Mend Me Blog

I have just worked out how texture painting works in Blender and I have to say that it is awesome. It enables one to paint on the textures in the 3D viewport. Now although I couldn’t really see myself doing finished work like this what strikes me as incredibly useful is to use it to paint guides for the final textures. I really should of looked at this earlier, but I could say that about any part of the project I guess. (more…)

I am still struggling to understand the various settings for lights, what they do and how to use them best. I am confident I will have a good understanding of it after the experience of this project but it would be nice to know a bit more about what the hell I am doing now. One of the biggest things I have trouble with now and again is getting nice soft shadows.

I have just finished the burial scene and it’s looking actually looking really good. The texture painting really helped guide the matte background so that they meld with the scene better and also avoid that skewing problem I had with the world ring (tree line and skyline).

I have purposefully been leaving the “fun” shots till last – those to do with the monster for a few reasons:

• Given my inexperience with 3D animation I thought it would be good to iron out some issues before getting to the money shots
• Under pressure the fun shots should be easier
• A lot of the shots I am doing now I believe are harder as they are to do with expression and animating the little boy – whose rig is very difficult to work with in certain circumstances

This last scene need particular attention to be paid to the lighting and effects. This represents the deepest part of the kid’s subconscious and also links the fantasy world to the real world. I wanted the mood to be dark but serene and to change rapidly when the lilboy is pulled up. I’m still really irritated I haven’t been able to solve the sparkling issue. I’ve tried increasing the sample on the lights and changing the textures to images but it still sparkles which destroys the shot.

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After considering how I was going to each scene in the story board I was worried about the “sunburn” shot where the butterfly goes into the sun and it flares up. I played with having a bright off-screen spotlight with a strong halo but that looked crap with the dark fringe on either side of the beam. From playing with the nodes in the first shot I remembered how interesting certain settings were just with simple curves nodes – so I put it to work. A distant keyed spotlight and a timed composit setup and I got the shot I wanted.

This is dissapointing: I spent a lot of time making this tree and and was ver happy with the texturing. Once again the issue didn’t suface until a test animation render.

I’d like to completely blame it on the rigging and armature but I think that my animating skills are also to blame. Being the first walk cycle of any kind that I have done I am finding the timing quite difficult. In combination with time restraints and all the other things I need to get done the animation of the lilboy is going to suffer. That and the rig really does suck. If I had a COG/Root bone then I could at least just make one decent walk and loop it but I have to hand animate every step and with the rotation issue in the feet it is very frustrating.

I found that for a lot of the open outdoor scenes and some of the complex scenes that the quickest way to light it was using this setup:

You have many spotlights parented to the verticies of a 1/2 icosphere. Since they are dupliverts you can control all the light from the single light below. By making them very soft one gets nice general lighting in a scene as a basis to add key lights and any other focal lights. For the darker/high contrast scenes I won’t use this at all.

I had this issue when I tried to bake ambient occlusion with the butterfly where it just didn’t work over the entire mesh. Now it’s happening again with the monster. Though I believe It may have something to do with the monster having multiple material assignments and UVs to various parts of the mesh. Once again I put it out to the community.

I have heard rumours about the greatness of Blenders UV unwrapping – quiet whisperings amounst the Maya folks, never too loud lest the wake the Autodesk overlords… After my brief spell with Maya and its UV I can say honestly that the Blender way is refreshing and logical. I also heard that someone thinks the same and has written a mel script to emulate it in Maya. Basically the metaphor is that of a seamstress where you demarcate edges on the mesh that the UV unwrapper will cut along. What is really good about this is the speed at which you can figure out where to hide the seams to avoid those horrible texture joins – or at least cover them up.

Carapace – even though the seams are identical on both sides it doesn’t unwrap symmetrically. When this happens either you have missed an edge somewhere or you need to just do it again which might mean that I missed an edge somewhere but didn’t find it…