Today I am going to delve into rigging, a scary jump considering the fail I experienced when first trying to rig the butterfly. I have a long way to go considering I only just found out exactly what an IK rig is and have no idea how any of this works in Blender.
Archive for September, 2008
Rigging
Monday, September 15th, 2008Blender tree generator
Saturday, September 13th, 2008
It took a while to figure out the new script in Blender that helps the creation of trees. It is the same script used for the Big Buck Bunny film. Unfortunately there is nit a lot of documentation for it but after fiddle for a while I have worked out what it does so I can better control it. It generates the twigs and leaves off a set of user defined curves, the idea being that this is a happy mix between automatic generation and user control design. These twigs are generated inside of a defined bounding mesh but the trick is that it will extrude twigs towards each verticy in the bounding mesh. So that is how one can exert some control over the generated canopy. I still have trouble getting twigs that don’t do stupid things but it’s getting there. (more…)
Organising the files
Friday, September 12th, 2008Well things are getting hectic and working on 3 different operating systems and 2 usb sticks is making file management complicated. Why 3 OSes:
• OSX because my laptop means I can work anywhere
• Windows Vista 64 as its my main machine at home thus convenient
• Linux as Vista is unreliable at times and Blender isn’t 64bit on it yet.
So now I sit down and organise a proper directory structure:
Meta
Blog
Renders
Screenshots
Resources
Images
Links
Tutorials
Documents
Examples
Animatic
Artwork
Production
Characters
Lil boy
Butterfly
Monster
Mother
Treant
Environment
World
Valley
Props
Cottage
Foliage
Trees
Audio
Scenes
Best thing to keep things working between my mac and pc is a free rSync gui for OSX so I can synchronise this directory across the network.
ATI just got better with 8.8 drivers
Wednesday, September 10th, 2008The 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.
Monster Design
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008
The drawing that made it all fall into place
It was quite difficult to get this design sorted out. I wanted it to be insect-like but also not and it had to look good in 3D and be achievable. The main issue was that I didn’t have much inspiration until I doodled out the image on the left here. Then I didn’t have to think any further and went straight to modelling.
An earlier design
Relative file paths
Monday, September 8th, 2008After 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.
Project file structure
Sunday, September 7th, 2008Things are getting hectic and working on 3 different operating systems and using 2 USB sticks for transport is making file management complicated. Why 3 OSes:
• OSX: because my laptop means I can work anywhere
• Windows Vista 64: its my main machine at home and thus convenient
• Linux: Vista is unreliable at times and Blender isn’t 64bit on it yet.
(more…)