Blender: Another lighthouse

Made another low-poly lighthouse scene in Blender because I like lighthouse. This one has a similar style of lighting to my last attempt but I made it brighter to look like its day time. The shape of the lighthouse has been greatly improved, and could be improved even more if I wanted to spend the time on it. I was experimenting with using depth in the composition, with the closer things in the foreground having more detail and faces, and in the distance it having less. The effect this gave ended up looking pretty good.

Blender: Smoke Logo

I’ve been trying to make a short, introduction style video in Blender, to use on the videos I make in the future. My idea was having my name written in smoke, which then falls down flat onto a surface; seems simple enough.

The font I used for my name was Futura; I wanted to use as sans-serif font as I like them and Blender wouldn’t let me use Helvetica Neue, which is what I initially wanted to use so I settled for Futura. Its still a nice font, with good shapes so I’m not really complaining.

Below is a screenshot of the smoke in Blender. To achieve this, I have a particle system in the shape of the letters, and each particle emits smoke, thus creating my name in smoke! As the timeline progresses the smoke falls downwards onto the surface below and spreads out and then dissipates.

 

However i’ve come to an impasse. I need to change some settings on the smoke box, so that it is visible to the camera when it is rendered but the settings just aren’t there. After about an hour attempting to get it to work it still won’t. So this has put a halt to my progress with rendering out the animation as a video which I can use. So for now, you can all enjoy a screenshot and a description of my dream, while I wallow in self pity and anger.

Blender: Logo Test

This short video was from the result of an introduction to importing .SVG files, and using keyframes in Blender. The end result aim was to make a short ~3 second animation of my logo or name as an introduction for my videos in the future. As this one was a test, and I am yet to decide on a logo, I went for the Wii logo instead. There wasn’t really any special decision behind this other than the fact I searched google for ‘.SVG logo’ and it was one that came up there.

The video is a quick test render so we could see what the end result would look like, without waiting forever for it to render out. This is why there is no background or lighting. I did this a few days ago in a workshop but no longer have the file so there is no way for me to finish it, unless i remake it and start again (seems kind of pointless though, putting all that effort into the Wii logo).

In this, we have the logo spinning, while the camera zooms out from an extreme close up to a covering shot, to reveal the whole logo. It’s not exactly a groundbreaking animation, as it has probably been done hundreds of times before, but it looks good, it works, and more importantly it was just a test and introduction into moving objects and placing keyframes in a timeline.

From here I will hopefully do a more complete video, with lighting, a background and my own logo or name.  However it’s debatable whether or not I will get it finished in time as the deadline for this project is tomorrow and I hate using Blender; not a good combination.

Blender: Mysterious Name

Here’s yet another creation in Blender, this time of a blue cloth draped delicately over some text. Before I say any more, yes, I am aware that the quality is rather low, and it annoys me to no end. As my laptop lacks a graphics card, I have to render using the CPU/integrated graphics (thanks Apple) which means it takes a long time. And frankly, I don’t have time for that. This one is at a quality of 100 passes, but preferably i’d like to do it at 2000 to get a decent quality result.

Anyway, back to topic. The cloth is made by using the soft-body physics in Blender, which does pretty much what you would expect by the name. Instead of being rigid (like my text for example), it’s soft… and falls as the timeline plays as shown in the screenshots below. The cloth starts as a flat plane, but as the timeline plays, the simulated gravity pulls it down.

The plane on the left, is emitting a bright white light, which is the main source of illumination for the scene, and the one on the right is emitting a dimmer purple light. I used the second plane to balance out the lighting a bit more so it wasn’t washed out by the white, and gave it a bit more depth. Looking at the result, I should’ve used a slightly different colour for the background compared to the floor, as it looks a bit like the name and cloth is randomly floating around in space or something.

The idea of covering my name with a cloth was based around the idea of a ‘grand reveal’ of it. I had the idea of creating a small video clip of my name fully covered by the cloth, then it being whipped off, revealing the text in all its glory. At the moment, the cloth doesn’t really show the curves of the letter forms very well, so the only letter you can be certain is there is the ‘K’ as thats not covered. Perhaps it may be possible to reduce the rigidity of the cloth so it shows the shape of the tops of the letters a bit more, or add more points where the cloth could bend but this in turn will require even more computing power and make my laptop even slower.  The video idea will have to wait though, until there is a better way to render it out than on my laptop (Praying that Rob comes through with the render farm).

Blender: Low Poly Scene

I tried my hand at making a low poly(gon) scene, having looked at a tutorial. I found it incredibly frustrating to make due to my lack of mouse which makes using Blender a lot easier, this led me to not spent too long working on it. However one good thing about working at low poly is that it runs a lot better on my laptop as it doesn’t have to render as many shapes. Its a great way to mock up an initial idea before creating a higher quality version, or just to create stylised artwork.

I like the idea for the scene, but it could’ve been better executed, and this is something I will do when my mouse comes (today hopefully!). Something here that definitely needs improving is the lighting. I think the problem here is that the global lighting (general lighting over the whole scene) is too high and is dulling the effect of having a sun in position. It’s also weird how I don’t even know whether its day or night… and i’m the one who made it.

Blender: Baby Steps

This is my first attempt at making something in Blender. The two random looking flat panels are lights to illuminate my text so that it could be seen. The ”cycles” renderer in Blender uses objects emitting light rather than dedicate lights to illuminate scenes.  I changed the text texture to glass to make it a see-through as it looks cool. I didn’t do the lighting very well and the text still looks pretty dark. This was really my first experimentation with blender, just getting an idea of using different colours, textures and lighting styles.

With this one I kept the same ones as before but this time had a ‘light’ the same shape as the text but directly behind it, this made it look like the glass itself was glowing which looks far better than before. I probably could’ve gotten the rendered image from a better angle but it took so long to render (A solid 5 minutes, i’m rather impatient) that I decided it wasn’t really worth it as I could easily create something 10 times better in a few days.

Next we learned how to do texture mapping using an image, instead of changing the material it’s made of. To do this we had to use UV-mapping on the shape in order to be able to apply the 2D texture onto a 3D shape. This feature is probably going to be very useful in the future as things get more complicated as its a way of creating realistic looking things using real life images.

Blender

In today’s workshop, we were shown the basics of Blender. Blender is a free, open-source 3D modelling program. Blender can be used for basic tasks such as creating and illuminating 3D text, but has even been used to make movies (such as Sintel).
I have past experience with a program like this having used Google SketchUp in my A-Level coursework, but this is far more capable and powerful than SketchUp.
We are going to start by learning the basics; making shapes and text, doing lighting etc. and then hopefully move onto more complex and interesting ventures.