Sculpting And Demo Reeling With Matt Ebb
Yet again Matt Ebb shows us the power of Blender in his latest work and demo reel.
Matt says:
It’s interesting how productive one can be without the constant distractions of the internet. I’m alive and well in my new place and enjoying it a lot, but thanks to incompetent phone companies I’ve been disconnected from the net for the 2 1/2 weeks I’ve been here…..
I’m using a build that’s about 3 or 4 weeks out of date, but even so, it works very nicely already.
Although it doesn’t have many of the features and speed of an application like Zbrush, at least from my experience in both apps, it’s quite competitive for a lot of purposes. The tight integration of the sculpting tools with the rest of Blender is a huge plus – being able to step down from level 7 to level 4 subdivision, use Blender’s UV tools to unwrap the mesh and having the UV layout propagate up to the higher res surface is just fantastic. At the rate things were going previously, I wouldn’t be surprised if the current development version is a lot better, too. This little test below took an evening to sculpt and another day or so for the remaining stuff like lighting, skin shader, colour and bump map painting.
We couldn’t have said it better Matt. We hope you get your technical issues worked out. Also, during his spare time Matt has managed to put together a nice demo reel. Make sure to check it out.
I know what he means about the internet. sometimes I just want to break my cable modem it’s so distracting. I can’t stop. it’s an addiction, much worse than tv…
While this it is true that Z-brush has many more sculpting featueres. Z-brush is a 2.5d (not 3d) application that lacks many (old) modeling tools blender has. Also, Z-brush, in 3d sculpting mode, on my g5, is slower than the new sculpt mode in Blender. I would be interested to know if other Z-brush users noticed similar performance differences. One thing that blender does badly need, though, is correct Tangent Space normal mapping, and perhaps a normal map/displacement map, generation tool. I don’t see the need for better displacement mapping at the moment though, since sculpt mode makes this unnecessary (you can animate a low-res mesh, and render a high-res one, without a displacement map). Keep in mind, displacment mapping would generate a dense mesh at render time anyway (unless blender started using a reyes renderer).
@NodeRanger: Just unplug the network cable, put on good music, turn off the phone, lock the door, isolate yourself, and open blender. Personally, i keep myself plugged in but turn off IM.
@michael crawford: i heard that the next release and the current cvs has tangent-space normal-maps…
it does, personally i couldn’t figure out how to use them though, so hopefully there will be good end user docs.
LetterRip
how can my blender do this
@Simhar: I build from CVS i know. But somebody has pointed out a big problem that needs to get fixed. Right now it does not produce results identical to other applications. Details here:
http://projects.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2006-September/015841.html
@LetterRip: It’s as easy as using OS normal maps. You just have to generate the map first. You can do this with a lowres mesh and a highres mesh using any number of tools. (melody by nvidia for pc, z-brush/ati’s normal mapper for mac (source only), orb for pc… etc) You can always get used to the technique in another application before blender’s NMap TS support is finalized.
@denn:
If you use a mac I just posted a build (by psyborgue) on the forums that you can try but I would recommend leaving TS normal mapping alone until all issues are resolved and it is known to produce the correct result.
Very impressive showreel, Matt.
“incompetent phone companies”…
Does this mean there are competent ones?
no sculpting movie?
very neat/.. Sad thing is ,,, alot of that could be done in real time opengl now.. instead of blenders old scanline..
great work anyway
Hi guys, thanks for the interest in the reel, it’s great, but unfortunately it’s sent me *way* over my web traffic allowances. I really can’t afford to pay the extra fees at the moment, so I have to remove it for now…
Sorry about that, if someone has a mirror that I could temporarily use until this all dies down, I’d really appreciate it!
thanks,
Matt
Why not just upload the demo reel to google video or youtube?
Because Google or youtube videos are small and ridiculously poorly compressed so putting the reel there, which is meant to showcase visual quality, would be self-defeating. Anyway, Rui ‘rcas’ Campos has helped me out with a temporary mirror, so all is well :)