Blender Week 2

Live happened, so with a month delay, here is work from Blender Week 2. We did not get to a third week. I did finish a VR project I had been working on for years, but that is a different story.

Of course, all of you who follow me on Mastodon or Instagram have seen these videos already
 

I started the week epxloring the scuplting tools, which are pretty intuitive and work well. Not quite ZBrush, but that progranm has such an awkward interface that you need to regularly use it to be good at it. Like editing on and AVID system, which you could not even do without a custom keyboard with color coded keys - it has been a while since I actually used AVID so I do not know if this is still the case.

I uploaded the video in a square format to Youtube and that turned it into a short without asking. Bad YouTube.
 

On day two I took the one eyed character thing into Unreal. Took a lot of trial and error, and two days, but it walks. It does sink further into the ground after a few steps. That I had never user Unreal before did not help.
 

For day four I decided to do someting fun again. I took the sculted head from day one of this week, and pushed it through a pinboard. Not a real pin board, the pins are just cubes placed in a dense grid using Blender Geometery nodes. I was curious to see how many cubes it could handle. This was on a relatively new silicon Macbook Pro. Not disappointed.
 

For the last day I decided to play with dynamic simulation. Or day and a half, as it took a while to render. I basically did someting I used to assign my students: build a Rube Goldberg machine. I found the rigid body dynamics easy to use and pretty robust. I did not get it to interact with cloth or other soft body dynamics, and am not sure you can.

Then life happened and I did not return to Blender for the rest of the summeer.

Blender Week 1

As a summer project I decided to lean a bit of Blender. Mainly on my own but my I have some help of my son who has been building car models in it for a while. The first day I played around getting some of the basics down and made this:

Day two was a dedicated to getting a hang of modeling, and, since I wanted to get to rigging, I made an easy to rig two legged creature

That looked a little gray, so day three was a little texturing and shading, followed by building an armature - which is blenderish for skeleton

On to animation for day four. That meant weight painting. Not fun in Maya, but possibly even less fun in Blender. But I got it to walk. And used Blender to add an wiggling image in the background, with its build in compositor
 

Day five: more animation and shading. I added some environment and played with shaders to create an animated texture on a cube. Though totally misplaced, I added some hair to the character as well. And rendered slightly longer animation. Which took something like four hours, not too bad but if I had used the default sertting of 4096 samples that would have been more like ten hours.
 

Because of bad weather we added an extra day to this week. I played with geometry nodes, which are part of the reason I wanted to try blender more seriously. Over the years I had occasionally played with Blender, and used it as a file convertor, but never did any serious work in it. I do remember that in the late nineties, when Blender was under Not A Number, I played a role in the instutute where I was a graduate student buying the (hard copy) manuals. I have met Ton Roosendaal at SIGGRAPH a number of times and followed Blender developments from a distace. But this is the first time I took a serious stab at learning the program.
 

That concludes week one of the Blender summer project. Week two will have to wait at least a week, have other plans for next week, like finally finishing VR projects. One great thing about Blender, at least version 3.6 for mac, which is what I used this week: it hardly ever crashes. Only when I messed with displacement did I get it to freeze or outright die.
Now I have a week to think of what I want to try and do for Blender week 2. I got a lot further than expected in week 1!

UlikeMe

While preparing for a new VR project that will use some of the ideas and techniques developed for UlikeMe, I cam across a test I never published. Here it is with freshly added sound, and an old analogue synthesizer tune by Wobmusic.
 

Softimaya

I thought there were things like anti trust laws and the like, but now that Autodesk acquired Softimage from AVID they have three out of the four leading 3D animation packages. Kind of scary, isn't it? Well, there are of course the Apples like LightWave and Cinema 4D. Or will it be 3D studio Softimaya versus Blender?

Animated Swirl

The last few days it has been to hot to work to work on my workstation. Our only AC is in the living room, and that's where I sat with my Macbook. Inbetween other stuff I have been playing with Blender again. I had temporarily abandoned the Python scripting experiment that led to this plane render. I could not get it to animate. But I finally figured it out:

Still using a bit of a roundabout way, but inching closer to making it work for me.

Displaced Brain

So here's another brain spin. After discovering that displacement in Blender works just like LightWave, I turned to good ol' Mental Ray, which I used to render this version (from XSI). Real displacement at rendertime that does not need denser geometry to work. The difference is most obvious on the cerebellum (the small part at the bottom).

Plane Render

It's that time of year: I'm off to attend the annual conference of ACM SIGGRAPH, held this year in San Diego, California. I'm on a couple of committees so I'll be pretty busy. But good busy. I've been preparing DVD's for the International Services and the Chapters Party and if you will be at SIGGRAPH this year there's a good chance you will find me in what is called the SIGGRAPH Village

The seats are pretty crammed on this plane I am on now (no, I will not be able to post to this blog untill back on the ground), but I managed to squeeze my macbook between me and the reclined seet in front of me. Been playing around with Python in Blender for a while, mainly while on the train to and from New York. And now I finally have an image to show for it. I'm generating a line that revolves around a central point but tries not to intersect with itself. To see if that could generate some nice imagery. Yes, just tinkering. Not quite there yet, the line still occasionally eats it's tail. And have not worked on the shading at all.