Just out of curiosity: what was your Blender week like? Did you manage to finish a project, did you learn something cool, did you have a great time exploring Blender 2.60? It's Friday! So kick back, grab a drink and let's have a chat!
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About the Author
Bart Veldhuizen
I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.
126 Comments
Grrrr.... Working with cloth simulation. Thinking the code needs more work, or I need to be smarter. Not sure which.
What's the problem?
I also happened to play for the first time with cloth simulation a couple of weeks ago and had a lot of problems with it, most of them surely are because of the workflow I was using, but even so, they were a pain, and I don't think I was making anything of extreme pecualirity.
- Wanted to animate the cloth pinning feature. Not possible, and would be nice to have IMHO.
- I was having constant crashes when trying to animate or just check a certain frame from a scene. Apparently the plane used for the cloth simulation happened to have too much faces (IIRC, it was a normal plane, with 13 subdivisions, and a solidify and level 1 subsurf modifiers, is it really that much?),
- My cloth was constantly getting through some of my meshes. I tried different collision settings,with no luck, but I guess I don't know much about them and surely I could have tweaked them better. This was not happening always tho, just on some reproductions.
- I found myself having to clean baked models, and/or modifying the ending frame to cache. Maybe I'm just fooling myself, but I believe it sometimes gave me nice results.
I surely may be missing some other things.
I just don't know if the standard cloth sim's code is advanced enough yet, without doing a lot of hacking to get stuff to work. Plus calculations are killing me 90frames is taking about 2 hours. Makes for long days at work.
Your settings are too high :P and those are just artifacts :P try starting again.
My Blender highlight: I just received the three Suzanne awards in the mail from Shapeways! ooh-ooh-ooh! See you next Saturday :)
Any chance for a photo? :D
The statues are for Ton - I'll leave it up to him to surprise you guys ;-)
Well, for me... it's Friday, Friday... gotta get down on Friday...
Have you eaten your cereal?
I am slowly converting an 3Dsmax user to an Blender user. He is at that point, that he says, Blender is the better tool for organic Mesh modeling.
Awesome! Of course, we also have a much nicer community ;)
I know, but he doesn't relay care about it. He want something that is good and easy to work with. And as 3DsMax User he have many problems to understand Blender Core Concepts, like the Texturesystem/Unrwapping or the most of the Animation tools. So I have to show him slowly more and more Concepts and cool stuff until that day how he could do it all by him self. ^^
I'm trying to convert a Maya user to Blender .. he's interested in it but .. I don't know if he'll ever fully convert.
I know what you mean.
When you're used to one program that costs you your first born (Maya, 3DS, SoftImage) why move to anything else? That's how he feels at least. Sure, Blender may not be completely at Maya level, but it's getting dag close.
That is not the Problem of my "Student", because he get to 3DsMax through the school for free. His Problem is more the case that he learned something in 3DsMax and if he don't get the same or similar result in Blender in the first try (5 Klicks or so), he says Blender is Crap Close it and Open 3Dsmax again.
Ah the impatience of the young.
A good friend of mine said that if a program is so easy anyone can make a masterpiece then they're not creating art, they're clicking a generate button.
New 2.6 is lovely. Did the rigging tut on Blender Guru, which was great. Tested the changes in the sequencer, great except it crashed when running a sequence with lots of strips and effects that I did last fall. It had worked with 2.59 of last year. Still not liking that the noodles in the logic bricks can't be moved/changed. Otherwise, super!
For me I found and built a yafaray 0.1.2beta version without too many bugs and put it in the blender exporter. Tried (and got confused) by Cycles' nodes. Can't wait for them to have more documentation.
Heheey, after that "first" thing post, you really do this huh? :D Right now i have nothing to say about my blender week yet, but i'm eager to read about other people's story. Blender community unique and (hopefully) inspiring stories. Maybe this is a very good idea. Really good work Bart. I hope this is gonna turn into something good in the future. Those images at the top of BlenderNation page are refreshing already. With this kind of new post for a chance, i think i like BlenderNation more.
Thanks! Sometimes you have to try new things, right? I think it's fun to have a chance to talk 'off topic' with you guys a bit, so let's see how this goes :)
Oh, I'm always looking for new header graphics, keep them coming! I'll upload a new bunch tomorrow.
Just got out of school and can't wait to get blending!
That's the spirit! What are you workng on?
About to start rendering an Anti-smoking ad I've been working on all week.
Random Gripes(Week of Oct 17):
-Get Bullet for regular Blender in already!!!!!
