Open Sourcing

hings have been a bit busy around here lately, so updates have been lacking. I apologize about that!

One of the big things that has been keeping me busy is searching for a house. This is the first house that either my fiance or myself have ever purchased, so there is a lot to learn! We have managed to narrow down the search to one particular house that we feel could be the one. It is in a great area and community, and has nearly everything that we are looking for...except that we would be interested in changing the kitchen a little bit. I figured that it would be great to be able to see some ideas that we had floating around in our heads, soo...fire up Blender!

A number of months ago I taught myself some architectural tips for Blender, so I decided to put them to good use. I decided to do a quick model of the ground floor of the house we were looking at, then change it to what we were thinking it should be. This seemed like a perfect use of Blender and indeed it has been!

The video below is a quick model of the existing ground floor of the house. This is obviously a very simplistic model (no doors, windows, materials, etc.) but it gives a fairly good idea of what the house is currently like. The movement of the camera is a bit quick and jerky in spots, but I'll say again that this was done very quickly!

This next video shows the same walk through, but with some changes to the back of the house.

I knocked down a wall, opened up a doorway and added a breakfast bar and large countertop, along with more cabinets. Again, very simplistic, but it gives a nice idea of what it could be like.

This project was fun to do because I was really interested in what it would look like with the changes made. It was tricky to model the house in perfect scale because I didn't have blueprints or even pictures of it, so I had to make guesses based on the size of the rooms in the disclosure. This was not easy! I think it turned out to accurately represent the house though. I also like the look of the additions!

ell, modeling of my Silver Surfer is complete! I finished up the head and hands this weekend. The picture above is the completed model with what I think will be the final material (this may change a bit). The picture on the right shows the finished body wire frame render. The anatomy of the Surfer made some of the modeling a lot easier. For instance, he doesn't have ears! He also doesn't really have eyelids. He also obviously doesn't have any hair on his body, which should make the materials really easy.

The picture on the left is a quick wire frame of the finished hand. I added quite a bit of detail to the top of the hand because I'd like to do some animations with close ups of the hands. They should hopefully deform really well, so the next step is rigging them up!

I also tweaked the head/face this weekend a little bit and am pretty satisfied with it. The video below shows a 360 degree view of it. The next step is rigging everything. It's been a little while since I have rigged anything, so I'm excited to get back into it!

am really excited about getting this head modeled! The picture to the right is a picture of the finished head and then where the head started. I concentrated on making sure I had nice topology and good edge loops all around. It needs some tweaking, as does the rest of the body, but at least the structure is all completed.

Modeling this head has gotten me excited about doing head modeling. After this model is complete, and before I rig it I may try to do a couple more heads.

ot a huge update today, but a fun one. I did some more formal wire frame renders of my current project. I also did a quick 360 rotation animation, which can be seen below.

y studies in topology are continuing. The picture on the left is my attempt at creating a fairly realistic, but still cartoon like super hero. He is modeled using a reference image of the Silver Surfer which I found posted somewhere on the web.

The hardest part so far has to be integrating the arm into the body and coming up with a convincing shoulder joint. I still don't think I have it correct, but I guess I can always go back and fix it once I rig him and move him into some different poses.

And because I like to look at other people's workflows, here you go!

ell my F1 entry is finally completed! Please take a look above and it will also be listed on the main Blender F1 site soon.

Next is just a few things that I've been doing recently. This woman model was my first attempt at modeling a fairly lifelike human. It's certainly a huge improvement over some older characters I had done!

Finally, this is my latest project. I'm working on do a fairly lifelike superhero that's able to deform correctly. It will be pretty low-poly, so I'm really concentrating on the topology. Take a look at the image on the left and you can see what I've been working on. I hope to have his body completely done in a few days. Just FYI, I'm using pictures of the Silver Surfer for reference photos!

very quick update today. I decided to go ahead and add grass to the opposite side of the street on my F1 scene. After some fiddling around with particle settings and textures this is what I came up with last night. I really like how the moonlight came out reflecting off of the top tips of the grass. It's coming along! I added some more decals this weekend as well, but I have yet to make a render of the car. Look for an update near the middle of this week.

he floor material has been a source of obsession for me for a couple days now. I think I'm almost at the point of calling it complete though. I added some more dirt and some tire skid marks. Take a look, I'm quite happy with it now. I think that it gives the overall scene a more complete look (you may have to enlarge it just to see the detail that I'm talking about).

I also got the chance a couple days ago to play with making a star field in Blender. The "stars" button in the render buttons in Blender doesn't really give a convincing night sky image, so I searched for some ways to create on from scratch. I ended up with an excellent technique to create a star field and was able to make some pretty good images. I think that this, along with a convincing moon (which I'm still working on), should make for a really dramatic night sky. What do you think?

completed the modeling of the wheels for my F1 car last night.

