, 2008… in other words, that is the music group I focused on listening to today (on Playlist.com.) Check out some of their music here. Wow, so inspiring… I could do my own MUSIC!!!! WHOOT!!! … or, JOIN A GROUP, or START A GROUP, or… SOMETHING!!! … Maybe I’m crazy, but I love the idea, wow… I want to start… start soon.
Is Blender as good as 3DS Max for professional 3D renderings?
October 27, 2008I received this very good question in one of the comments:
And my answer:
Mike,
Your question is a very good one, but I am really not the person to ask. However, I will try to give you a good answer nonetheless.
As you well know, the quality of the final render lies heavily upon the work done in the modeling/animation application prior to the rendering. The detail of textures, proper placement of lamps, and correct shading and maps all play into getting the stunning result we all want.
Blender’s internal renderer may (or may not) render as high quality results as 3DS Max – I do not have experience with 3DS Max – but Blender’s internal renderer results are definitely satisfactory for general usage.
With the use of an external renderer such as Yaf(a)Ray or Indigo you can achieve higher realism in your photo-realistic renders, and with a program such as Freestyle (coding for the integration with Blender is still in progress as far as I know,) you can create artistic stroke renderings as well. I have also heard of another photo-realistic renderer called Pixie.
Now onto your question directly:
Is Blender as good as 3DS Max for professional 3D renderings? I don’t know, but I would say a big “yes.”
Give Blender a try, learn online with all the great tutorials out there, and you will soon see that Blender is a very capable program. I highly recommend it!
To find out more of what Blender can do, see the features page (and also see the new features for the 2.48a release,) and check out the image gallery (I do not like some of the images here for various reasons, but I hope you will be OK with them.)
If you have any more questions, feel free to ask! I am welcome to answering your questions.
God bless and best wishes!
-b
P.S. All of the above programs that I have listed are open source.
Posted in 3D, Open Source, Professional, blender, real-life | Tagged 3D Max, 3DS Max, Autodesk, blender, comment, Indigo, Lazy Animation, Mike, photorealistic, Pixie, Professional, question, rendeirng, render, Yaf(a)Ray, YafRay | 2 Comments »