Colin Litster has posted a tutorial on faking really nice looking volumetric clouds on his site The Cog Project. It covers working with textures on particle systems, lighting them well and then cheating a bit.
Tutorial: Cloud Creation
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Monthly Archives: January 2006
Blender.org Gallery Updated: December 2005
It was long overdue, but I have finally managed to put the December 2005 gallery online on Blender.org. After some feedback from the community I have become a lot more picky on which images should be included and which not. Please let me know if you think it’s better now.
Blender Render Engine Rewrite for Orange
Ton is planning a rather large code rewrite of Blender’s render engine. Apart from cleaning up some old cruft the main issues seem to be to allow for multi-pass, multi-layer and multi-thread rendering, storing everything in a single EXR file and building a Noodle editor for compositing the rendered layers. Oh, and *real* vector based motion blur. Joy!
An excerpt of Ton’s announcement is inside.
Blender, Orange branch
Zupermonkey posted a Blender testbuild of the Orange development branch of Blender. While the Orange artists are working on producing a movie, Ton is slaving away at building the tools they need to get the job done.
Autodesk Completes Acquisition of Alias
Autodesk, creator of 3ds Max, has acquired Alias, the creator of Maya:
On January 10, 2006, Autodesk completed the acquisition of Alias for $197 million USD. Alias is a leading developer of 3D graphics technology. This acquisition extends Autodesk’s 3D software leadership in the manufacturing and media and entertainment industries.
Tutorial: Linear Workflow with YafRay
One of the things Ton has been trying to explain to me time and time again is the concept of Gamma correction. I never got it until I read this tutorial by Alvaro Luna Bautista. He explains how to work with the Gamma settings in Yafray, how to analyse the histograms with the Gimp and how to Gamma correct your textures for better results.
To be honest, I’m still not sure I understand Gamma for 100% now, so this tutorial is probably more useful for you than for me ;-)
OS X 10.4.4 update
A few days ago I reported that using Blender 2.40 was problematic on Macs with NVidia hardware. The Blender developers had reported this issue and Apple has supplied a bugfix in the graphics drivers in the 10.4.4 update that became available today. I tested Blender and it now works like a charm.
Orange Production Diaries in 3D World Magazine
The February 2006 edition of 3D World features an article about Open Source graphics and project Orange:
The open source revolution
Professional graphics created with free software: fantasy or reality? We interview the key players in the market, and bring you the first of six production diaries from the set of Elephants Dream [the movie that the Orange team is working on, bart], the world’s first ‘open source movie’
I haven’t picked up this copy yet, but 3D World Magazine has always been one of my favourites so I’ll be sure to get one today :)
Update: buh, the February edition wasn’t in the shop yet…
ResPower reaction
Earlier this week there was a bit of an stir on Elysiun.com when it turned out that ResPower had posted some positive comments about their renderfarm service under pseudonyms. Some people even suggested a scam. I contacted them to hear their side of the story and Early Ehlinger, President of ResPower, sent me the following reply:
Continue reading
Blender.org downtime
Earlier today ‘xserve’, the server that hosts www.blender.org, mediawiki.blender.org and orange.blender.org was experiencing load problems and was unreachable for a while. Usually these problems are caused by people who are trying to ‘spider’ a website for offline browsing. Measures to throttle the maximum number of connections are being taken so hopefully this will soon be a thing of the past.
Anyway, to whoever jumped on his bike to ride to the server location facility today (Ton, Marco, Stefan?): thanks for bringing xserve back to us!
