Adelaide in Blender

Work on the gallery

2010-06-05T07:02:00.000-07:00

~Glenn
I have been doing a little work on the gallery set. Just playing with materials and lighting. It's not nearly finished but these things take time. That said, I'm pretty happy with the mood of it.

Bedroom lighting test

2010-05-24T13:33:00.000-07:00

A simple render on an untextured model. Just checking out the lighting I need for this shot.

~Glenn

Sliding skin.

2010-05-23T02:20:00.000-07:00

This is how to create shape kleys (blend shpes/morph targets) in Blender using the shrinkwrap modifier and a vertex map to mask the effect.

Sliding skin is necessary for things like eyebrow raises where the skin has to slide across the skull bone.

~Glenn

Negative cloth solve.

2010-05-21T23:34:00.000-07:00

It appears that while 2.5 allows negative frame numbers (thanks to aligorith), the cloth solve panel still only allows solves to begin from frame 1. Many studios rely on pre zero frames as a cloth pre-roll before the take starts. For clarity, action always begins on frame one. On a show containing hundreds if not thousands of shots, consistency is paramount.
I usually start around frame -50 for my solves. I had a shot where a character in a skirt began the shot sitting down. I animated her from t-pose at -100 to her seated position at frame 1 so the cloth skirt could solve into a nice arrangement for the start of the shot.

~Glenn

Pinning an object to a vertex

2010-05-21T18:01:00.000-07:00

I needed to pin buttons onto a deforming shirt and as I didn't want to simply skin the buttons to the armature, I needed to constrain them somehow.

Michael W at blenderartists pointed me to this gem from the 2.4 Wiki...

You can parent an object to a single vertex or a group of vertices as well; that way the child/children will move when the parent mesh is deformed, like a mosquito on a pulsing artery. In Object mode, select the child/children and then the parent object. ⇆ Tab into Edit mode and on the parent object select either one vertex that defines a single point, or select three vertices that define an area (the three vertices do not have to form a complete face they can be any three vertices of the parent object), and then hit ctrl p

~Glenn

Kentaro

2010-05-19T00:49:00.000-07:00

Here is a first pass test of my Wombat character kentaro. The fur has polished up great for a first pass, but he turns to mud id ambient occlusion is enabled. What I need is to figure out how to exclude the fur from Ambient occlusion. I really don't want to have to render him out as a separate pass. If anyone has any ideas as to how to do this, drop me a note.

~Glenn

Rain on glass test

2010-05-19T00:04:00.000-07:00

Here is a youtube clip of a rain displacement map made for Adelaide Grey

I have also tried to throw the rain as a gobo onto the wall as well as tidy up a few render problems.

~Glenn

Things I've found...

2010-05-18T20:02:00.000-07:00

Here are some thoughts about work flow in the current SVN of Blender 2.5.

Skeleton Sketching | Constraining the sketch to a volume's centre requires CTRL held which is not explained at all clearly.

Weight Painting | Need to be able to convert mapping data to vertex data. Noise maps baked into verts of weights painted in grey scale in Photoshop (or gimp :)) to be applied and converted to weights.

Particle System | A particle system can be re-named but the name is not reflected in the modifier stack.

Preferences | Default preferences more consistent with 3rd party apps. Turntable VS Trackball for example. Another example is having to select UV over generated every time you add a bitmap to a material. If a UV exists, it should be the preferred mapping system.

Paint modes | On selection of a texture, the brush button under the texture tab should be on automatically. Brush selection on the left tool panel should sync with the texture panel on the right.

Rendering | Cannot set up a BG image in a render without post compositing it. Makes it difficult to set up a Bg to reflect into materials.

Viewport | Cannot hide the grid in non perspective views.

Materials | There is an 'add material' + button but not an 'add texture' + button.

Materials | Multiple materials (and textures) create a scroll bar but there is no way to resize the window to show all.

Materials | Animated textures don't automatically set themselves to the full frame range of the incoming clip.

Nodes | A check box to turn off colour management in the node view is needed when working in a colour managed scene. Otherwise the materials are hard to see.

Graph editor | Need to be able to drag on and off channels (the same functionality as the 'show/hide layers with a mouse drag' in Photoshop.) There is too much data to spend the time clicking on and off each lock or eyeball individually.

Sequencer | Proxy file paths are currently stored with each clip which can be painful if you have many clips to import and work with. A global proxy path would be far superior.

Entrance rendered in Blender

2010-05-18T06:34:00.000-07:00

Here's a test render in Blender of the entrance hall. The mesh is mostly salvaged from Max but chunks have been reworked in Blender. I'm not happy with big bits of this but post it here as a WIP.

~Glenn

Old max renders with Vray

2010-05-17T17:37:00.001-07:00

For what it's worth, here are a couple of pic of sets I built in max. They are rendered with Vray and GI. I'm pretty much rebuilding them again in Blender as the OBJ export is a little unkind on some of the mesh and I also want to learn more about poly modeling in Blender. :)

~Glenn

Riggin'

2010-05-17T14:30:00.000-07:00

Lately I have been rigging. This is really my first rig in Blender and I have to say I've been impressed. So far I have IK/FK switching and a couple of tricks on the spine and feet which (hopefully) will make animation of my character fluid. No doubt if i ever get to animation, I'll wish I had rigged her differently.

~Glenn

Ghost in 2.5

2010-05-17T06:31:00.000-07:00

Here are a couple of thoughts about the implimentation of ghosting in 2.5
Firstly, Ghost and motion paths should be organised the same way...

