Monday, May 23, 2011

Blender 2.5 Realtime Physics


Following the latest developments of Blender, it's almost impossible to keep up at pace if you slack off and wait for the official ones to bloom. Recently, we've been informed and blown away by Blender Cycles (Blender 2.5's realtime rendering engine). If you haven't been updated yet, check these links:

http://www.blendernation.com/stream/tag/blender-cycles/

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.5/Source/Render/Cycles

http://www.blendernation.com/2011/05/02/cycles-render-demo-by-mike-pan/

OK, that's just the introduction. My coder/developer friend Goatman has recently written an addon for Blender to test the new object-oriented ctypes ODE wrappers and the results were mind-blowing! In a nutshell, you'll be experiencing realtime physics inside of Blender's Python API and interface without having to exit the default interface and activate game engine to achieve such.

Briefly on the list of features to add are the following:
- Kinect interface support
- ragdoll rigging support
- gamepad support
- Wiimote support

Quoted from Goatman: "the goal is digital puppetry and game engine export"

And for a proof of concept:





For more info and for the download links, check out his blog post here http://pyppet.blogspot.com/2011/05/ode-ctypes-in-blender.html


-Reyn

Friday, May 20, 2011

Do You Want a 'Making Of' of Slumber?


Hi! After reading the comments in my previous post (http://reynantem.blogspot.com/2011/05/architectural-renders-criticisms-needed.html), I felt so inspired to write another blog post, however unrelated to the previous one in some ways.

I have been exchanging emails with my friend Miguel Lebron from Germany for a couple of months now. And he recently suggested something cool (I guess?) - to create a tutorial or some sort of 'making of' of my not-so-old artwork and camera-animated animation titled "Slumber".

You can see my old related posts here:

Slumber Still (http://reynantem.blogspot.com/2010/10/slumber-still.html)

Slumber Animation (http://reynantem.blogspot.com/2010/10/slumber-animation.html)

Slumber Compositing Breakdown (http://reynantem.blogspot.com/2010/10/slumber-compositing-breakdown.html)


Or you can visit these video pages if you want to:

http://vimeo.com/16054952

http://vimeo.com/16200006

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibzsXFvEQ6w

http://www.youtube.com/rey123sss#p/u/8/tTPQKzpq4mA


The BlenderArtists thread here:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?200399-Slumber-Still


The CGSociety CGTalk thread here:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=928779


But I currently am struggling with some free time to do so. That's why I need your feedback and let me know if you want me to make one and if I see that most of you agrees, I'll squeeze in some time and make one.

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Architectural Renders (Criticisms Needed)

Hi, everyone! You might have noticed my inactivity lately. However, I am always trying to find time to post something worthy and related.

I have been working with an architectural company for a couple of months now. We are doing architectural visualization for a variety of clients - local and abroad. My main responsibilities include: shading, lighting, secondary modeling, secondary texturing, scene composition, animation, and compositing. Some time last week, we decided to show the community what we have been doing and to gather constructive criticisms regarding our renders.

We recently finished the setup for our latest project and it's now currently rendering on the farm. However, we wanted to get ask for your honest feedback regarding our output and will possibly apply them on the next projects to come.

Most of the of the lighting schemes and color balancing you will see are a collective decision of the team, so I could not simply inject my own style to the renders (which you might notice later on). But I'm happy that at times, I can get out of my comfort zone and follow the themes that the higher-ups wish to see. That would mean I wasn't able to play around much in post to add edgy color grading, vignetting, depth of field, etc. That would probably come in the future personal projects that I'll be doing myself. Everything is rendered with Blender 2.5's Internal Renderer.

Pardon me, I had to attach a watermark to the images just to stay safe. Click them to see a larger image. ;)

Anyways, enough rambling and more pictures (we need your constructive criticisms):









This latest archi animation project was the one we struggled most with, probably because we hadn't planned well earlier in advance. I was very much itching to colorize and add at least depth of field but I guess they won't let me. ;) Personally, I think the images look too bright. But I'll leave that up to you to judge.

Below is one of our earlier projects, with a slightly different lighting rig.



Let us know what you guys think. ;)

-Reyn

Sunday, May 8, 2011

Butter's Recovery

Note: This post is non-CG related.

You might remember Butter, the kitten we adopted and became part of our family. If you don't, you can check the photos below to see some lovely snapshots of his life.
























He came home a while ago after a few days of not coming back, and we wondered where had been. We were very shocked to see our little cat wounded, in fact, he was flayed. We don't know how and when. Butter is the one and only cat in our family and we love him so much. He's very kind and tender and we just couldn't believe what happened to him. We have so many speculations as to what happened to him; side-swiped by a vehicle, cat fight, dog fight, animal cruelty, etc. Right now, he is still gasping for air, barely can't walk, and not able to eat anything. I simply couldn't imagine the pain he's going through right now.

Please help us wish for his fast recovery. I know our dear Butter is struggling with the excruciating pain now and we are really hoping he could make it. ='(

If you want to see how he looks now, you can check the images below.









WARNING: SENSITIVE IMAGES















What you see is only a portion of his wound. His skin was flayed, showing the muscles underneath. And please, if there's any advice/medication you could suggest, we would love to hear from you.

Get well soon, Butter...

Thursday, May 5, 2011

Ice Cubes (with .blend)

I was recently approached by my fellow Blenderhead and online friend, Kewl, asking about an ice shader similar to the one seen in the post 'Cuboid Aliens' by onetwothreesquare (http://onetwothreesquare.blogspot.com/2011/05/cuboid-aliens.html) and the original concept came from Emanuele Tenderini (http://emanueletenderini.blogspot.com/2011/01/dei-2.html). I thought I'd give it a try. So I did a very very quick doodle in Blender to see what I can come up with. And here it is:



(click image to enlarge)

I hope you like it. Textures are from Flickr.

In case you're looking for the .blend file (which has the shader setup and some compositing stuff), you can grab it on this link > http://www.pasteall.org/blend/6353

Colors-Video

“There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where colors are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again.”
- Elizabeth Lawrence


This is a camera-animated version of my recent still image which you can see here http://reynantem.blogspot.com/2011/05/colors-still.html

Music by JFBSAUVE and pcaeldries from freesound.org.

Made with Blender, GIMP, and Audacity.








Colors-Still

Hi, everyone! I'm back again with a new small project which I was recently inspired with. This was created with Blender. I had so much fun! I hope you do too.

I'll follow-up this post with the camera-animated version of this project, stay tuned. ;)

“There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where colors are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again.”
- Elizabeth Lawrence



(click image to enlarge)

Link to the BlenderArtists thread here http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?217424-Colors-Still