Open Sourcing

have shifted my focus recently from modeling to materials, texturing, and general scene management. The image at the right is my first attempt with adding decals to my F1 car. They don't look too bad actually. I have some more design work to do with them, mainly making them look more f1-ish, but the hard part of getting them to mesh with my existing node based car paint is done!

Next came the process of adding my star background to my scene. You can see my progress so far on the left. All the pieces were made in blender and stuck together with Gimp. Right now it sort of looks like the asphalt is the end of the world and it falls off into oblivion, but I have yet to figure out exactly what I want to put over there. I like the way the moon and the stars came out though. The nebula gives it that sort of futuristic/other-worldly look.

I also thought I may share with you my initial sketch for the Blender F1 scene. I think I originally though some fire extinguishers would look good in the right hand corner, but I like it empty right now.

Finally, I'll leave you with a few doodles and fun sketches that I've done recently. I like the way this last character is turning out, so he may be my next modeling challenge! (Sorry for bad scan quality)

am going to be skipping around a lot today, so bear with me! First off, I love my tablet! I have been playing around a little bit more with Inkscape and vector designs as it is a lot easier to do this with the Wacom. I hope to have a nice completed vector design up in a little while. Secondly, my fiancee and I tried our hands at making some t-shirts last weekend. We enjoy doing little projects together and as a Valentine's Day present I gathered up some supplies and we made our own "vintage" looking t-shirts.

The process was quite fun actually and is sort of a hand made screening process. Basically what you do is create a design (see the image to the right for my quick "on the plane" sketches) and transfer the design to a light fabric. I went with a skewy bike gear and she ended up going with a winged track foot for our designs. We used an old pair of spandex tights, but pantyhose or a very thin curtain material would work as well. Then you create a template of the design by painting with glue on the areas that you wish to not receive paint. After the glue dries you simply paint on the t-shirt, through the template and you are left with your design. Painting through the fabric gives the resulting t-shirt image a worn out or vintage look. You can also use the template more than once if you want to make shirts for a number of different people. Take a look, I think it came out pretty well! (please excuse the grainy cell phone picture)

My next bit of jumping around is playing with some photo editing. I wanted to do some really impressive editing, not just cleaning a photo up, so I set out to try my hand at manipulating a face. I took the original picture from this post and used some stock images of tribal graphics, architectural moldings, and clouds to come up with the following:

I really like the way this last one came out. There is plenty more cleaning up that could be done to it, but I think it looks fairly good. I found the iWarp tool in Gimp which really helped to make it look like the graphics were against the face and not floating above it like the previous image.

ast week was my birthday and I received a new Wacom Bamboo tablet as a gift! I've never used a tablet before and was quite excited to try it, so I quickly got it all set up and sketched a quick picture of my car. It's obviously not perfect and would need quite a bit more work in order to make it a finished piece, but it allowed me to test out the tablet, which works great! I'm not sure how I ever got by without it actually. It took me a while to get used to it, but the pressure sensitivity is fantastic for painting in Gimp. I can't wait to try some texture painting with it!

Also last week I did a quick render on my hand with some particle clouds I've been tinkering around with. The idea behind the render is that some sort of alien is behind some laboratory glass and something goes wrong in the room causing a ruckus and the only thing that the observers on the outside of the lab see is an alien hand coming up against the glass! Scary!

t's been a little while since I have updated, but between the holidays and getting back into the swing of things after the holidays everything has just now settled down a bit.

The Marty project started to bore me a little bit as I had already done the modeling, rigging, and walk cycle for him. I'm going to call him done for now until I can come up with something else that I want him to do. Maybe a short animation with both Bone and Marty?? We'll see...

I haven't been completely idle the past few weeks. I have been playing with some techniques in Tony Mullen's Bounce, Tumble, and Splash, which is an excellent book that goes over simulating real world events in Blender. There is a lot of discussion on physical events, such as bouncing balls, pouring water, jumping springs, etc. It's all really interesting and there is a surprising amount of work that goes into making computer generated images look and act like real life.

