After seeing the two threads about the new amateur film (video) called “V de Vicioso”, a parody of the 80′s “V” tv series and how all the 3D VFX was done with Blender, Bart (I’m posting in his name – etr9j) asked Nicolas Morenas (Caronte – the guy who did all the Blender work) some questions on the project:
After some quiet reflection on how to support armatures, Illusoft has released an update to their Collada 1.4 plugin for Blender (now version 0.3.91) with – guess what – beta armature support, and the following features/bug fixes:
The Quake Community site Quake3Bits has published an extensive series of video tutorials on terrain creation in Blender and on exporting the resulting model to Quake. Obviously, they’re aimed at the novice Blender user but they do go into subjects such as mesh modeling, assigning multiple materials to a mesh, UV mapping and UV painting.
Alvaro Luna Bautista pointed us to a great YafRay/Lighting discussion that has just recently been translated into English.
The Blender Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects are still going strong and their is still more that we haven’t touched on. We’ve looked at the very early stages of the Sculpt tool, the Modifier Stack Upgrade, and now we look at Dmitriy Mazovka’s Sky Gen project.
Not Blender news, but think of Jahshaka as Blender’s cousin. As an open source project Jahshaka was part of the Open Source Pavillion at Siggraph with us. Jahshaka is a realtime editing and effects system supporting Linux, OsX, Irix and Windows, and is certainly an up-and-comer in the open source graphics/film community. They certainly got plenty of attention at Siggraph, so I expect nothing but good things coming from the team.
Colin Levy (effstops) has done it again. Not only has he made another great film, but he’s also posted a great video entitled “Breakdown/Overview of a VFX Shot in Suburban Plight.” This overview is what Colin presented at Siggraph at the Open Source Pavillion to show what Blender can do. Bart never got a chance to film Colin in action so we are lucky to have the overview available to us!
After the extensive re-making (and addition of an extended version) of my texture painting for material mixing video tutorials and thinking about it’s use of UV’s, I realized that one tutorial in particular was great for learning about them. But where could I go to find it?
Okay, this post is going to be a bit silly but I had a laugh when it happened to me so I guess I’ll share it with you!
As you may know, Elephants Dream was released under a Creative Commons license. This license encourages you to do anything you want with all the files (including the audio and video), as long as you give proper credit to the creators. Some people have picked up on this and have started making remixes of the movie.