The idea is that the wheels are completely hubless, which gives them a nice futuristic feel. However, I needed to have some way for the wheels to be driven, so I added some gearing to the inside of the wheel. This will connect to the car and drive the wheels. The gearing was made with the "Blender Mechanical Gears" script, which is excellent. I'm not fully happy with the material for the wheels yet, but this shiny chrome should do for a little while. I do like how the tires came out though.

After doing some node material research, I ran across a material for a nicely tiled floor. That material, along with this document, let me create the garage floor material.

You may have to click on the image for a bigger version, but I think I'm fully satisfied with it. It could possibly use a little bit more dirt, so I may add that, but for now I'm calling it complete. I also added some dirty plaster wall material for the interior wall and a painted, rusty metal material for the pole on the left.

The next step is to finish up connecting the wheels to the car, then work on some decals for the car. My latest thought is to make this scene be at night and add a moon with some stars to the outside. We'll see how far I get on that one!

am coming along on my f1 car for the Blender f1 competition. I have most of the basic modeling done on the car itself, except for the wheels and cockpit. I'm now working on the materials. The green paint on the car is my first attempt at node based materials and I'm very pleased with it. The lighting is very simple in this image, but you get the picture. I still don't fully understand a lot of the node features, but I like the output! I also added a nice chrome material to the fin, with some grid lines and decals. I was going for something really subtle for the decals because I like the look of the big chrome fin.

I really want to concentrate on my composition for this challenge, so I thought a lot about the scene setup. I did a little photography composition research and decided on having the car framed by a garage door. This gives the car a natural frame in the picture, which is visibly appealing. I'll also have the car at a 3/4 length view on the right hand side of the door frame to abide by the rule of thirds. The picture below is a quick render of the scene setup.

And one with the car placed roughly where it should be

This last one shows a couple of material and textures. One of the common traits of most of the previous winners of the competition is that they all have great textures (and lighting, but that will come later), so I'm trying to concentrate a lot of time on this.

I also started to model the tire yesterday. This is a work in progress shot of the tire so far. I used an array modifier fit to a curve, rather than spin duping the tire. That way I didn't have to do a lot of calculations to try to get the size of each tread correct. The next step is doing the wheel and working on materials for everything.

t has been a long time since I have posted! Sorry about that, but I guess I was just in need of a break for a while. I've also been a bit busy with a few other things recently.

I haven't been idle on the computer graphics front however. I've been working on a wedding website in order to update our wedding guests about changes in wedding plans and registries. It should be posted online soon and I'll post a link here. I tried to get a little more fancy with this one than with the birds on a feather site, so it was fun learning some new techniques.

In order to get a little more involved with Blender, I have also decided to enter the annual Blender F1 competition. This is a competition that is run every year where Blender users create what they think the future F1 cars will look like. The only rule is that you use Blender to create the image and that the car has an open cockpit.This is my starting point so far. It is based on a Mercedes concept sketch that I ran across a couple of months ago online. It will probably end up being quite a bit different than what it looks like so far, but I think this is a nice beginning! Stay tuned for updates.

esterday was a snow day! We had a hefty 8 inches here in Wilmington, so I had plenty of time for some blendering and painting with the tablet.

The first update is an updated Cephy model. I remade the body using a much cleaner, low poly mesh. It should deform very well while animating and should render fairly quick as well. The last thing to finish up on the model is the mouth and eye/eyelids.

The next thing that I took on this past weekend was to try my hand out at some texturing (see picture on left, please click for bigger image). I used just the hand off of the Cephy model and painted out a normal map and color map in Gimp. UV unwrapping the hand mesh was fairly straight forward, so I'll skip that step. I first painted in the wrinkles around the knuckles (the tablet made this a lot easier than it would have been!) and then added a black and white image of leather to add the pores. This completed my normal and specular map.

The next step was a color map. I mainly just painted flat colors out for a color map, but I also added a colorized picture of a piece of old bark to give it some detail. The palm didn't come out as well as the back of the hand, but I think that's mainly because I'm still learning how to paint wrinkles. It's not as easy as it seems!

I also got a chance to practice some painting yesterday. The image below is my attempt at doing some digital painting. I'm learning a lot with the new tablet and I'm definitely improving from the first car painting. This painting took about an hour and is based on the techniques from ImagineFX.

managed to finish modeling most of a hand last night which can be seen on the right. The original intention is for the hand on Cephy to be webbed, which I still intend on doing, but I haven't quite figured out how I'm going to do that yet, so for now here is the slightly alien looking hand. The fingers are nice and long and there is a really short palm area. This seems to be a theme in most alien hands, so I figured I'd go with it! If you want a bigger view please click on the picture.

