Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Blender 2.59 Splash Contest DEADLINE


You might have read my previous post last July 22 about the Blender 2.59 splash screen contest announced a few weeks ago.  If not, you can head back to http://reynantem.blogspot.com/2011/07/blender-259-splash-contest.html.

Sooooo, to those of you wondering, the deadline is already announced and we're expecting to see all entries by that time and probably announce the winner a day after that.

The deadline of submission is on AUGUST 2, 2011.

I, Hjalti Hjálmarsson, and Ben Simonds will pick the winner and we'll announce it then.  Good luck, everyone! May the best image win! :)

More info can be found on the BlenderArtists thread > http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?225288-Blender-2.59-splash-contest

-Reyn

Monday, July 25, 2011

New Dilation for Texture Filtering


Weeeee! Check out this cool new feature recently implemented on Blender's texture baker; now I won't have to really really have to hide my marked seams just to work around the not-so-seamless textures (before) that were baked.

Thanks to Sergey for the post on the Blender Development Blog.

Here's the link to the post itself:
http://code.blender.org/index.php/2011/07/new-dilation-for-texture-filtering/

Friday, July 22, 2011

2011 48 Hour Film Project Commencing!



It's this time of year again (why do I keep saying this?) and the Richmond 48 Hour Film Project is back.  This time, to shake again the film-making industry, with a bit of twist.

For more info on this, check http://www.48hourfilm.com/richmond/

Led by some guys crazier than me, we as part of the Hand Turkey Studios is joining in this blast! I will be joining in as one of the artists from Team International, including Blender personalities like Bassam Kurdali, Sebastian Koenig, and Jonathan Williamson to name a few.  Kudos to Jason Van Gumster for organizing the team and giving us something to deviate from our own sanities.

Below is a link to the blog post from Jason Van Gumster himself:

http://www.handturkeystudios.com/archives/245

Blender 2.59 Splash Contest




It's this Blender time again where the Blender community is calling to artists to put their best work forward to be selected as Blender's splash screen. Do you want to see your own artwork seen every time you fire up your app? Now is your chance.


Due to my queer absence lately from my mailbox, updates, and such, I only got the chance to view whatever I could a few hours ago. I recently got a mail from Ton Roosendaal himself that I've been chosen as one of the judges for the Blender 2.59 Splash Contest (read it 2 days later), alongside Ben Simonds and Hjalti Hjálmarsson. As of this writing, there were already amazing submissions on the thread at BlenderArtists and the visual decision toughness gets more and more. I've already a few criteria in mind. Wish us luck! ;)


Check this thread at BlenderArtists to read the rules and participate:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?225288-Blender-2.59-splash-contest


This serves as a call to all Blenderheads. Come and take the challenge. As of this moment, it's slowly becoming clear that we'll have a tough time choosing who will make it to the splash.

Good luck!

-Reyn 

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Packt Pub Open Source Titles Campaign







Hi, all! I've been recently informed by Packt Publishing regarding their campaign on the open source titles they have.  That includes book titles by some of our author friends in the Blender community.

Anyhow, to those of you interested in checking the books out, you can head over to the link below:

http://www.packtpub.com/article/packts-best-selling-open-source-books-offer

Have fun learning!

-Reyn

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Blender 2.58 Ambient Occlusion Baking Problem

UPDATE (2011_Jul_13):


Someone posted a reply below, I'm assuming his alias is lmg. He pointed out a cool workaround to this problem; by selecting all the meshes in the scene and have the AO receiver the active selection, then do the Baking. It works quite well! And I'm pretty satisfied with this method too, where you can isolate objects you don't want to create occlusion (if ever there's a need for that).


Thanks, lmg! ^_^



... and a workaround to that.

With the release of Blender 2.58.1 just a few days ago, I was very eager to use it as my production version of Blender, after having used 2.57 for quite a while.  Please note though that this 2.58 version of Blender is the stable release which is downloadable from the Blender downloads section, since I don't have the luxury of time to doodle around and compile Blender 2.58 just yet due to hectic deadlines.  I have been recently working on realtime architectural visualizations and this could imply some basic texture baking, uv-mapping, and stuff like that.

I was quite pleased with the release of 2.58.1 but found out a rather unlikely error with regards to baking AO maps.

Here's usually my workflow:

  1. I link in my objects that would create the occlusion effect on my prop.  For example, I would link in a sphere, a cube, and a suzanne object (either individually as objects or wholly as a group) to my plane prop.
  2. I then create a uv-map for the plane with a corresponding new image that will contain the later-to-be-baked AO map.
  3. I make the necessary materials and textures (with mapping settings, influences, etc.)
  4. I proceed to the World context and set the Ambient Occlusion settings (as seen in the screenshot below).  Most of the time, I use Raytraced AO and set a sample between 10 to 15; falloff is enabled depending on the effect I want to achieve.
  5. I click the Render Context and scroll down over to the Bake subcontext and select Ambient Occlusion as my Bake Mode with Normalized enalbled. 
  6. Finally, I hit the "Bake" button which does the actual processing of the AO map. 
(Blender 2.58.1 with AO not properly baked)

(Blender 2.57.1 with AO baked as normal)


This works quite well on the 2.57 version of Blender but when I tried it on 2.58, it just didn't work, the occlusions happen internally on the object.  A workaround I found out to fix this is to merge the objects I have linked in to the prop file.  This is a very destructive workflow indeed and not safe if you are linking things and wanted to maintain their hierarchy.

Please, if anybody else knows of a quick solution to this in Blender 2.58.1, I would greatly appreciate it if you could tell me.  Otherwise, it remains a mystery to me.  Or probably, it's just a changed system that I was not quite aware of. ;)

Hit me if you know the solution.  Thanks!

Credit goes to my friend Michael De Leon for pointing out the version regression workaround.

-Reyn

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Blender 2.5 Dynamic Paint Waves

I just couldn't help but to repost the amazing Dynamic Paint Wave by MiikaH. It is just overflowing with jaw-dropping awesomeness (yes, I say that a lot). And the problem is, I couldn't clearly describe how amazed I am at the recent demo he showed. I'm really hoping this gets merged to trunk soon. But it wouldn't hurt me to try the custom builds. So without further ado, watch the video below:






-Reyn

Friday, July 1, 2011

Video: Leave Me

Today I share with you a video that will take a few minutes off your life yet will inspire you emotionally.  Credits to Andrew Price for sharing this in one of his Twitter posts.

To those of you who love photography, this is definitely for you. :)







-Reyn