A few days ago I finally received some copies of a quarterly print newsletter I work on with Vishal. I’ve been working on this regularly for over two years now. For most of that time I worked on it with Anjali. In fact we came up with it together from scratch when a local engineering contracting company in Dubai wanted a complete makeover of their in-house newsletter. During that time I had very little to do with design and production, which was handled by Anjali using the standard Photoshop + Illustrator + InDesign setup. At the end of last year she moved home-base so I took over the mantle of getting this done every three months with Vishal’s help. The first major stumbling block was that I didn’t currently own Photoshop or Illustrator or InDesign, and I hadn’t owned or used them in a long time. Since the last few years had been almost completely devoid of large scale print projects for me, I had never felt the need. I had moved on to open source software.
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I saw Spiderman 3 two days ago and just didn’t feel like writing about it. Sure, I could have gone into the post-mortem of every little piece in it that worked and didn’t work, but I realised that none of that would go far enough into explaining why I found it disappointing. In a seemingly un-connected event, today I came across a mention of this Slashdot piece about Blender on Blendernation [later I also saw a related thread on Blenderartists]. Lo and behold there was a large number of people doing post-mortems of every little piece of both Blender and the Slashdot piece, that either worked or didn’t work for them. Just as I was about to dismiss the whole thing and put it off to sour grapes on one hand and over zealous teenagers on the other, I realised there was a connection I was missing. While everyone was tearing everything apart and analysing every word, sentence and minor feature, we were all forgetting to ask the most important question: How entertaining is your 3D software?
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I submitted an image for last weeks Weekend Challenge over at Elysiun. I was thinking of putting it up on this blog when I realised that I have not recorded my previous two etries into the WC either. So here, for my own reference more than anything else, is a list of my last three entries for the WC – along with links to the appropriate Elysiun forum threads, so that I don’t have a hard time finding them in the future if I need to.

Weekend Challenge #101 : All Alone
Voting Thread
My thread in Finished Projects

This was a composited image using a regular photograph I took specifically for this project. It started mainly as a test of some compositing tutorials I came across on the forums. It turned out pretty well and the simple character model really did end up looking very lonely. Also, surprise surprise! I actually WON this challenge, in spite of this not being a pure Blender entry. Although it was only by a hair. I later modified some of the shadows falling on the character to make it a little more realistic. You can view that modified version of the image on my portfolio page.


Weekend Challenge #103 : Cyberpunk
Voting Thread
My thread in Finished Projects

I had a very complex scene in mind for this challenge, which involved sprawling desolate landscapes and futuristic towers littered around the landscape. I managed to complete most of the modelling and texturing, but my trusty old Pentium 1 laptop simply could not handle what I was throwing at it. So, I used the models I had come up with, i.e. the gloved hand and the futuristic tower, to create up a simpler and more iconic image. I was pretty happy with it and liked the slightly renegade look of the scene, but I was not totally satisfied that it was finished. There were only a handful of entries that week and I came in a very far second in the final count. I went on to improve the image by strengthening the ligting and adding a bloom/glow effect in Blenders sequence editor. The modified version is on my portfolio page. Hopefully one day I will get back to these models and recreate the original scene I had in mind. Hmm …


Weekend Challenge #112 : Primitives
Voting Thread
No Finished Projects thread for this one

I decided to participate in a challenge after a long sabatical, not only from the WC, but also in some ways from Blender (barring the Techman character I’v been updating on this blog). While I got the idea early, the execution of it was one of those last minute things and was finished in a couple of hours. I wasn’t very happy with the result, and the challenge that week was very well populated. I stood a far nowhere in the voting. But, I do think this scene is a good start, and I do intend to finish it to my satisfaction. Once that is done the new version will definitely be put up here. Untill then, the latest Weekened Challneg is also coming to a close tomorrow. I’m going to try my best to throw in my hat into this one as well.

Samir

I have used Blender for professional work before, so I though it was only right to use Blender when illegal_ops put out an open call for a logo for a new Blender community site, BlenderCG.com.

The logo is now up on the site as the header/masthead. It’s a new site built to provide many Blenderheads out there a place to host their images and yet other place to hangout and hone their craft. Can’t argue with that sentiment. I wish them the best of luck and all the success in this worthy cause.

More the merrier.

Samir

It goes without saying, that I have once again been away from this blog for a long time. This armaturing and posing was done a couple of weeks ago, but sheer procrastination has kept me from posting it here. I really must try to post more regularly. Anyway, better late than never, and at least this has not ended up as one more Blender project stuck in limbo. I finally managed to armature the figure, and started playing arond with posing it. I also assigned the loin cloth mesh to the same armature and after a bit of tweaking, it seems to distort in an acceptable manner unless the leg is bent to its extreme positions. At the moment I’m happy with it, but this is definitely still a work in progress. For animation I might have to rethink some of the geometry to be more anatomically correct for better deformation – such as the flow if the faceloops along the arms. Some weight painting might also help smoothen out the rough corners at the joints.

Recently there was a call for splash screen ideas for the latest release of Blender (2.34), and I thought that was as good an excuse as any to put my character through some more deformation tests. This mockup was the result of the exercise. It didn’t win of course, because it is by no means is a stunning example of what Blender is really capable of, but it was worth the effort just to get to know this model better. Here I rendered the character with smooth surfaces as a test, and also because I didn’t expect my rough look to be comprehended by most of the viewers as a legitimate choice. However, the solid shaded polygonal look will continue in my further uses of this character. I like that look for the world I am trying to create.

More to come.

Samir

The materials and shader settings are now done, barring any unforseen tweaks and adjustments required as this project progresses. The hair has been made a little translucent, and specularity and translucency are set to vary between the fringes of the object and it’s central surfaces, using a gradient/blend texture to provide the template for the gradual transition.

The texture for the loin cloth was one of my main completion goals for the day and I am glad it is done and has turned out well. For this texture I decided to use UV mapping because that is the most reliable way to ensure appropriate texture movement when the object deforms in various poses and animation. Other than the faces that make up the knot at the waist, the entire object was un-wrapped using simple cylindrical projection. The knot was captured with a flat projection from the window. The 1’s and 0’s animal print was created in Inkscape and imported into Blender as a PNG.

Last but not least, it was essential to have a reasonably believable skin-like shading for the body and head, to further emphasise the pixelly un-reality of the character. Using a few built-in procedural textures and some toon shading tricks, the end result is quite convincing. As of now, this character looks much better than I had hoped.

Samir

With this hair, I thee complete … well, modelling at least. I’m pretty happy with the result. The hair is wild and wanton enough while maintaining the comic stylisation of the character. The very apparent surface polygons I have left in on purpose, because I think it adds a good deal of techiness to the character; this will make more sense once the character is placed into appropriate environments.

Come to think of it, this is really not that complete yet. The materials still need to be finalised. Then there is some texturing to be done for the cloth. Armatures. Posing. Some environments. Some great renders, and then finally animation!

With this hair, I thee begin.

Samir