And secondly, as ghosting is turned on and off a LOT while animators work, it would be good to have one of those radio buttons beside the ghost (and motion path) titles. Currently the only way to turn it on and off is to adjust the number of steps before and after.

Do you think it would be good to combine the two anyway?

~Glenn

Cloth UI should mirror Particle UI.

2010-05-17T06:29:00.000-07:00

The cloth UI should mirror that established in the particle system rollout like this...

Notice I have put pin in multiple times. I wonder if it's possible to pin at different points and animate the pinning on and off? For example, a woman wearing a dress (pin 1 at her waist) picks up the hem of her dress to cross a pond (pin 2 at her hand) and drops the hem once across. This is a pretty standard workflow in many other apps and I think it's well worth considering.

~Glenn

3d Spline woes

2010-05-17T06:28:00.000-07:00

Is it just me or does...

This non scaling of the profile is particular to Blender. in other apps, the resultant mesh tries to follow the flow of the base shape (in this case, the arch) and to do so, scales the profile in the corners. Blender pops the same bevel profile in at every vert regardless of the resulting shape. This makes things like windows (above) difficult to bang out quickly.

That said, 2d does work as expected.

Here is what I'd like to see...

~Glenn

Sparse hair on imported OBJ,

2010-05-17T06:27:00.000-07:00

I have this character that I have imported into 2.5 via OBJ and the hairs only propagate from a small group of faces. Weight painting was only painting on these handful of faces too. I fiddled about but to no avail...

Here is the blend:
http://www.glennmelenhorst.com/misc/blender/hair.blend

Any help greatly appreciated.
Glenn

2010-05-17T06:26:00.001-07:00

Here's an update on Adelaide...

Made in Max but largely rebuilt in Blender 2.5 as a test piece. Most of the mesh has been reworked (retopoed), re mapped with new materials applied. I'm really loving 2.5 and am finding out a whole bunch of new stuff doing this excercise.
I just need the meta rig stuff to work.

~Glenn

Weird comp of hair

2010-05-17T06:25:00.001-07:00

I have 2 particle systems emitted for the hair of a character I am working on and the second hair system seems to wig out (pun!) around the edge of the character's face.. a like so...
Any thoughts on what might be doing this?

~Glenn

Project verticies on the surface of other objects

2010-05-17T06:24:00.000-07:00

The "Project verticies on the surface of other objects" toggle is great for retopology and I was wondering why it was toggle-able in sculpt mode.
I think it would be extraordinarily useful to be able to move a bunch of verts around over another surface in sculpt mode (something we do in Maya for muscle and skin deformation targets) and I was hoping it might be implemented in Blender.
Otherwise, I'd look to having that icon removed when in sculpt mode so as not to be confusing.

~Glenn

Multiple pinning of cloth

2010-05-17T06:23:00.000-07:00

Hi all.

I've been playing with 2.5, trying to make dynamic rabbit ears using rubbery cloth and it works a treat. Where I'm stuck is that I'd like to give each ear a slightly different set of settings so they don't wobble the same way but can only apply one cloth modifier to my mesh. Is there a way around this? I have faked muscle wobble in Max in the past by affecting different clusters of soft selected verts with a stack of differing flex modifiers which gives a nice, natural oscillation of the flesh and am looking to do the same here.

Any advice on work flow here would be appreciated.

~Glenn

Indirect lighting test

2010-05-17T06:19:00.002-07:00

Here is a room I made years ago that I thought I'd try with indirect lighting. No idea how long it took (I was rendering in max as well on the same machine) and I'm well aware the mesh is poor but hey, it's a test after all.
One spot outside and two gentle ceiling spots on the books.

~Glenn

Vertex paint trouble

2010-05-17T06:19:00.001-07:00

If in vertex paint, you paint a strong colour on the outside corner of a box and rotate it, the back face that connects to that vert remains uncoloured. Is this correct?
It would seem that as it's the vert being painted, the backface should be affected too. Or can it do that and I'm missing some kind of setting?

~Glenn

Show Brush Textures

2010-05-17T06:17:00.000-07:00

Can anyone think of a reason why the 'show brush textures' button should not be automatically switched on whilst in sculpt mode? It seems like an added level of confusion for the UI. It would seem logical to me that when you are in sculpt mode, the textue panel could already be in the 'show brush texture' mode and there would be no use for the button itself.

Any thoughts?

~Glenn

Shape Key Sliders

2010-05-17T06:16:00.000-07:00

I was playing with Angela's Durian test blend and it occured to me that the Shape Key sliders in the shape key editor would benefit from scaling with the window to allow artists finer control when adjusting values, a-like-so:
Given the rest of the UI is so 'stretchy' I figure it's a pretty easy implementation (says the non coder).

~Glenn

Blur Brush

2010-05-17T06:15:00.001-07:00

One of my colleagues mentioned he had troubles with the brush tools in blender and had defaulted back to Max to get the job done. He mentioned that the blur brush averaged the weights into a single value under the brush making it almost impossible to create smooth, feathered transitions in weight painting.
Naturally I didn't believe him and tried it for myself. Here is what I found..

Was difficult to get the result I wanted.

~Glenn

Welcome

2010-05-17T06:05:00.001-07:00

In this blog I hope to maintain two threads, my work making Adelaide Grey in Blender rather than Max, and as a testing bed for 2.5 which is currently in Alpha.
Hopefully the first challenge will unearth a bunch of stuff useful to the development of 2.5 in the same way that Durian is attempting to.

~Glenn