Saturday, December 17, 2011

Early Christmas Gift to Self

Weeeeee! I'm so excited! I just finished setting up my rig.  Sorry though it's not a character rig or the like - it's a desktop rig.

I wish I could afford more though, but for now, this will suffice my current needs.

Here's what I came up with:

  • Fujitsu wireless keyboard and mouse (for Hailey, my laptop) - I'm surprised it works in LinuxMint out of the box!
  • The following specs of my new desktop PC 'Pochi' (my girlfriend named her such, I wonder why):
    • Acer 18.5" LED monitor
    • AMD Phenom II X4 840 3.20 Ghz
    • GeForce GT 430 2Gb (96 CUDA cores)
    • 4Gb RAM
    • hopefully more upgrades coming soon! ;)
P.S.

I'm really loving these wireless devices!

-Reyn

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Blender 2.61 Released!

Amazing news!

Blender 2.61 is released! Check out the news here http://www.blendernation.com/2011/12/14/blender-2-61-released/

And the release logs here http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-261/

Oh, Blender, you've grown yet again. High five!

P.S.
Thank you so much to Max Hammond for contacting me regarding my art 'Childhood,' for the jury for choosing my piece as the splash screen, and finally to the community for the huge support.  I'm very much humbled and honored.

Cheers. ;)

-Reyn

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Merry Christmas!


Title: Merry Christmas




(click image to enlarge)



After a couple of decision fatigues, I finally decided to go for it and join Andrew Price's Blender Guru competition, for the first time! The theme for this month is 'Christmas.'  I originally opt for a linear merry- and warm-themed concept, but somehow the thought of a Christmas spent in desolation and longing suddenly struck me.  I am, for one, not promoting sad emotions, but instead I want to share with everybody the feeling of sadness, longing, apathy, anticipation, joy, hope, and eventually blissful happiness.

On the other hand, this was one of the most technically challenging pieces I have ever worked on, specifically on the modeling and lighting aspects.

Modeling, texturing, rigging, scene composition, and node compositing: Blender
Shading and lighting: Cycles
Post: GIMP
Project duration: approximately 60 hours


Here are some close-up shots:

(click image to enlarge)


And finally, some 'behind the scenes' shots:

(click image to enlarge)

(click image to enlarge)

(click image to enlarge)

(click image to enlarge)

(click image to enlarge)

(click image to enlarge)

(click image to enlarge)

(click image to enlarge)


Wish me luck and Merry Christmas to you all! ^_~

-Reyn

Monday, December 5, 2011

Pyppet2 Update

Pyppet, which was recently updated to version 2 has something new Blenderish (it was from the beginning, right?) to feature.  This tool has been developed by my friend Brett Hartshorn himself.

Here's a video showcasing what he has been updated recently:





Quoting from his post:

The first requirement of this project was to integrate Blender and GTK3 without any compiled Python modules, or modifications to the Blender C source code. To acheive this, only Python and ctypes are used. The GTK3 ctypes wrappers were generated by Rpythonic. GObject Introspection is not used or required.
Rpythonic is also used to generate wrappers to the Blender C API. This allows us to control the Blender main-loop from Python and integrate it with our own custom main-loop
.

You can head over to his full blog post at http://pyppet.blogspot.com/2011/12/pyppet2-update.html

-Reyn