Wind Turbine Demo by Bassam Kurdali
Bassam Kaurdali creator of the ManCandy model, Rig and DVD Rigging tutorial created a visual for new type of Wind Turbine which is featured on MIT‘s Technology Review site.
“All visuals are made in blender, soundtrack (music) is by Jan Morgenstern, Voiceover is rather hurriedly recorded by me, voice is Fateh Slavitsky. I did all the visual work in blender as I said; initially I imported a model as an STL from pro-E, but it was very high poly and messy, so I re-topo’d it in blender to a lower poly model that I could just subsurf. Explosion of the windmill is based on a popular (at the time) viral vid on youtube of a real turbine falling apart. Used the explosion modifier, which at the time had a bug that prevented motion blur. the colored flowlines are blender particles on shadeless normal blended spheres (no light) and use ton’s awesome curved vector motion blur and some compositor effect. The whole thing is edited in the blender compositor. The credit scroll
is a 3D scene.”
Wow!! Really impressive!
Quote: “Used the explosion modifier, which at the time had a bug that prevented motion blur.”
Did you get a bug fix for that? Or did you work round it?
The animation was sexy, and the idea was even sexier :) .
Sounds like a very welcome and reliable alternative to current wind turbines.
Sweet. Hope this works in the real world.
WOW!
This really beats most of the CGI explanations I’ve seen on documentals! I really liked the effect of the wind running through both sides of the turbine, or when the turbine was disassembled (reminded me of one of those crazy array modifier demos back in the day it was released in Blender).
It was really cool, AND informative!
I really hope this comes to the real world too.
That voice… I kept expecting Mancandy to climb up and start swinging from the turbine blades!
Beautiful work, Bassam.
Yeah, great animation, and that particular issue of TR looks like required reading.
My first commercial animation was made using blender and it was with wind turbines as well :D
Great animation btw! I really enjoyed it.
I had to laugh when I saw the ‘lots of stuff on trucks’ comparison at the end, well done :)
WOOOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It is so professional, and great idea about the new turbin.
You can create anything with blender but did you know you can program a hardware interface into BGE? one day one might be able to use BGE to control wind turbine … here is the link !
http://www.simonblackmore.net/notes/doku.php?id=wiring_to_blender
Nice animation and nice energy generation method. I do wonder how loud these things will be, how many noise do they make compared to normal windmill?
i cannot get this video to display on the TechRev-Site
(blank page with the internal brightcove.com link) :(
Is there any alternative stream or download?
great!
now blender also has contribution to new power research!
viva blender! good bye pollution!
Whoa, Bassam’s work in my alumni magazine. That’s great looking work.
So instead of looking at graphs and numbers in the control room, you have the BGE show the wind turbines? That would be a great help too for logistic systems for better visualization.
Nice presentation by the way. We all know years ago that Blender is capable, so props to Basam for realizing this.
But the new wind turbine design makes green energize more vailable. I wonder if they sell this as a consumer product too. Wouldn’t mind a smaller version of that powering my whole house.
O yeah! Jan Morgenstern soundtrack as always sets the mood perfectly. He’s a one man army.
Awesome video and the music is great too! Congrats.
Guest2 wrote at Jan 22nd, 2009 at 2:47 pm:
“i cannot get this video to display on the TechRev-Site”
problem solved. you need to have referers enabled
and ad-busters disabled to see it. :(
great vid. uses even smoke effects. nice.
Amazing detail! I think that it turned out really well with the retopology. The surfaces look smooth and clean.
NathanKP
thanks guys!
RedBirdIII: it’s been fixed in blender, but not in the video; the client just didn’t care )
Excellent job, Bassam Kurdali! Do I get one of those turbines?!! lol. The part about minimizing the spacing of the turbines would have been better if you showed the comparison (with the new turbines) sooner, so that it fit with the narration. The music was maybe a little too “rock-like” for a documentary-ad video, but the beginning was very nice! Overall, excellent, excellent job, sir! I have downloaded your Mancandy FAQ through Miro and just need to figure out what order to watch them in, set the time aside, and go watch and learn and practice. Cheers!
go clean energy! go bassam!
Very professional and well organized!
However not easy to assimilate the whole information in one view.
The flashing wind stream effect – great! Another Blender mistery to solve :)
What is the production time of the animation (incl. modeling) if not secret?
hehe, thanks again for the nice comments and thoughts folks.
Syziph: initial part of the project was about a week; including meeting with client, learning how the stuff worked etc. if I remember correctly (this was a while ago). The idea then was to provide a bunch of video ‘slides’ that would go into the clients powerpoint presentation.
after that there was some input from the scientists and marketers at the company, to edit / add things for technical correctness or for more pr reasons. Around the same time I saw the presentation that was being made, and said, why not do the whole thing as a video instead of a bunch of slides? so they agreed, we did a combination of working and adding shots for the next two weeks, and this video was born.
Almost everything you see was done ‘on the cheap’ to render really fast. (big thanks to aao for this, btw). some shots have no lights and no aao either, it is just self illuminating textures and compo. Nice thing about using blender (and linux) was that I could work on my laptop on one shot, while in a terminam ‘blender -b’ was rendering the other shot; even though the cpu’s were pinned at 100% or close to it according to the system monitor, the multitasking was so smooth I didn’t even really feel a loss of interactivity while I worked :)
Wow, that was a lot longer reply than I had anticipated, sorry.
i found this very fascinating. I hope these turbines get used to their full potential.
the animation was excellent and expressive. Great work.
very impressed, I was wondering why no one used that type of turbine yet. It looks like they went even a step ahead and added those aerodynamic enclosures to redirect wind into the turbine and create a vortex effect.
Nice work, looks very professional to me; it looks like our Blender does not only make our life more exciting, but also our world much cleaner!
Thanks for reply, Bassam!
It seems you have very effective workflow there!
For animated presentation is better to to limit the color variation and effects so the viewer could concentrate on the idea.
I think moderate combination of simple and more sofisticated shots works best.
After all the target audience are not pretentious blenderheads :)
Once again, well done!
that’s awesome
This was a great tech-visualisation. I was most impressed by the airstreams and the resulting vortex.
This turbine design is very close to a jet engine (as said). And i think this might be the problem: noise :-(
anyway, very good viz of a good idea.
rubicon, somehow I don’t think so; one of the specific previous projects this company undertook was making jet engines quiet- the other reason is that these blades, while faster than windmills, are many orders of magnitude slower moving than a jet engine.
I saw this when it showed up on an environmental site and thought “that’s probably the hippest tech demo I’ve *ever* watched”, mostly thinking about the music. So I stuck thru to the credits, realized I’d seen the name of the composer before, and knew there was only one man who coulda done graphics those graphics… well done!
I was kinda curious how long it was gonna take to show up here, actually, cause it’s such a great example of blender being used for something outside of the purely artistic or commercial (ok, it’s really an ad when you get down to it, but it’s so different from all the “ads” I’ve seen in blender reels and for such a different audience that I really think it might get some people who’ve never considered blender as a possible tool for them to take a look).
Am I the only one who thinks it’s weird that two people from that company are named Stanley Kowalski? … STELLA!!!
Seriously though, great job Bassam! (As always!)
Regards,
Chris
Hos, not the only one….. and in case you wondered, they are father and son (Junior and SK the third.. so yes, the grandfather is the original from streetcar ;)
Stan Kowalski is a very common polish name- not sure but it might be as ubiquitous as John Smith is supposed to be.