Open Sourcing

Captain Blender has sort of taken a hiatus as I've gotten into modelling this house more. I finished up doing most of the actual modelling this weekend. All of the walls are done, along with the floor and the roof.
The next step is adding some doors and windows, then adding some materials.I picked up Allan Brito's book "Blender 3D Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery" last week. That book, along with his blog offers some good tips. The book itself is pretty easy to follow, however it is a little bit basic in the modelling stage. For instance, the roof is completely overlooked. I skimmed through the last half of the book and the materials and lighting seems to be more detailed however. If you are interested in it I would recommend buying just the ebook to start out.

As promised I do have an update today. I don't have an animation, but Captain Blender is now fully posable as you can see in these quick renders.

I think he looks pretty good now. Tony has a chapter next about teaching basic animation with a bouncing ball, which will be good for me to go through as I haven't done any sort of animation as of yet (minus the gingerbread man). Getting the basics down before I start to make CB jump and run is probably a good idea!

I also played around last night with some toon shading. I saw a picture on Blender Artists yesterday (can't remember which one) that made me think of my sheldon model. I dug him out and played around a bit with different toon materials and edge settings.

This is what I came up with for a basic toon style. It took a bunch of trial and error to come up with this, however I'm sure there are tutorials out there on it. I ended up adding a lot of lights and dropping the hardness down all the way to make it look more flat. I also added a specular color that was a little bit darker than the actual colors and dropped the spec setting down to zero. Next, I played around a bit with the Ref and Amb settings to make everything a bit brighter. Finally, I added an edge with the edge detect system in the render buttons. He still looks a bit 3D in this view, but this could be because of the shadows too. A straight on shot would probably make him look very flat.

And just for fun because I like composites:

It's been a few days since I've posted, but I haven't been idle from Blender in that time! I am happy to say that Captain Blender's bones are now fully attached to his skin and I'm working on finishing up the rigging process tonight with some shape keys. I may have a quick test animation tomorrow up for you!

In other projects, I have started another house model. This is actually a house and not just my apartment, so should be much more interesting! It is based on my girlfriend's parents place, with the long term goal of being able to see what a planned addition will look like. There are the original blueprints scanned in (sorry for bad quality):
I have finished outlining the walls of the original blueprint and will be traveling there this weekend, so will be able to do some measuring of some things that aren't in the blueprint. Here is what the outline looks like so far, nothing too exciting!

The blueprints are in feet and inches, so I've had to tell Blender to break up it's units into twelves to account for this. I've also adjusted everything to the nearest inch to accomodate this, which shouldn't be a huge problem when doing a whole house.

That's about it for now, but hopefully something exciting for tomorrow!

Last night I worked on the final action constraint of Captain Blender's fingers spreading. I've had to play with the settings a bit because the action constraint feature in Blender has changed from the version that Tony is using in the book. I'm still having some troubles, mainly with the CSpace option, but I'm puzzling my way through it. It's actually helping me understand all the features of the action constraint, so it's a good thing!

I'm very anxious to finish up the weight painting and finally being able to move him around, but these are fairly important steps. In the meantime, enjoy the spreading fingers!

Captain Blender Fingers Spread from Tim Brown on Vimeo.

I finally got around to designing a custom layout for this page. It's not perfect yet as I have to change the old "Tic-Tac" icons in the elements on the right and make the bars that separate the elements fit a little bit better, but I think it gives a more custom appearance to the page as a whole.

I used Gimp for all of the designs and fiddled around with the "Edit HTML" option that Blogger has. The only real problem that I ran into was trying to get rid of the title that Blogger automatically puts in. I know that Blogger can display an image rather than the title, but for some reason I couldn't get that to work right and line up with the rest of the elements on the page. Therefore I was forced to use the "visibility: hidden;" tag in the header section of the style sheet. This isn't ideal but it works. There is also a very slight ring around the header image, which you may not have even noticed if I didn't mention it.

I may decide that I don't like this layout too much, but it will work for now. I based the header image on the mac style wallpapers, which I think came our fairly well. The font was taken off of DaFont, which is a fabulous free font site. The font title is Today, which I also use for my watermark font.

Let me know what you think...

Another very quick update today. I'm working on some action constraints for the Captain Blender rig and decided to test out some screen capture utilities to show the animation. Keeping with my Open Source theme I'm using Cam Studio to capture my screen. This software is very easy to use and very minimalistic. I wish there were some shortcut keys to start recording and end recording, but I didn't read a lot of information about it, so there very well could be.

The first action is the Fingers Curl action. This is simply the action of making a fist with the finger bones.

CB Fingers Curl from Tim Brown on Vimeo.
The second video is what is called Toe Heel Roll. This is the action of rolling the foot from toe to heel.

CB Toe Heel Roll from Tim Brown on Vimeo.
There is one more action constraint to add which is spreading the fingers, but I didn't have a chance to get to that last night. Once all the action constraints are added I will start attaching the bones to the mesh. Enjoy!

A real quick update for Captain Blender. I am a bit bored at work today, so decided to finish up his bones!
He has quite a number of bones. A lot of which are there for reference for IK chains and locations. I'm not exactly sure how the animating process is going to go, but I'm sure I'll find out in a little while. The next step is to attach these to the mesh!

As promised I do have a Blender update this afternoon. Instead of working on Captain Blender last night I did a little bit of composite testing. I've always been impressed with people who could add computer graphics to still images or videos and decided to attempt to do a quick one myself.

I think that it came out fairly well. I didn't spend a whole lot of time getting the lights correct as there were hundreds in the exhibit hall in San Diego, so the shadows don't exactly match up.

This is actually quite fun to do and with a number of models and good background images you can come up with some pretty cool pictures. I particularly like this one on BlenderArtists.