Nur eine kleine Notiz nebenbei: ich werde beim Blender-Stand auf der Cebit aushelfen. Blender ist eines von mehreren Open-Source-Projekten, die auf dem Open-Source-Stand in Halle 6 vertreten ist. Am Wochenende werde ich persönlich – mit meinen beschränkten Möglichkeiten – dort stehen und versuchen, Fragen zu beantworten und vielleicht junges Volk für dieses Programm zu interessieren.
Comics im Internet sind eine nette tägliche Beschäftigung – reißen sie einen doch aus dem teilweise sehr anstrengenden Alltag heraus. Ich habe inzwischen so einige Comic-Seiten abonniert, die ich anlässlich eines Neuzugangs hier vorstellen möchte:
xkcd ist der Klassiker. Der Autor hat bereits einige recht interessante und “tiefe” Einsichten in seine Gedankenwelt gewährt. Er schenkt mir ab und zu zwei Minuten des Nachdenkens.
gocomics bietet verschiedene Comics an. Ich persönlich habe nur Calvin and Hobbes abonniert. Die meisten dieser Comic strips kenne ich bereits, aber es ist ein anderes Erlebnis eine der vielen Serien auf mehrere Tage verteilt zu lesen..
Ninjabi hatte ich bereits vorgestellt. Erscheint leider nicht so regelmäßig.
Jojos illustrierter Blog ist eines der “du musst es nicht verstehen” Comics. Lustig gezeichnet, teils fies und ansonsten für kurzweilige (und kurzzeitige) Unterhaltung sehr gut.
Us the Robots ist der Neuzugang, den ich über eine blendernation-Meldung mitbekommen habe. Auch wieder ein Comic, der nicht sofort verstanden werden muss. Dieser steht noch am Anfang, verspricht aber durch die tolle Grafik und die Möglichkeiten der “Charakterentwicklung” viel Gutes. Die ganze Arbeit hierzu soll mit open source Produkten geschehen – toll!
Übrigens: Wer lieber ein Videocomic sehen möchte, den verweise ich auf das neu aufgelegte “Red vs. Blue”. Auch da muss man nicht so schnell etwas verstehen..
Der Trailer für den zweiten open source Film aus dem Hause der Blender Foundation wurde heute veröffentlicht [via]. Die Grafik stimmt meines Erachtens, die Charakteranimation auch. Hoffentlich ist es auch eine spannende Geschichte!
Just a short notice: Blender 2.46 is due to be released in april/march 2008. The list of features is amazing. I’m most excited about the ability to simulate anisotropic materials and Gloss. Both i need for my day-job so I’m looking forward to them.. I’m also interested in the way this has been implemented and I want to look into the code as fast as possible to see, if i can use the tangent-implementation to help make my own shader..
The next thing I’m excited about is the new particle system, though I’ll hardly find the time to use it..
Phew! At last i was able to build and even modify the blender sources. I need to do that for my current project:
I’m trying to Simulate different BRDF-models for my research using the render engine of blender. It was easy to find the source code locations, where i had to change it, but the hard part was to get the blender source code compiled..
I tried following the guides that are given at blender.org, i downloaded all needed software, libraries and documentations, even tried changing the code on my own, when an error was shown. Mainly i tried compiling the code with cygwin and visual studio and although there are project files specially for visual studio, i couldn’t succeed at building the project.
Then – just before giving up completely – i decided to try to contact the ‘elders’ and describe my problem. The easiest way was to get into the irc-channel. I thought #blendercompilers would be the right place to ask this sort of question, but unfortunately nobody was really active at that channel. Then At #blendercoders someone pointed me to this guide. The guide uses mingw and – to my surprise – it works .. flawlessly!
So, at last i’m getting to the fun part: writing my own shader!
Ralph asked over at tmc about what the tutorial on creating a rose over at blenderartists meant by
and do a short spinned curve like on the image below.
Since the expression can really confuse (it has nothing to do with the F9-option “spin”), i decided to make a quick video explanation. Here it is, Ralph:
[MEDIA=12]
Just for the record: i used xvidcap to record the video then re imported it into blender and did a sequence where in one alpha-overed scene the text is blended in (using a vector blur to make it nicer). Maybe shortly i’ll do a tutorial on what i learned in the last few days about using blender as a video editor and specially how to cut video sequences..
