What’s been happening

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:

Head model for animation – got a lot of help on the topology from a head-modeling-timelapse video by Jonathan Williamson

Frame from the final animation renders – had technical (encoding) issues, so I couldn’t submit this animation to the Blenducation particle hair animation contest.

What I modeled in my first public Blenducation class. (False-colored, disasimbled, etc., after the class)

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

Tomato for project “Dancing Taco”

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!

Rebounding Jalapeno

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!

“Dancing Taco” Blender work-in-progress

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.)

“Mussheron Paddocstol” a platformer game made in Blender (work in progress)

I have been working on designing a simple platformer game in Blender.  The game is currently called “Mussheron Paddocstol.”  You are a simple little mushroom jumping across pitfalls (that lead to an endless fall into oblivion,) and you’re navigating a “mysterious” world full of cubical, gray boxes – well, that’s what it’s like so far…

"Mussheron Paddocstol" a mushroom bouncing, WIP platformer game - made in Blender

It still remains a pretty basic game, but I am hoping to use this game as a stepping stone in learning 3D game creation with Blender.

If you want to see a REALLY impressive real-time model made in Blender, check out these images on BlenderArtists.

God bless,
Listening to Sixpence None the Richer, needing to complete work on updating ShadrachYouth.org, etc…

-b

P.S. This is a work in progress btw! ;D

Blender 2.48 released!

Blender 2.48 is released! Blender is an excellent 3D modeling, UV mapping, rigging, animating, and rendering program that is open source and completely free!

Check out the BlenderNation article about the new version of Blender!

Download Blender 2.48 now!

NOTE: This version of Blender has two dependencies. The installer will let you know what they are. Downloading and installing these dependencies (needed third-party apps that help create the need environment for the program to run) is not that hard to figure out.

God bless and looking forward to the days ahead! It’s really late, so I better hit the hay.

…trying to make a game in Blender… I have had a desire to make games for a long time… I abandoned that desire thinking gaming wasn’t good. However, if I am careful with my time, I would still love to create some computer games.

Hopefully the Minosa Films group will rehearse (run through the script of) “Is This Love?” this Sunday after church. Currently I plan to rehearse the film and prepare it as needed for production. It is very tempting to just say “Hey, who cares, let’s film now” when the script is not film-worthy yet. Like a ship that is not prepared for the ocean, our film will sink. So, we must prepare.

Tentative plan:

• Brief script rehearsals (group)
• Find location – if current location will not work (banor, others)
• Pray about it

When script has gone through revisions and is film-worthy, we will then commence a 2 day schedule:

1. Day 1: Take cast and crew to location.  Walk through scenes and familiarize the actors and crew with the location: when and where events take place in the film
2. Day 2: Shoot film

By the time the production is film-worthy and ready to shoot, we will have gone through a number of brief rehearsals, script revisions, blocking, acting emotions, etc., so that when we film we are ready, with no wrinkles or big problems to iron out on location (hopefully.)

Well, God bless and best wishes,

May you be guided on the road ahead,
And may we all find what we are looking for,

Never give up,

-b

About BlenderNation:

BlenderNation is the central news site for Blender, the free open source 3D content creation suite.

Check out BlenderNation.com!

Destination: where?

Was going to write a poem – started, but haven’t finished.  Oh well, maybe later on that.

Did a job for free on designing a small black and white ad for someone and now it turns out I had the deminsions wrong.  Maybe if I correct them and send them back in soon I will be able to repremind the situation more smoothly.

Prepared and completed the downsampled (720×480, mpeg2) video files from Charles Morey’s violin recital for someone to use with other footage and compile a 4 minute promo video for the string program.  That’s good to have that done.

Now need to prepare (cut, edit, burn…) the recital in HD SP for one DVD, with source footage starting at about 2hrs and 40mins.  This computer is not built to handle HD smoothly, so I long for a faster machine.  I am not sure exactly what approach we are going to take with this project, whether to use the entire recital or just cut and compile the best parts, making a 5, 10, or 20 minute video when finished.  We will probably use the entire recital, but I’m not sure yet.

Hoping to design a website and logo for someone, which will greatly help in my finances for film.

FLY

Who knows, what path will I take?
Who will I be, what am I now?
Where will I go – why, when, for what?
And who will I meet, for God, or for naught?
Who will I be in twenty years,
Or even twenty minutes.

Who am I now,
And what am I aiming for?
What am I living for,
And why?

Find out,
Endeavor,
Don’t just try,
Don’t fall and cry,
Get up, spread those wings,
And upon the high winds
Fly.

May your skies be as bright
As the hope we were born
To fulfill.

-b

Forging ahead

There are some tasks I need to forge ahead through:

• Charles’ Recital
• Miracle In Gansu (play to DVD)
• Backup files

And so… working on that…

Prayers for the days ahead, please,

God bless,

-b

Stalemate – well, sort of

I’ve run into a stalemate of sorts due to hardware limitations.  It’s better than it could be, but a solution will need to be found before I can absentmindedly run ahead with this video editing business.

So, anyhow, I ask for your prayers in this matter and that God would provide for what I need.

Thanks for listening and sticking in there with me!

Working on various video editing things, trying to get my workflow going, working toward a Minosa Films demo video… whooo!  See ya,

-b

Testing Blender VSE with HD proxy

Hey everyone!

Testing Blender’s VSE (Video Sequence Editor) for my editing needs.  So far it’s working well, once God helped me figure out how to get the audio and video the same length.  (Clue: import the audio and video separately, then make a meta strip to keep them together if you want to.)

Testing Blender VSE with HD proxy

(Watching the video real-time with a 25% proxy is great!  Unlike using Premiere Pro 1.0, playing the video back on Blender’s preview window is fast enough and sweet for viewing!)

Interlacing is bad, so I may use VirtualDub for that.  Depends.

If I can get good results from Blender, I may go with it for now and keep the JVC Everio GZ-HD7, instead of downsizing my camcorder.

Hopefully BlenderAVC will continue to be developed so I can import my video directly (without worrying about conversion.)

I hope this all works out!  Thanks to all who recommended using Blender for editing my video.  I should have tried it again earlier – then again, what’s wrong with now?  “The road goes ever one” as Bilbo sings, and it’s the journey that brings memories and experience.

Best wishes, peace out,

-b