Very early on, I did a recap of my experiences with creating 3D graphics up to that point, and then when on to journal my progress over the next few months. I did make a lot of progress, but unfortunately my blog ground to a halt with a casual report on some of my latest 3D images back in August 2004.

It was almost three years before my blog was revived, this time with a whole new design and its own domain here at SamirBharadwaj.com. I never stopped working with 3D graphics, but I never returned to that frenzied learning of the early days, and I rarely spoke about it on my blog, which has become more of a repository of my thoughts than of what I do. I’ve been thinking of re-learning Blender, since a drastically re-engineered new version (2.50) is almost ready. But before I start talking about 3D graphics here again, why not an updated recap of my adventures in 3D graphics? I might have been silent about Blender 3D and computer renderings over the last 5 years, but I was not idle.

3D Contests & Community

My last post on my 3D work was about images for the Weekend Challenge held on the Elysiun forums. Elysiun is now BlenderArtists.org and it is still a vibrant community. Back in those days, I continued to participate in the weekend challenge when inspiration stuck, and interesting images did result. Above are some.

One contest that did catch my attention was the car design competition organised by Peugeot. They hold a contest every two years for artists and designers to submit car designs based on a theme. I thought it was a great excuse to push my images to a more finished level, and the Belisa is what I turned out. Working on it taught me a lot, and I’m still proud of making this from scratch without any deep-seated obsession with cars.

Along the way another interesting opportunity presented itself. I got a chance to write an introductory Blender 3D tutorial for CHIP India magazine. I was a fan of the magazine for years before that and it is one of the most widely distributed in India. I had a 4 page tutorial published in the magazine about how to create the image above. A great feeling to see your work and instructions in print.

3D Illustrations for Design

By this time, I was confident enough about 3D rendering to start using it in my other design work. And in some cases, I began to receive projects based only on my 3D skills. The character above was modelled on the figure in the Puranmal Restaurant logo. This was to serve as a modern take, and this image still adorns the front of all their menus in their many restaurants throughout Dubai.

When I was working on a corporate magazine/newsletter for a few years, simple 3D images like the pie-chart above (left) would often help add some pizazz to an otherwise plain page. It got me out of many tough spots. At other times, like in the front image for an Eid greeting card (above right), 3D helped bring together unmatched elements like the moon and engineering plans, and give them that magical feel.

3D Logos & Identity

While I’m almost a purist when it comes to logo design, I also started experimenting with using 3D imagery in logos and identities. In an increasingly online world, there are opportunities to design logos that will rarely need to suffer the rigours of print production or work on a fax transmission. At some such junctures I did add in a 3D touch into some logo design options I presented to clients.

Web site graphics were another place I included 3D graphics, when it was appropriate. When done well, rendered graphics immediately lend a professional look to the site. The top and bottom images above were meant as “Under Construction” screens for websites. The top one was just for a personal site, but the 3D makes it look much more serious. The middle image was created as an element for a web template. There is plenty you can do with computer imagery if you go beyond the obvious.

3D Animation & Video

Being asked to do my first animation project was a fairly big step in my using 3D for serious work. I was called in to create a 3D visualization for a shipping company who wanted to simulate ship movements and port procedures to show clients. The challenge was that it needed to be a real port with the ships at real scales, so that it made for a realistic simulation of how things fit in the space. Also, I had less than a month to complete it, obviously. My computer(s) were rendering thousands of animation frames for weeks, and both me and the client were quite pleased with the result.

Once in a while, I did continue to just play with 3D graphics. For a while I was doing weekly themed exercises with some friends, to help us learn animation. Strange things like the Carrs animation above resulted. Just snippets of a few seconds which helped keep my 3D muscles healthy.

A couple of years ago I was once again handed a big animation challenge. A regular client was participating in an important exhibition and they wanted one of those fancy corporate videos to show off at their stall on an obscene flat screen TV. The only problem was, they had no video, and the only material they had was still photos of their various construction projects. Making a slick video from fairly boring stills was fun. I used Blender to do the whole thing, moving and manipulating images and graphics in 3D space, instead of using a video editor. Quite an interesting way to work, and the end result looked very impressive on a wide screen TV, while also covering all the technical information required.

3D Rendering Tests

On and off I have continued to open up Blender and tinker with effects just for the sake of trying something out. All the images above were a result of such playing. They all started as trials for lighting ideas, or texture ideas, or in the case of the origami flower, just wanting to see how easy or difficult it was to recreate an origami design in 3D models.

From the beginning of my 3D journey, creating human models has always been a dream. While I’ve never put the requisite time into it, I did play around with getting the right skin look at one point, using the readily available Victoria female model from the Poser and DAZ Studio software camp. This image was done with fairly simple material work, before Blender was capable of faking SSS and doing complex node materials. Now I’m sure much more convincing skin effects are possible, but for the time, I was quite happy with my progress.

That is a summary of my 3D experiments over the last half decade of silence on the topic. Now, Blender is about to have a completely redesigned version out with the completion of the Durian Open Movie project. I look forward to re-learning it and getting back to more regular experiments in 3D. Maybe I’ll even tackle that human model I’ve always wanted to try my hand at. Whatever I do, I’ll be sure to write about it on this blog as it takes shape.

