Mend Me Blog

Figured out and implemented render layers – now working through all the issues that come with the privilege of splitting one’s renders up, namely character foreground/background overlap. Apparently this is solved with the “Zmask” render pass. I’m having issues with the layering as the butterfly goes both in front and behind the trees. I posted and got some good answers, and eventually worked out what I was doing wrong. Also it seems my approach to nodal compositing was a bit off as this one fellow points out, and subsequently made me wonder why I ever did it this way to begin with, that I only need one Defocus (DoF) filter at the end of the chain rather than on each layer.

Got depth of field working so that it tracks the distance of the butterfly at all times.

Z-mask problems

Seems that if I have automatic keyframing on when keying the camera it goes crazy with rolling rotations when I use the free-look camera mode. Solution is to turn the auto-keyframing off and manually insert the keys after using the free-look cam placement.

In order to make use of the NLA animation strip sequencing I needed to create the following short animations: (more…)

Finally worked it out. The first point to absorb is that it only affects bones whereas objects have their keyframes dropped into the Non Linear Animation Editor (NLA). This was very confusing for me at the start but eventually it became apparent that the action editor creates timelines that can be arranged and blended in the NLA so one has to be very aware of which “strip” is active when moving things around (with autokeyframing on) as keyframes can end up in the wrong strip which then produces unexplected results. This method seems powerful, for example the entire first scene with the btterfly flying and gliding was very little detail animation. I animated a 5 keyframe strip of the wings flapping, 2 keyframe strip of wings in a gliding position, and that’s it for the wing movements – the variations were created by blending in and out of duplicates of these strips set at different playback speeds. So when the 2 frame glide strip is blended over a flap the wings ease into that gliding position, but because I only keyed the main bones in the wings the flickering tips aren’t affected and so continue to flicker. The walk up the stalk was of course animated all the wa though.

After experimenting with the hair particles in Blender I wanted to use the painting from the animatic for the grass in the first scene as I could not get hair particles thick enough and with the same character. After looking through numerous tutorials I could not get partial transparency to work on the images assigned to planes – it was either 100% or 0% which leads to ugly jagged fringes. Eventually I found the answer (which is probably pretty obvious to someone familiar with 3D work): you have to pre-multiply the alpha on the image. Pressing the Premul button after loading the image makes life prettier. It is annoying that a lot of documentation seems to miss a critical point like this and leads to much frustration. (more…)

Seems in Blender that there are 2 ways to attach an armature to a mesh: the “old way” being parenting the mesh to the armature and the “new way” being adding an Armature Modifier to the mesh. There seems to be confusion over the benefits of using the new way. I have been confused not so much that the new way is cleaner and suits the overarching workflow of Blender better but with all the facets that rigging encompasses (weight painting, vertex grouping etc). For instance eyeballs as a separate object could be parented to a bone whereas, as far as I can see, if you apply the Armature Modifier to the eyes you then have to link the vertices to the bones – many more steps.

The “new feature” of Bone Heat Weighting has only confused me more as the workflow for that seems to include using the “old method”. So if they are shifting paradigms why are there new (and attractive looking) features for the old method.

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I always welcome an update to any software but what has this new version of Blender got to offer that is immediately relevant to this project?

• The shrinkwrap modifier looks like it will be useful for modelling the lil-boy’s clothes
• The sun lamp considering I have many outdoor scenes
• The sky parameters, again because all my scenes are outside.

The good news is that the recent ATI driver (for 4870 card) update seems to have fixed my Blender modelling issue – it is now possible to USE the program again. It is probably pretty silly (like 16-year old schoolgirl silly) but I was pretty chuffed to get responses from Ton Roosendaal on the Blender bug tracker report that I submitted on the issue. He is one of the founding members of the Blender institute and responsible for putting the open source movie projects together.

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After happily ordering my project directory I discovered that my animatic was completely stuffed – “what’s this?!?! Absolute file paths!? Damn you!” So remember kiddies that there is an option in the settings pull-down (mouse to the border of the top menu bar and you will be able to stretch it to reveal hidden stuff) File Paths > Relative Paths Default. Unfortunately this then only applies to new links created so I had to go through and relink all the images in the animatic to the new ones.

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