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
Archive for October, 2008
Making sky
Monday, October 27th, 2008Blender and Ubuntu issues
Sunday, October 26th, 2008Well 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.
User error #1: “Do Sequence”… do it!
Sunday, October 26th, 2008Well 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…)
BBC motion gallery rocks!
Saturday, October 25th, 2008I came across the BBC motion gallery when I was looking for example movies of butterfly movement and its a really good resource for animators. Be nice if their watermarking wasn’t so aggressive but it’s free!
Monster’s head is too cute?
Saturday, October 25th, 2008I had some feedback from different people that the head on the monster is too “cute”. My main design concept is for the head to be the same head (which it is) as the butterfly and I do not mind the “cute” so much as the monster itself is seen through the perspective of the little boy. It is a figment of his imagination so elements of “cuteness” aren’t necessarily outside the design specification.
Time spent on timelines
Thursday, October 23rd, 2008Just when I thought everything was working out I’ve run into another strange issue. I thought I would try and put the animation that I had done so far to the music via the Video Sequencer. Now it seems that the speed at which it plays back the frames is a lot less than the file that has the animatic – so timing is a couple of hundred frames out! I’m hoping this is just playback drag and not some weird setting mishap. Both timelines are set at 25 fps. It seems out even with the display set to wireframe. I am leaning towards it just being a playback issue but I might try and render this small sequence to double check.
Linking library problems
Thursday, October 23rd, 2008
Crazy legs
Well I think I might have to resign to “Append” and not “Link” for models in the project as I am having a lot of issues with armatures of linked models.
Complete disconnection from armature
Grouped armature and models but then everything is on the one layer and defeats the purpose of separating the armature from the mesh.
My master-controller curve for resizing acts very strangely – when animated the armature that is parented to it lags behind and also produces bugs when going back to frame 1. Perhaps this is not the correct way to have a way to scale the object and rig together, though from my tests parenting everything to an object was the only way to scale the model and armature and IK constraints in sync.
Solution: group link works but my parented master-controller curve acts weird. So I deleted it in the linked blend file and can scale the linked object without the distortion encountered when I was rigging the model itself.
Disconnection from parented objects
First lot of animation was a fail as I keyed this curve that the butterfly and rig were parented to only to discover that the armature modifier was not having an effect on the butterfly mesh, so effectively the rig was disconnected from what it was meant to deform. Seems the way to link a character properly is to group the armature and mesh together in the lib file and then import LINK the group. Initially the data is in the new scene but there is nothing in the 3D screen, so after you add the group to the 3D scene you then have to make a proxy out of the armature. So far this seems to of worked but I am still having a lot of trouble with the action editor: keyframe turn up in the non-linear animation editor but not the action editor.
Action editor
Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008Finally 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.
Lil Boy’s eye problem
Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008
I think I mostly fixed this issue with the Lil Boy model. Still not 100% happy with the look of the face front on. I think the lil-boy model would of been a lot easier if I had chosen someone to base it on and taken decent photographs. As it stands I used miscellaneous references in combintation with a side drawing of my own. 
Matte painting transparency
Monday, October 20th, 2008After 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…)