“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.)

Blender green screening, VSE – and how to make your own greenscreen!

I am endeavoring to learn some of Blender’s (blender.org) VSE (Video Sequence Editor) and node compositing editor.

With the VSE you can arrange video clips and do effects, such as achieving a fade out to black (using three strips – video, gamma cross and color generator.)

Using VSE as a simple video editor may be very useful, and as it develops hopefully it will overrun such commercial monster products as Adobe Premiere Pro.  One advantage over Premiere Pro 1.0 that I have found is that Blender’s VSE accepts an .avi compression that I use, whereas Premiere Pro 1.0 doesn’t.  Besides that, Blender is completely free and open source, and is an alternative to Windows Movie Maker.  WMM can be very useful for shrinking file sizes and doing some simple editing (and you can do text effects and transitions,) but Blender’s VSE seems less dumbing.

And now about the greenscreening:

With the node compositing I am endeavoring to make a successful chroma keying – taking out a certain color, like bluescreening, also known as split screen – but it is proving quite a bit harder than I hoped. It seems (as is perfectly logical) that to have an effective keying I need very clear, pure colors to key out. Otherwise you get grays when it looks blue and your footage becomes very spotty.

Hopefully I will get some good results soon. Here’s a screenshot of my first work with chroma keying – overlaying a video on an image – not so great, but I’m learning.

Old machinery (video) on old machinery (image)

Also, doing further testing this evening, this chroma keying business may be much more difficult than I had hoped. Looking online for professional options, I found these two sites: (the first site recommended the second site.)

DIY (Do It Yourself – Bluescreens, Greenscreens, Backdrops and Background stands) Highly recommended to check out – you can find out about how to make your own greenscreen the cheap way. (not fool proof.

EEFX (green/blue screen backgrounds and backdrops(?)) Great for seeing professional quality equipement, seeing the prices, and learning about what makes their cloth special.

Hope you enjoy – looking forward to filming soon! Praise God!

-B