-Why are Particles so buggy and on the fritz?
I've made my first object animation even though it's not Blender related I thought it would be nice to share
What was it? You can share a pic here if you like..
During school I did a presentation in a 3d animation class about the projects I have worked on in Blender, and they have decided to change the 3d studio from 3dsmax to Blender because of 3dsmax's costly updates for the school.
Wow! An argument that I often hear from schools is that other 3d apps offer more job opportunities than Blender. How did your school think about that?
Times are changing Blender is becoming pro now...
Most of the kids started to use Blender because apparently their version of 3dsmax was bugging out so the school decided to take the free open source program instead of updating each computer with 3dsmax which would cost them about $1600 for each computer.
Blender week indeed! Been working on my Unity game and creating game characters for it in Blender. Lots of fun!
I've seen your blog. Last panda on earth? Poor panda. You sure don't wanna make the panda a little bit fat?
On the story I'm trying to speak out about the situation of pandas as they are on verge of extinction mainly because of their lazyness and about how their natural habitat is been taken away from them and so on but all this between the lines. I thought of making the panda look traditionally a bit plumpy but decided to go with this design as i want him to be a badass-character and this form boosts his personality more :'D
I think Xone has a good point. To me the panda looses a lot of pandaness if it is that skinny. Maybe you can make him more voluminous and also accentuate muscles? By doing so you might increase the familiarity while maintaining badassness.
Other than that it looks very cool. Also the story sounds interesting.
I so want to start digging into Blender 2.60 - but had been working on ipad apps all week and learning LUA programming so I've not had the chance to really play with it. I have 101 things I want to do I just need to do it!
I was testing cycles with and old model that I made in blender 2.54... 5 hours to render just an image... hehehe... Testing blender 2.6 in Spanish, and recording two videotutorials
I'm exploring BGE to create a subbuteo like game with my hometown soccer team players.
'football' ;)
Ps. subbuteo is awsome!
Hmmm, now inserting pose keys changes them for all frames, not just current one.
A bug?
Wasn't sure. No one else reported it on the bug site. So, I'm going to test again at home with my WIndows version. This one was with Mac version.
Found my problem. I'd thought I'd set auto key for both rot & loc, but sadly was only set to rot. My bad.
Was a funny week between cycles, sculpt mod and retopo ! Just have to finish my project now !
Here exploring Quick Fur, Explode, Smoke and Fluid. And participating in the pumpkin contest. Result: a horrible hairy pumpkin, hehehe :D
I played a bit with some animation properties and the graph editor. Not rocket science, but never played with it under Blender. Also tried to rig some models, didn't quite get the result I expected, but just spent a bit of time with it.
No Blender for me this week. Just developing/installing apps for Android. Though the apps contain Blender 3D animations.
Finally had the enouth spare time to work on an interior design on http://www.lighthouseanimation.es this week! Was fun working on these things I don't work usually...
I made a usb stick model i will publish as free ressource for everyone to put their logo on and render with cycles :D
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?234414
Still waiting for blendswap to moderate my file.
I have been working on green screen keying and 2d node compositing work. My brother just recently got hermit crabs and the very first night one of them woke me up at 2:00 in the morning 'cause it was trying to escape, it had pushed the lid up and was attempting to gets its shell through the opening. So I decided to make the hermit crab an action star. My brother printed out paper with chromakey green on it, I filmed the hermit crab holding onto a rope in front of the green screen and then in Blender 2.60 keyed out the green. I then placed our tv behind the crab, added cracks to the screen in GIMP and comped some detfilms explosions over the tv and tada! Action star hermit crab blowing up the evil masters tv!
Hi! I'm a teenager from spain and in this blender week I put the final sounds effects into my first blender animation http://vimeo.com/30597257 . Wenesday I had an idea and today I'm working in my new project: The gravity's theory!
I'm struggling with some cycles materials/lighting . Is the first time I ever try to make some interior architectural render.I think I'm gonna have to check LOTS of cycles tutorials (?
I started a little project to learn about real and cg characters integration, playing with a HDRI handmade, the IronMan model at BlendSwap, and the new Camera Tracker, and of course Blender2.60 :)
I didn't really do anything this week :(
Hopefully I'll start working again on a different project this weekend/next week. The old one was a big re-topology project(at least for me. >_<), so I've decided to do something simple. :P
I wonder.....
Oh, that and I'm waiting 'till someone compiles a Windows(64 bit) and/or Linux (32 bit) 2.6 + Cycles thing on graphicall :)
I haven't done much in Blender this week.