Playing with all the physics engines in Blender made me think about incorporating some of these things in with a character, so I set out trying to come up with something. What came out is based actually on a friend of mine's father (he doesn't actually look like this, but bear with me). I spent a great deal of time while I was younger at a friend's house who had a pool. Well, his father, who had a fairly large belly, would often join us. It was quite interesting because he wasn't the stereotypical picture of a swimmer, but it was really amazing the way he could dive in without making a splash and swim like a fish! What came out is a part man (with a belly!), part mermaid (with the flippers), and part squid (with the tentacles). The tentacles I thought would be interesting to animate and it may be fun to have him dive into some water. I call him Cephy, short for Cephalopod.

I've now modeled most of his body and am working on the tentacles on his head. The tentacles are tricky because there are a couple of different ways to create the tentacle in Blender. One way is simply to model all of them and apply a softbody to the mesh, but this would take quite a while as I'm thinking of having 6-8 tentacles. Another way to create a tentacle is to have a mesh object follow a curve object. This is done with an Array modifier and a Curve modifier put on the mesh. I played around with this one for a while, but I couldn't quite get the taper to a point to look good. The taper on the object is based on an offset and I just couldn't quite get it to look good. The final way that I tried was to give a curve a Bevel Object (shape) and a Taper Object. Both of these objects must be curves, which I had never really worked with before, but turns out to be pretty much the best way of doing this. Below is a video of the Curve tentacle and Object tentacle with a quick little animation to see how they react.

Finally, here is a quick video of something similar to the back of the head that I am imagining for Cephy.

fter a long holiday break, I have a large amount of updates! First things first, I re-made the rig for Marty the robot. The feet, hands, and hips were all changed, so it's quite different. These are some of my notes along with a snapshot of the complete rig.

With a new rig it obviously meant that I had to make a new walk cycle. This was good animation practice for me, but I'm not as happy with it as the last one. I could have continued to tweak it, but I'm going to call it done for now. Enjoy!

Next, I played around with a python script called Blender Mechanical Gears, which is pretty fun. The script creates a single tooth of a gear, which you then have to spindup around it's center point to create a full gear. This one was rendered in Yafray, with the texture created in Gimp. I think it came out really well!

quick Christmas wish to get you in the spirit of the season! Made quickly in Gimp last night, enjoy!

ince I finished my Bone character recently I decided to design and rig a completely original character. This is the design sketch that came out of my thinking. It's certainly not a finished sketch by any means, but the character I had in mind didn't really require any reference pictures to create in blender, so I figured it was good enough. I knew that I wanted a robotic character that was some what human shaped. He looks somewhat goofy and gangly which is probably why my girlfriend recommended the name Marty.

Marty is somewhat easy to model, being all mainly spheres and cylinders. On the left is the first render of him. The next step is the hands, which should be pretty quick as well. Obviously the material needs some tweaking, but it's certainly better than the default gray! I'm not sure whether or not the cylinders should be different materials from the spheres, but that's something that I'll look at later. I'm anxious to start rigging him as I haven't done any mechanical rigging before. The cylinders going into the spheres for his joints poses an interesting problem for rigging actually. I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to do it yet. I do know that I want a full range of motion with all his joints. This should hopefully lead to some pretty funny animations in the future!

long with working on computer projects such as Blender and Gimp, I also enjoy sketching. Although, again, I do not consider myself an artist by any means, I do enjoy it.  The image at left started out as a quick sketch of a pose I saw in a picture a number of months ago.  It has turned into a bit of a project now, mushing two of my favorite activities together, drawing and biking.  I'm still debating about what sort of head to add to him and I obviously have to work on the shading among other things.  It's a nice little side project.

o after being reminded this weekend that I haven't updated my blog in a while I decided to go ahead and post a quick update. ;-)

Look for more little scenes with this guy, he is fun!