GuruBlog

This weekend I tried to work on my modeling skills. I tried to model the alien-head to be animated so I think you will see it again soon :-)

you can download the alien-head here

And here is one more hairy ball rendered with blender. I tried to make it a bit anemone like by removing the gravity and adding a litte self turbulence to the particles, I also modified the strand rendering and added a blend texture to make the hair grow smaller towards the top and make it look more like an anemone

You can download the blenderfile here

This is a test scene I have made to try the explode modifier from blender The explode modifier uses a particle system to define where the vertices are removed and where they should fly to. The particles themselve are not rendered in this scene

you can download the blend file here if you want to see how its made.

today I played a bit with the new camera-tracking features in blender 2.61

I recorded a short video of my desk and added my dragon model from yesterday to the scene. I messed up the shadow a bit and the compositing would require a looot more love but its really impressive how easy the tracking can be (once you have figured out what todo, which was the harder part :-))

Yesterday some colleges an I visited the Palmenhaus Schönbrunn in Vienna which is a huuuuuge glass house with palm-trees and plants from all around the world. It's located in the imperial garden of Schönbrunn and - as we found out yesterday - looks great by night too!

After watching the awsome "flame-thrower"-tutorial from blenderguru.com I wanted to give the particle and smoke system a try. I modelled a very simple animation of a dragon instead of a flamethrower and I haven't added any fancy materials or compositing stuff yet. But I think the fire-effect is still very impressive

you can download my blender file here - but be warned - it takes a while to render.

here is a still form the animation, in case you can't watch the video

There are some really nice video-tutorials out there in the internets that show who to animate a growing vine in blender - unfortunately all I found are for blender 2.48 and use keyboard shortcuts that aren't working in blender 2.5/2.6 anymore.

so I tried to recreate them for the current blender-version. Here is a short video to show what the final animation looks like.

Today I tested the blender fluid simulation system. Very cool stuff but if you have no idea what the parameters mean (like me for example) - it's very easy to render something that takes the whole night to bake and looks very unimpressive. This reminds me a bit on rendering fractals on the atari ST :-)

however here is the download link to the blend file

today I modelled and rigged a very simple figure with blender and made an animation of a walking cycle.

faaaaaaar from perfect - but hey! It walks! ( read: guru is very proud!)

as usual here is the blend file to download if you want to play with it

Today I learned what the blender node-editor is here for and how to use it. I made a simple scene containing 2 cubes, a camera and a lamp and composed the scene on an photo I made a while ago.

the composite editor also alows to filter the composed images, adjust color values, etc ...

but in this sample image I just added the two images based on the alpha values of the 3D scene.

very powerfull tool - and I certainly only have scratched the surface yet

I also uploaded the blend file again, which can be downloaded here