Mend Me Blog

Need contrast between the open scenes and the forest. Also a progression when in the forest to help emphasise that he is getting lost. The obvious thing here is that it is getting darker. Also a quick change during the scene where the lilboy is lifted by the treant would be good

Not sure what is going on but when I add a bone to be the root and parent all the controller bones to it everything goes nuts. It’s more weird because if I move the 4 controller bones together everything acts as normal and the whole rig moves without deforming. But as soon as those bones are parented to another, when moving that bone, everything goes bonkers. Given that I still haven’t done the face rigging yet I think I will just have to deal with selecting 4 bones instead of 1 in the animating process.

I just realised why that tree brought the 3D viewport to its knees: over 3 million vertices! I went and stripped some details out of the leave models and did a regeneration of the tree. Managed to cut it down by more than half and there is a noticeable difference in the viewport. Still won’t be able to have more than one in any shot.

This shows that I am going to have to come up with better ways to make my sets look populated without too many models. Curse these outdoor scenes!

The new shrinkwrap modifier works fantastic with shirts and fairly well with pants. I had some issues with the pants and had to rebuild the mesh near the feet. Still struggling with making folds and very worried about the mesh deforming correctly for the poses – particularly the first pose where the boy is sitting down.

After running some tests it seems that the way to use the dynamic linking of assets across .blend files is to use groups. This allows huge changes to be made to the asset that gets updated in main file. This is what I wanted to achieve from the start and knew it was somehow possible as that was the touted workflow of Big Buck Bunny. The trick was that I was importing the object rather than having the object and armature grouped and linking to the group. This should allow me to start setting up scenes and animating with partially complete assets. Also another things that sucked an annoying amount of time is that both the armature and mesh need to have the centre-point moved to the world-space centre. This seems to be the way that you avoid the armature/rig disconnection issues that i have been grappling with.

Well after the first full render I have been looking through ways to improve it. I also noticed a z-mask problem of which I posted about on this forum. The solution given back worked fairly well except for the first part of the scene when the butterfly is in the grass: something weird is happening where the final composite is just the grass with a black background – no sky, no butterfly. I also think that the blur on the butterfly (even though the depth of field is supposed to be tracking it) is a bit too much. So I have several options: (more…)

It took about 8/9 hours (I’m still not sure where/if Blender displays the total time taken to render an animation). I’m fairly happy with how things turned out. The background could use a bit more detail and somehow the sky got messed up. After fiddling around I discovered that somehow a texture got mapped to the texture input in the World Buttons. I’m not entirely sure what you use this setting for but at least I can now see some results of using it. (more…)

I’ve created the base sky texture and mapped to to the midsection of a sphere. Hopefully layering concentric sections like this will create the basis of a nice landscape.

The blocks are for reference

Well I’m disappointed that I probably won’t have a Ubuntu/Blender setup working in time to use for this project. I was planning to use it when I started rendering as I assumed (and subsequently tested) that it is faster than windows Vista 64. There seems to be window issues with Blender and Ubuntu. Blender starts full-screen, which is fine, until you want to render and then things go screwy. The render window doesn’t show up, which is kind of an issue. Also Compvis (fancy and usable desktop visual effects) completely screws up Blender. Changing desktop spaces with the cube makes Blender useless and needing a “ctrl-alt-del” close – seems that Blender doesn’t regain user-input controls when going back to it.

I tried disabling Compvis and running Blender with a command to force it to a specified windowed size and the “start bar” (not sure what linux people call it) visually dissapears until you mouse over the functional areas – desktop then becomes very buggy looking. Plus with a 64 bit windows version of Blender it doesn’t matter to me as much.

Well it is probably not the first user error really but it was a worrying one till I worked out what was going on. I was getting black-screen renders when I had the “Do Sequence” button checked. For some reason I assumed that that was needed to be checked in order to render all the frames and not just the current frame. Amazing the power of the mind to deny obvious indicators revealing the truth of matters. This option renders from the Sequence Editor which, with nothing in it, renders black screens. (more…)