Samir

The issue of Windows 98 as a legacy system came up recently when there was report on BlenderNation about a new patch for the latest Blender release which restored its compatibility with Windows 98. There were a few wise ones who saw it for what it was, another extra bit to make an open source piece of software compatible with a larger range of platforms, but the majority of the adolescents complained and gibed at all the losers who were still using the old piece of rubbish that is Windows 98 … after all EVEN Microsoft doesn’t support it anymore. Pff! The remaining rabble complained about why the entire world uses Windows at all when Ubuntu Linux is there to save all our souls.

I tried posting a comment to the ever growing thread of responses to add another vote to the saner side of the “discussion”, but it probably got lost in the site moderation queue somewhere. So, I thought I’d jot down my thoughts here instead.

You really can’t discount the value of Windows 98 in many situations. While the special Blender build in question might not be of direct use to me because I use XP on my work computer, I do have one old piece of hardware that is still in use (almost always on) and runs Win98.

For anyone who has experimented with this stuff rather than giving grand pronouncements, the simple fact of the matter is that a well tuned Win98 install is the best option for a usable full-fledged operating system on old systems with low resources.

Yes I like Linux too, and use it when it suits my needs better, but it simply can’t recreate the useability of a Win98 system on most old hardware. What Linux has in its versatility and power, it lacks in the realm of truly light GUI options.

Let me preempt some of the responses this is sure to get.

1) NO, a Pentium 4, 1.(something) gigahertz processor, with a measly 256 MB of RAM is not what I am talking about when I talk of old hardware. I’m thinking much lower. As LetterRip rightly points out, getting a new powerful computer every 6 months to a year is not something a lot of people can afford in the world. Even if they can, in many cases such as mine, people don’t see the point of blind upgrading of hardware when the old hardware does everything you want it to at an acceptable speed.

2) Yes, I am aware of low resource friendly window managers for Linux: IceWM, fluxbox et. al. The point still remains that the modular nature of the open source Linux system means that simply starting up a basic desktop requires a million different modules to be loaded into memory no matter how light the windowing system is. Think about it, the Windows 9x base architecture was designed at a time when you had to pay extra to upgrade from a Pentium 1 to a Pentium 1 MMX running at a whopping 233 Mhz! Most modern Linux GUIs, however, were built at a much more resource-rich time and it shows in the performance. Windows 98 may not be built to take advantage of your new beast of a machine, but it was built to make the best of limited resources. Your latest Enlightenment desktop with rotating 3D widgets or whatever, might not be designed to downsize to low resources, but it makes the best use of your latest beast … and the less we say about the travesty that is Windows Vista, the better.

What it comes down to is using the best tool for each situation, and it’s good to know that that choice is still being kept alive by helpful contributions such as this. Three cheers to jms for providing this Blender build, and more power to open source!

Ultimately the reason I am a fan of Open Source software and the reason all my professional work is created exclusively using such software is because of the freedom of choice and implementation it allows. Since when did it become a mandatory decision to prefer and love a UNIX-like operating system, i.e. Linux. Is it not valid choice to prefer something else instead?

Replacing one form of blind faith (Windows is the only God) for another (Linux is the only God) is not my idea of freedom or open thinking, and I wish more people remember that occasionally. Software is at best a musician’s instrument and at worst a blunt tool. It doesn’t play much of a part in producing greatness in the hands of a great talent any more that it plays a part in producing garbage in the hands of the ignorant.

To me Open Source is one of the most important things to happen in the world of technology for decades, maybe centuries. Now if only we all refrain from our natural tendencies as a species to sink into religious zealotry about everything under the Sun, maybe it can actually reach its potential, and more.

If there’s anyone out there still using Windows 98 like me, leave a comment and let me know your reasons, and the challenges you face with it. This is actually a topic that might be useful to write more about. If there is enough interest I just might do that soon.

Samir

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

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

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 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

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

As of now, I plan on assigning the cloth model to the main character armature. I expect that with some clever assigning of vertices, the cloth should deform in keeping with the rotation of the limbs – at least in an acceptably comic way. Now there is really no modelling left to complete other than the hair. So, perhaps I can safely say, on with the hair?

Samir

The legs are exactly the kind of comic, skinny musculature I imagined. It remains to be seen whether the light mesh holds up well to armature movements. Next in line is the hair, and I expect that to need an independent armature object for it’s movement. Although, the new softbody dynamics features that have found their way into the Blender trial builds might be a better solution, if they are controllable enough. On to the hair!

Samir

I have begun modelling the character and this is what I have so far. The mesh is meant to remain very basic. The screen shot here is with one level of Catmull-Clark subdivision applied to the object. I will probably up the subdivision for render-time but I’m not sure if I really want this to be a completely smooth surfaced character.


Those ideas will be clarified as this progresses. I hope to post updates here as I model, armature, and pose the character. I don’t expect to use many textures, or at least nothing complex, so that’s one less thing to tackle.

Another project is born. Maybe I need to start paying myself to complete personal projects … that certainly seems to work when I take on freelance work. Damn capitalist education!

Samir