Mostly playing around with a ring I created in Blender, trying to make it low-resolution-compatible, while still looking nice.
It's amazing the number of objects you need when you're writing a "connect-three" type game...
Great idea for this Friday afternoon Blender chat!
I 'snuck in' a fun blender project at the office this week. Our department hosted a 'chili' lunch with the proceeds going to charity, and I volunteered to do the poster. Rather than use a photograph or some clipart, I (of course) opted to create something in Blender. I'm happy to say, it was a hit!
Would you care to share the poster here? You can attach images to these posts. Thanks!
Spent a little time familiarizing myself with the rigging toolset in Blender. Trying to decide whether to move my company from an Autodesk studio over to a Blender studio. So far its looking good!
How many people are working with 3D software in your company? What kind of products do you make?
I too looked at the rigging tutorial on blenderguru. I love it when somebody who knows what they're doing tells you what a feature actually does and it's just what you've been looking for. In my case it was "Automatic Weight Paint" when associating an armature to a mesh and it's made a lovely job of painting the mesh on a dog character I am working on. I was having a great deal of trouble getting a smooth and gradual flexing around his shoulders and by putting in enough geometry in it has done the trick much more consistently than I could paint it. For anybody else looking at this I would recommend not having little features like the eyelid bones in place until afterwards as they grabbed whole chunks of the head rather than just the eyelids. Also the neck bone grabbed the inside back of the mouth but a judicious bit of add/subtract/blur manual weight painting has solved these.
How was my Blender week? Not at all. Soulcrushing dayjob is soulcrushing. :<
Do you have BlenderNation access on the job?
Been studying a lot on rigging, participating on forums...
I actually learnt how to do stretchy bendy arms! wich are AWESOME! for cartoony characters...
i wonder, is there a way to attach vertices to something like hooks, but to do the inverse thing, meaning that the object stays parented to the vertex?.
basically what i want to do is i did a head super stretch/squash control with a mesh deform, but since it's like that when i do the squash/stretch controls stay where they were originally and don't follow the face, i guess if i could attach them to certain vertices it would work... wouldn't it?
i would like if anyone could gimme a hand on this :D
Did you try to use actual hooks? (select the vertices to be hooked and strg+h)
you can do vertex parenting, select the child object, select the parent, enter edit mode, select 1 or 3 vertex and ctrl+p. it works with 1 vertex (only location) or 3 vertices (loc/rot/scale) . If your controller is an object it should work, but if you want to parent bones to vertex then you'ill have to make some kind of dirty/complicated vaudoo tricks,
Also you can make an python UI for your rig, it can be much cleaner without controlers in front of the face you're animating. But that's another story :)
Good luck !
i've been workin on an iphone concept for blenderguru contest
Long week, sore eyes!
i called johan hill, and talked xD
I got school, so I don't work with Blender until the weekend. Lately I've just been practicing with the modeling tools.
Working on a game...having issues with rigify and the game engine otherwise going well.
I've worked on tire for tractor. But someone had an issue with cloth sim, for him/her I want to say this tip: remember to use real world scales. Blender don't like very much if you use a sheet, which has a size of 200 metres x 200 metres :)
Been struggling with sculpting tex painting for a project. Can't believe how slow it gets when image is bigger than 1200x1200. Hopefully will this finished over the weekend so I can move on to the setting.
Updating conceptional ideas for future blender projects and a cold beer !
I've been recording all week for my new training series... Oh and I modeled a robot for a change of pace!
New series! Can't wait to hear more about that! Are we still on for our Skype call this Monday?
I think I'm about to try something with voxels in the BGE. We'll see how it goes. :D
EDIT: My profile looks very shady right now for some reason. I guess I don't have a profile picture... XD
I modeled a 4 bar linkage for an employer. Nothing huge, just a quick product visualization.
by the way your new site looks good
and this week nice to see 2.60 but was expecting what we gone get in 2.61
now hope there are not too many bugs this time near christmass!LOL
but it will be a nice chirstmass gift this 2.61 with the new Nurbs tools i hope since last year
and that one is gone be fun hopefully with Bmesh included and dynamic sculpt may be with UC
blender is moving foward like a turtle but it's still moving so it's a good news i guess
it was underestimated a lot and don't know any big project that was not
cause there are so many unknows estimation becomes a big wild guess
so have fun with 2.6
Thanks for the compliment, Ricky!
Built my first body armor/ robot suit, for several story ideas I've got. The head is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhrN-i6NSLk
and the full turntable is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clyF9Ba4Oxw I've learned that the Solidify Section script is a real winner, but it helps to make sure that you're not solidifying something that's already solid!
