instinctive-Blender adds global audio sequencing / syncing support to Blender. This eliminates the need for external lipsync tools like Magpie, enables users to composite audio and video inside Blender without the need for external compositing applications, and makes work with Blender a lot easier on the whole, especially if the audio material already exists, and the video is to be done.
Documentation can be found here.
The latest Blender Development Digest was posted at the Foundation site about 10 days ago. Some things to look forward to in 2.34 are a cleaner LSCM Unwrapper, additions to the BPy API, some UI enhancements [including a graphical colour chooser], the GameEngine Python Reference has been updated and better support for YafRay. Sounds good. Expected release date for 2.34 is early August.
Creating Animated Seascapes in Blender [.pdf] by Colin Litster is by far the best tutorial I've completed so far. Sure it's 41 pages long and 2.7MB in size, but it worth it. There's not much modelling involved,but heaps of info on the wave effect, and animated procedural textures. Another aspect i like about this tutorial was Colin's introduction and his reasoning that lead to his solution to his initial problem. As an example:
As with any 3D creation, particularly one requiring detailed textures, research and observation will save you an enormous amount of time...For my project I visited the local library to view art books by famous naval watercolour artist...
All in all this tutorial is good because it's a great demonstration of the abilities of Blender, and introduces you to some good special effects tecniques, especially in relation to producing animated water.
Modeling a Bicycle Chain is a tutorial by Chris Bradford, hosted at Blenderman. It's a well written tutorial with lots of screenshots. The modeling isn't all that hard but it did introduce me to a good concept, which is using images as backgrounds for a sort of model blueprint. This is furture explored in another tutorial called 'Blueprint Setup' in the Blenderman Magazine - May Issue.
I started doing BlenderChar's Cartoon Eyes with Lattice Deformation tutorial 'cause I wanted to stick the eye theme I'm on. Unfortunately the tutorial stops after Part 1 - How to Create Basic Cartoon Eyeballs. I got that down, but Part 2 - Animating the Cartoon Eye, is underconstruction. Oh well, it's a good tutorial anyways. On with the next.
And then I discovered the OSA & MBLUR buttons. The eyeball image turns out a lot cleaner now compared to the first one. I keep looking at the first render of my eyeball thinking - "Damn, that's some hard-core aliasing going on there." Until it finally dawned on me that I needed to turn on Anti-Aliasing before rendering. Shows the inexperience, but it's another lesson well learned. Always remember to set up the renderer for your desired output. To set this in my brain I did a little searching and found this in the Blender documentation:
A computer generated image is made up of pixels, these pixels can of course only be a single colour. In the rendering process the rendering engine must therefore assign a single colour to each pixel on the basis of what object is shown in that pixel.
This often leads to poor results, especially at sharp boundaries, or where thin lines are present, and it is particularly evident for oblique lines.
To overcome this problem, which is known as Aliasing, it is possible to resort to an Anti-Aliasing technique. Basically, each pixel is 'oversampled', by rendering it as if it were 5 pixels or more, and assigning an 'average' colour to the rendered pixel.
The buttons to control Anti-Aliasing, or OverSAmple (OSA), are below the rendering button. By pressing the OSA button antialiasing is activated, by selecting one of the four numeric buttons below it, the level of oversampling (from 5 to 16) is chosen.
And this interesting point on motion blur.
If Motion Blur is active, even if nothing is moving on the scene, Blender actually 'jitters' the camera a little between an 'intermediate' frame and the next. This implies that, even if OSA is off, the resulting images have nice Anti-Aliasing. An MBLUR obtained Anti-Aliasing is comparable to an OSA Anti-Aliasing of the same level, but generally slower.
This is interesting since, for very complex scenes where a level 16 OSA does not give satisfactory results, better results can be obtained using both OSA and MBlur. This way you have as many samples per frame as you have 'intermediate' frames, effectively giving oversampling at levels 25,64,121,256 if 5,8,11,16 samples are chosen, respectively.
Here's the home of the Blender Documentation
I'm trying to complete as many of the tutorials that are around on the web to soup up my [limited] Blender skills. This time it was BlenderChar's Creating Pixar-looking eyes in Blender. As you can see, my eye turned out a little rough [and the iris area is a little big =)]. I'm still not sure how to smooth out the pixelation you can see around the eyeball itself, or around the pupil. Also, around the outside of the pupil you can see I found it hard to match the pupil object with the hole I made in the eyeball object.
The BlenderChar site is worth making a note of. It has good tutorials, an example character rig, and some good links to externals sites.
I just completed the Making a Reflection tutorial over at the Blender website. It's a short tutorial that explains the simple set up of the Blender renderer for making objects reflective. This image is my output for the tutorial. It's not a very complicated scene, but at least I know how to do it now.
I've been doing the Modelling Bongo tutorial over at Enrico Valenza's site. As far as Blender tutorials go [the limited number I've seen so far anyways], it's pretty good. The images relate well to the instructions. There are some things that didin't seem to work for me, but all in all my Bongo turned out pretty well.
It took me about 10 hours to complete the model and I had a few difficulties along the way, particularly with the mouth. By the time I got to the section on making the inside of Bongo's mouth, I realised Enrico's model had more vertices around the mouth than mine did, and therefore building a tongue was kindof hard. But it's all experience right?
What I got out of the tutorial was mainly much needed practice and usage of Blender. There are now a few shortcut keys [Extrude - E, Merge Vertices - Alt + M, Joint - Ctrl + J] set in my brain. And moving around a model, quickly switching between object and edit mode and selecting vertices is all really easy now. The Blender interface is becoming second nature, and it feels good.
Well worth getting when starting to use Blender is the Blender Basics Tutorial Book which comes as three .pdf files. Seems to be a Blender training course of some sort. In any case, it's a really nice introduction to the application and it's features.
Also a must is The Blender User Interface Tutorial by Bart Veldhuizen. What he says in the opening paragraphs is so true.
"...I had found this extremely interesting looking 3D application (which other users were raving about), but the user interface completely baffled me....In the weeks after that, I slowly found out the basic principles behind the Blender user interface. And though it is non-standard, it became clear that it was a very consistent system - it would let me use the same functions in a number of completely different situations..."
That about sums it up for me as well. At first I was almost ready to think the whole Blender thing was a joke. After using Maya, 3D Studio Max, Lightwave and TrueSpace, the Blender UI seemed backwards. But if you stick with for a week and practice, you do get use to it, and it does become second nature to you. Now I think of the UI as the Blender Test. If a new user can get past the frustration that comes from the different UI, they're dedicated enough to do almost anything =)
WHY BLENDERBLOG?
I've decided to learn how to use Blender and I want to record my learning experience. BlenderBlog.com will help me in understanding [and remembering] all that I will learn, and hopefully aid others in similar situtaions.
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What draws me to Blender, apart from the fact that Blender is a professional, quality product, that it's open source and runs on various operating systems, that it performs [really] well under most hardware conditions and is scriptable with python, is the community that surrounds and supports Blender and it's users. The Blender community is [i think] unique among 3D users and developers these days. The Blender community reflects the Blender code-base, open and sharing to all.
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Most of the Blendering will be done in OSX, althought I often use a Linux workstation, sometimes Windows 2000 and, when there's no other alternative, XP.
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