Ok, i decided to use shadeless materials and edges (edge intensity: 10), so that the whole thing looks more like a 2d-cartoon.
Plus, now i started creating the different shapes for the mouth movements. Right now i have a shape for each of the vocals ‘a’, ‘o’ and ‘i’ and one that’s called ‘consonant-b’, but it should be able to cover ‘m’ too.
Here is a small test of turban guy saying ‘hallo’..
I’ve been thinking about creating a cartoonish series using blender for quite a while now – mainly to get my head off of some things. I have no storyboard and no real idea what the plot of the cartoon will be all about. Since i think it will deal with every day muslim life I thought the first character should be called “Turban-Guy”. Have a look.
Right now, the only thing that can be animated about this character are his arms, which are linked to an armature.
Later I’d like to make some basic shapes for eye and mouth movements as well as one for the turban, which should move with different face expressions. As you can see, the guy has no legs, I do intend on having the characters hover over the ground if they moved at all. This makes it a lot easier and i hope it will be something that is more realistic for me to do on my own.. Let’s see where I can get with this.
At the same time, I’m looking for an open source application with which i can compile the story board (as a drafty comic). I came upon Stripgenerator.com and had my first comic created, which is basically a test of what the site is capable of. Theoretically it’s quite nice, but I’d need to be able to draw my own characters if I’m going to use it for the story board. If anyone has a suggestion, please let me know..
Note to self: Check-out the comic strip on ninjabi.com regularly! This could provide material and ideas for some episodes..
After doing day-long construction job (actually this is something that has been going on for quite a while and I’m looking forward to ending this construction) and since i had to wait to get someone to the airport at 3:15am i decided to have a look at blendernation and found a very interesting article about “Animated Modifiers“. The gist of it: The values assigned to a modifier can’t be animated right now. While on can’t see the point in animating the level of Subsurfacing applied to a mesh, Matt demonstrates a way to change the value of “Decimation” modifier.
For that to work, one has to ‘read’ the current value of an IPO-Curve (Matt uses an ‘Empty’) and based on it’s value change the “RATIO”-setting for the decimate modifier.
Some comments suggested using this nice trick to decimate objects which are further away from the camera more and let them get less decimated when they get nearer. So this is what i did:
Create Some objects and scatter them across a xy-plane.
Have the objects all have a ‘decimate’ modifier (best copy and paste an object which already has the modifier; by the way, wouldn’t it be nice, if we could add modifiers to multiple objects?))
Set up an IPO for the camera and add some points for camera navigation
Once the basic scene is finished, this is the python-script i used (based on what Matt provided in the example .blend-file):
[python]
import Blender, math
from Blender import *
for ob in obs:
mods = ob.modifiers
for mod in mods
if mod.name == ‘Decimate’:
sx = ob.LocX
sy = ob.LocY
sz = ob.LocZ
dist = math.sqrt((cx[curframe]-sx)**2 + (cy[curframe]-sy)**2 + (cz[curframe]-sz)**2))
if dist > 50: dist = 50
mod[Modifier.Settings.RATIO] = (50-dist)/50 + 0.1
ob.makeDisplayList()
[/python]
The 0.1 that is added to the RATIO is only there to ensure the objects don’t disappear. And i guess there is a better way to make the objects regenerate other that .makeDisplayList() inside the for-loop.
Here is the result:
[MEDIA=10]
Python-references
Because this is my first python script here are the references i used:
Just a quick note: ‘Essential Blender’ is the new book about blender-usage. Shipping is announced to be second week of May, but there is a pre-order discount. I will order one right now (alhough I’m not a good book-reader, specially when it comes to Software-guides) and you should too.
On a similar note, Daniel Martinez Lara, the creator of pepe (look down) has created a small video-tutorial on how to use the blender node system to achieve real-time illumination. Just have a look.
Here is a out-of-sync version of the marvelous animation “pepe”. This is one of the first 3d-animations i truly loved. If you want the real version, head over to pepeland and download the movie as xvid-encoded or as mov and then some!
This is my first test of the matrix-modifier in blender3d. The complete animation is done using only two cubes, three “Empties”, a camera and three lights and some node-editing. If anyone is interested in the blend-file, just ask..
Omar | 4. März 2009
3D-Grafik, Bildung, blender, Open Source, Software, werbung | 
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