From the turntable animation it looks like you have some overlapping or intersecting geometry.
I'm working on a space scene right now. and I'm having problems with the stars. We all know that the internal 'star engine' is not good for animations, because when moving, the stars are flickering. So I tried another method, which is basically a giant icosphere rendered with halo, but the problem is the same. the stars are flickering, when the camera moves. anybody knows a good solution for this?
In the past, I've just used a photo of stars, (from NASA) or created one in Photoshop and used it as a shadeless texture on the inside of a sphere. Not sure if that helps or not, but it's solved the star flickering problem for me.
found out that my short "clocked in" got in another international film festival. Been playing with 2.60 and also having some fun with some of the newer freestyle branch features.
I need to start on another project. i'm thinking this next project will have more detailed scenery/textured/colors since my last two projects have been stylized B&W. I need to brush up on my UV and texturing skills. Krita and Gimp, get ready.
I'm also going to start making a short opengl rendered animation every week. these will be simple actions, lipsyncs, walkcycles, kills, deaths, etc. just bare rig/model + motion.
spent all week with blender figuring out how to import from poser, got the mdd import working, but having so much data in shapekeys made the renders crash. Updated to ubunut 11.10 64 bit to use more RAM and it started working:) A good week.
That's interesting. I didn't think one could use Poser content in Blender. Did the Poser rig data transfer in the mdd file too, or did you have to re-rig your character in Blender? Sounds cool.
MDD is shapekey data (it creates a shapekey for every frame thereby giving you exact import of the animation, although it's difficult to modify once in blender) I actually submitted a patch to blender to fix the import.) You have to export an obj initially from poser and import it from blender and never touch the mesh or do anything to change it's vertex order. Then set up your materials in a master blend file. You can then import mdds to the object in blender. It works great except you have to modify the poser animation to divide by four (at least) and then change the step size to four so you end up with a shape key every four frames since shape key every animation frame eats memory for breakfast.
well so far coming up with random ideas for, hopefully, a small animated short idea ive been trying to make for ages!!!
not coming along so well as far as settling on one and beginning the modeling and animating process.
i did enter the weekend challenge again though :D
Wow, look at all the comments here! Awesome! :)
Yea, makes me wonder how's all blender developers doing last week. I can't imagine how our heroes fighting BUG monsters every day, so we can blendering our 3d juices happily. It would be nice if they can join us too, and tell us their epic stories here.
im making a modern church for an re project for school its going well :D
I rediscovered the potent power of Blender's auto-rigging system, which allow me to rig the following two human models in less than 30 mins.
http://vimeo.com/30849598
That's one scary video!
I never realized that it could look that way. Thank you for your observation, Bart. :)
Great topic ;)
I've been working on a GoKart model... But three days ago I got a MacBook ;D
So I had to stop working on my project... finaly I am working again on my projects
he Keybord is so much different :/
I realy need some time to get used to it
This is what I could model until now: https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-DAlkIiCZoYo/TpXnSpMvuDI/AAAAAAAAAM4/IsD9cyqKnpY/s1280/Screen.jpg
Sweet. Nice render too!
Thanks ;)
I just uploaded some more header graphics. Keep them coming!
I just uploaded some more header graphics. Keep them coming! #b3d
Ah cool, a contributor to The Blu! Please let me know how you like their process. Do they really give good feedback etcetera?
Yup! They are awesome! so far I only posted my WIP on the forum and I got instant feedback from one of the artists and other users :) I'm really loving it!
I had hoped to manage more blender related work, especially trying out the new 2.60, but unfortunately the update to kubuntu 11.10 destroyed this wish very effectively.
It took me the last weekend and all of my precious freetime during the week to get to a working system again.
Anyway I am now eagerly diving into finishing my dragon to be able to finish the remaining shots from my short (http://www.loramel.net).
I have to fight some oversights ( on my side ) in combination with corrective shapekeys.
A highlight was definitely the arrival of a silver pendant I designed in blender as let shapeways print it out for me. Its a birthday present for my wife.
Been working hard on my short film made in blender. LOOTS of rendering!! up to 9 minutes a frame!!! for a short film contest titled Shindig. I hope i get it done in time :S
trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNk-xCbxnTw
Explored the cycles render engine. Especially with compositing for glow and light streaks effects. Since there no more
different RenderLayers in cycles you have to manage with RGB-Curves and Input-Nodes.
Finally i think thats well done.
