GuruBlog

This animation was made using dynamic paint on a rectangular canvas. The brush is a invisible sphere that changes the weightpaint of a vertex group (used to remove the grass) and a displacement modifier (used to generate the mole hills).

you can download the blend file here

I just discovered another awsome feature of blender - dynamic paint. This physics simulation tool can be used to transfer the material or color from one object to another. Sounds boring but is very very usefull to moddel a bunch of things because 'color' can also mean vertex-group-weighting, displacement, etc

so this feature can be used from modelling foot-prints that compress some snow to making brushes or stamps

with dynamic paint it's also possible to render water ripples running through a surface of liquid if a drop falls onto it - read raindrops landing on a surface of water

you can download the blender file here

I modelled a sunset in blender using the new ocean simulation. I also tried animating the sky color for the first time. I really like the "animate-everything" approach of blender. Finally I used the node editor to add some glow to the sun and some glare effects to the light reflections on the water.

you can download the blender file here

I made a animation with blender, showing some water dropping from a leaf. This took me a while to get it right, because first the water fell througt the leaf. In the end I dublicated the leaf and extruded the copy to make it thicker. I used the copy as the obstacle but made it invisible in the final render.

Also make sure to click "receive transparent" in the shadow block of the leaf material, or else the water will make a solid gray shadow - which makes the leaf that shines trought the water appear dark gray.

you can download the blender file here

I love metaballs and the surfaces they generate since I used them in Povray. For this animation I used them to render the particles of a particle system. Works really good and is very cool because the particles also interact with other meta-objects of the scene. A really cool way to model slime, brains or similar stuff.

as usual you can download the blend file here

I made a raining cloud in blender using a volumetric cloud and vector blur. I really like the comic look of the cloud and the rain particles.

You can download the blener file here

When I modeled some glass metaballs yesterday I found out that the blender-internal renderer doesn't support caustics (the light reflections on the ground, when light falls throug a sphere of glass for example).But after some googeling I noticed that this is the perferct oportunity to give the new blender renderer named cycles a try - because cycles renders them. After some experimenting with various lightsources I finally used two small planes with an light emmiting material.

It also took me a while to generate a material in the node editor that displays a gradient on the backgound, because relies on the node editor much stronger than the blender interal renderer and I haven't used material nodes so far.

download the blend file here

Unfortunately my graphics card is too old for blender to use the GPU for rendering - so it took a while to render on my box

This is another compositing test I made with blender. This time I modeled the Cup as a mate object that doesn't get rendered but does hide parts of the little man who is swimming in my coffee and casts shadows on the table. This is also my first blender scene where I separated objects on differend render scenes to hide It from the final compositing.

as usual you can download the blend file here

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