To model this hand I really concentrated on good topology, so it should hopefully deform quite nicely. There is a wire frame picture of the hand on the left.

I also uploaded a video of the eye from my last post. Enjoy!

ephy is coming along quite nicely. After I pretty much completed the head modeling it was time to pick out what sort of eyes he should have. There were a few criteria I had for coming up with an eye including: animate-able (pupil should be able to be dilated), one mesh (I want to be able to append just one mesh to many files), different pupil shapes (I originally wanted a cat like eye), and I wanted the iris to deform when the pupil dilated. This last one was more of a hope then a requirement. The current trend in CG arts is to use an eye modeled after the Pixar characters and these eyes look fabulous, but it wasn't really what I was looking for (there is a great tutorial here for creating those eyes if you are interested). The mesh for the eye is separated into multiple parts (cornea, iris, pupil, white) and the iris doesn't deform when the pupil dilates. The iris color/texture is based on an image and when the pupil dilates it just covers up some of the image. I was really hoping to create something where as the pupil dilates you could actually see the iris muscles moving. I also wanted to make different pupil shapes and originally wanted to create a cat-like eye. I tried a number of different ways with the Pixar eye, but couldn't come up with different pupil shapes that I was satisfied with.

After much searching around I found a technique by Jon McKay, that pretty much fit the bill! I saw this example and was blown away. The iris muscles moved, there were different pupil shapes, and it was all done with procedural textures (no external images required). He's written up a great article about it which can be seen here. He seemed to have wanted the same things I did! After some playing around and tweaks I created the cat eye seen above. In the movie that I linked to before the cat eye pupils were sort of rounded, which I didn't like too much, so I made mine much more pointy. It looked great when it was contracted, but the shape in between full contraction and dilation wasn't what I was looking for (the right hand side of the picture shows the pupil deformed when half contracted).

After some more playing around and tweaking I decided on the star pupil shape seen on the right. It gives a great alien like appearance, looks great when contracted, and also looks good halfway between contraction and dilation. I went ahead and made the iris emit some light, so they also glow in the dark (top right view in picture). I'll try to get a quick animation of the eye in action made up in the next few days. The next step in the modeling process is the hands. Hope you enjoy!

ephy underwent a couple of changes this weekend, but the overall concept remains the same.

I really didn't have a head/face design in mind when I originally drew the character sheet for Cephy. I knew that I wanted a full face however, because that is something that I haven't really done before. Well, I have modeled a face, but never rigged or animated one. After doing some thinking and watching the general modeling video tutorial/time lapse on Creature Factory I tried my hand at doing something similar. I'm fairly happy with the face and head.

The problem is that the head didn't exactly fit my idea for the 6-8 dangling tentacles. I was a bit more attached to the general shape of the face and head, so I decided to change the whole "dread lock" look to just a couple of tentacles on the top of the skull. In a still image they almost look like horns, but this similarity should end when they start to swing around during an animation.

Like I said before, the face itself is based on a time-lapse modeling video that was on the Creature Factory DVD. Andy Goralczyk is the author/artist that arranged the DVD and he does fabulous work. I encourage you to check out some of his work here. Back to my face however, I think that I may need to add a couple of things when I go back and try to rig it, particularly around the eyes, but for now I think it came out pretty well. I'm thinking about adding some sort of sideways blinking action, similar to the creature in the trailers for the movie 10,000BC. I have a couple of ideas floating around in my head as to how to do this, so I'll have to find out if any are actually possible. The color and material is obviously still in process, but I hope you enjoy it for now! Oh, he also still needs hands as you can tell!

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 an extremely exciting and wonderful weekend ;-), I did manage to get the hands modeled on Marty the robot last night during the Giants game. I tried to keep the major part of the hand fairly simple for rendering speed purposes, so it's pretty boxy, but I think it looks fine. It's tough to estimate the size of the hand when it's out like in this pose, so I may need to adjust that when I start to move him around.

I'm pretty excited to start rigging him. I've never done any rigging of an inorganic model before. It seems a bit easier at first because you don't have to take in to account how the mesh deforms (there is no deformation), but the constraints may be a bit harder to configure. The Creature Factory DVD by renowned Blender artist Andy Goralczyk, has a section in it about rigging the creature, which is sort of inorganic. Andy really is a great artist and the DVD shows all of the work he went through to create a short film all in Blender. I wouldn't expect to come close to anything that he can do, but something similar to it may be a fun project to tackle in the future.