This week I worked on this video i just uploaded on youtube. Wanted to try out the tomato build. I had hoped to finish it sooner but I discovered that Blender Smoke simulations don't play well with each other which slowed down my progress a bit. Anyway fixed the problems using the compositor and the effect turned out better than expected. Blender's tool set is really getting very powerful.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAEtg2L7h1I
Nice tracking!
I had similar sounding problems with smoke at one point - the solution is to use one giant volumetric cube with the texture data for all the smoke domains mapped to it.
For some reason that solution did not work for me. With the new domain, the voxels rendered in the correct positions. So I know i got the mapping right. But which ever material/texture was first layer occluded the one below it. Had it worked I would have a much simpler compositor setup.
Did my first fluid animation, turned out to be easier than I thought.
Yesterday, I showcased my project focusing on how I use Blender in a big shopping mall here in Nuremberg, Bavaria, Germany. Furthermore I presented the Motion Capture process via Microsofts "Kinect" and how to transfer the data to Blender. People were stunned by the abilities of Blender :) Also the biggest local newspaper came to my stand and asked me about my project. It was very cool.
Thanks Blender Community!
Hey, cool to hear it turned out so well :)
This week I found out that some brave students are building a FabLab on our campus! Volunteered to do some Blender classes once they got their RepRap Prusa Mendel working well :)
Funny this came up now. I started a creative-blog-thing about week ago, and have been spending a lot more Blender-time than planned to get postable material.
Mainly I've been polishing my familiarity with the sculpting and rigging tools, but also done some animation to test-drive said rigs. The new animation system tweaks are wonderful!
Worked all the week on finishing an animation, "Marcel Haka", which will be available tomorrow, for the final of rugby ;) It's a short test of rigging / animation of the main character of a tale, made 100% with blender... We're at the beginning of this project, but it's on track now !I promise to send you a link to the video when it's ready (hope this Saturday evening)see you !.P
Trying my hand at an idea for a scene i had, just a sort of factory deal with lots of debris and things.
Having a hard time finding good reference on Flickr though...maybe it's that i can't articulate what i am going for into words,I've been stuck using keywords like "factory" and "warehouse" to no avail, if anyone wants a look I'll upload a picture.
Also finally gave sculpting a go and i am pleasantly surprised as to how much easier i found it for characters, i actually posted a thread on blenderartists a while ago about how i sucked at character modelling and just couldn't get the hang of it, but sculpting seems alot easier to me,i guess it's the visual feedback that you seem to get from sculpting.
Been working on exporting mesh sets from Unity 3d into for tweaking, then reimporting back into unity with all the mods in perfect position. Not working too bad, actually. Won't work with animations, though. Good for making game maps.
I think you can tell by the number of comments on this post what a good idea the 'how was your blender week' is. Have to say it's nice to see so many people working on blender.
Personally I've been working on my first real blender 'scene' as I normally just focus on building individual objects, hopefully I'll have a WIP image to show next week if, we have a similar friday post.
Indeed, the number of comments is amazing. I'd better start thinking of a question for next week!
Trying to finish this BGE Tuturial I am making. Having problem with my screen recorder but this are getting better. Should be able to do it.^^
I made the second one of the new tutorials of agenzasbrothers.de
I don't know if anybody knows this site
there are good german blender tutorials, especially for beginners :)
Seems I'm a little bit too late for a Friday reply.
My Blender week was awesome (or so I thought it was)!
Just finished a very short clip for the Halloween, just to
feed my urge to get something Blender-related and to
experiment with some stuff I have thought of.For a treat; somebody emailed me a few hours ago asking
for the blend file of my Boids Boids Boids video http://vimeo.com/13969685,
you can download it here > http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9701519/boids.blendHappy Blending! ^_^-Reyn
Hello!
It seems I can't post news in BlenderNation... So here is links to our past 2 weeks animation work :
MARCEL HAKA :
http://dai.ly/no5uz3
or (same video) :
http://vimeo.com/30955034
Thanks for watching !
FIrst I'd like to say, I like this idea of a Friday Hangout, Bart. I have been working with the Paper Model Add On by Addam Dominec (Emu). I really am excited about the possibilities it provides. I still am having trouble with another project. I am looking to render an animation for a dome (for a planetarium. It seems the Game Engine will display for a full dome (Fish Eye), but not the main renderer. Does anyone have any ideas on this?
Mine's been good thanks, I got a place on the TOSMI training course in Bulgaria!! :D
wich week first or second?, i'm in the second :D
Nice! Is that via one of those grant positions?
Nice work!