Thursday, December 13, 2012

Friends and readers

I have just gotten word today, that I will be starting a new day job. Which will wind down pretty much my entire capabilities to moderate this site, and post new content. Since income was a constraint for me in publishing new content, this does alleviate some worries but does push this website to a little lower on a list of things to do.

I still troll around on reddit, and help when I can. I am looking for people who have experience in blender who may want to help this site grow, but as for now it's going to sit on the side. I may be able to work on some new content after the beginning of the year.

I hope everyone who has come hear to read some informative stuff on blender can continue to in the future.

I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season, and a happy new year. And if the world ends after the 21st, I won't have to worry about this website anyway. ;-)

Thank you to all my returning readers, and any new readers.
-AG

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Dear Readers,

I've got a few readers who come here on a daily bases, I can't believe I've got so many. I haven't posted anything new in a while because I've been trying to get a new day job, and other things in order. So I apologize that I haven't been able to make any new content.

I have been working on a few things. I found a great piece of software that is a bit pricey for those who use free and open source software. That allows you to take multiple photos of a real object and create a mesh and texture from the pictures. I'll be writing a little something about it, and demonstrating it for those who are interested.

I also went to New York this weekend, which got my imagination going about architecture and the CAD work that you can do with Blender. I took a lot of pictures that will be helpful to do some interesting designs, and I'm planning on recreating a scene that I had done a while back. Which was supposed to be a high rise apartment/loft thing. I way overestimated the work involved, and I think I'm going to try to recreate it, with some new design ideas.

I appreciate those of you who come here for the tutorials I've posted and the comments I get. I'm open to suggestions or questions, please feel free to ask!

I don't make much money from this site, which I think is why it's hard to keep up with it. So if you like the content, and want to see more, I do have a donate link on the side.

Thank you for reading!

Sunday, September 16, 2012

Fluid Dissolves

After helping out a guy on YouTube, having an issue with a scene he created, I decided to play around with this blend file, and log some more hours in the fluid physics sim.

He was having some issues with fluids disappearing from his scene, after leaving a square pipe and hitting aquarium floor that he had set up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNc1kMkZxBU

It took me a few tries to finally realize what was happening...

Monday, August 20, 2012

Tutorial #4 - Ocean Simulation

This is a quick little tutorial about how to set up the ocean simulator, and a basic scene to create a decent looking ocean. I was asked about this a while back, and with a recent animation I created, I felt like it was time to explain it.

So first, here's what we're going to be creating with the ocean simulator, a ten second clip. I'll then show the tutorial, and explain the steps.




Monday, August 6, 2012

Cycles CUDA vs OpenCL

Once again, I was helping out on Reddit /r/blender. Great place to see some works in progress, and help newbies, and discuss things about blender. Sometimes things amaze me there, but more often than not, it gets my brain going.

Whats better, this or that? Whats the difference between... How do I make this scene look better?

This weekend someone asked about Cycles, and GPU computing, and why he can't get AMD GPU's to work. It was mentioned that Nvidia cards are the cards Blender is being developed for, and to try some other builds for AMD cards. We get into a discussion about CUDA vs OpenCL, and that OpenCL has problems with shadows.

I decided to run a few tests.

Friday, July 27, 2012

Champagne Glass Scene, with Wedding Band (UPDATE)

So after a long few days, trying to get this ring modeled, I finally came out with a fairly good model. I learned quite a bit about modeling an object with this. I'm not going to go into too much detail about the process of making the ring in this post, but I will try to write something up over the weekend.


I will however show the ring, and the scene with the ring in it, after the break.

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Champagne in a Crystal Glass, and How to Handle Liquids IOR

So I finally got my AC fixed. Installed 64bit Ubuntu on my blender machine, and 64bit Blender. Things feel smoother, but it likes to crash. So I had spent all of yesterday working on this scene, and most of today. Yesterday, was more or less trying out blender in 64bit to see what it could do more. Not much, but it does seem to respond faster.

I just wanted to post a quick sample of where I got with the wedding table scene. It's not complete, but I'll give some notes of what I was trying for.

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

No Air Conditioning!

What a pain, I got a leak in my AC unit, so I can't really run my blender machine without turning out like a hot box. My office is in Mojave, California so luckily only hitting 85 degrees today.

I wanted to work on a simple blend this week, that uses a simple particle system, based upon my weekend. My brother got married, and he had a really nice wedding, so I was looking to make a simple diamond ring and some glasses of champagne.

We'll see how it bodes if/when I get my AC repaired tonight.

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Tutorial #3 - Understanding Depth Of Field and Camera Settings

So two weeks ago I posted about knowing your camera sensors sizes, and I wanted this to get you to look at your camera's information to understand the aspects of it. The focal length, the sensor size, and f/stop affects how your photo looks. If you were going to use a render in compilation with a photo (or video) you took, you'd want these settings to be as near as accurate as you could get.

I feel this is something that is really taken for granted in blender. Depth Of Field, it's overdone, or not used at all. Both of which can make your scene or render look really fake if you're not using it correctly. So after the break, I've put up a new video, that goes into the settings of the virtual camera to make you take a look at the depth of field you're using in your scene.

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Fracture Tools - Animation Tip

I released a new animation that I was trying to get done completely with game physics. Come to find out it's just not that easy. I saw a video of someone using physics to drop a cup to a floor, it breaks, and that was it, but he didn't explain how he did it.

I tried to replicate it like he did, but I couldn't get the cup shards to fall without interacting with each other before they hit the floor.

I started to analyze the video, saw the cup was fractured before it hit the ground. I was hoping to reproduce it, but I wanted to do it better. I think the animation tools in blender are really ingenious, with what you can do with key frames. After the break, I've got the video I made last night, along with a quick tip of using key frames to create a dynamic animation like this.

Friday, June 29, 2012

A logo, and a decent render to show it off in.

Maybe you didn't notice the new logo, up top?

I spent a few hours hashing out some ideas, sketching things up, and kind of landed on this one. I left the original files alone so I can change colors when I need to. The font seems kind of fitting, and I quite like the signature in the corner.

After the break I've got a new video I just rendered, some tips on things I ran into, and a personal critique of this job. I've already uploaded a frame from the video as the background.

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Blender Physics - Poker Chips

Update at bottom of the article after the break, how I got rid of the springiness in game physics.

This last weekend, my girlfriend and I went to Vegas. We had a lot of fun, but for some reason it always gets me in this mood. I just love the thought of Vegas, and gambling. We've been home for a few days, and I felt like testing out blender's physics engine.

She loves to play roulette, and personally I like craps, and the video poker machines. I just love poker chips.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Preface to Tutorial 3 - Standard Sensors

After playing around a bit with camera tracking, I found that you need to know some key information about your camera that you're using. One bit of information that kind of confused me, was the sensor size.

Using my Kodak Zi8, for camera tracking I was confused by the 1/2.5" sensor size. So I took some time to understand this concept.

Monday, June 18, 2012

Horrible Tutorial #2 - Concepts of Light


This is basically a photography lesson about light. Using Cycles you need to understand how work with concepts that work in real life film, and where cycles lacks in recreating real life light.

In this tutorial, I'll go over the basics of lighting a scene, emotions, and temperatures of light. I'll describe the proper way to light a scene and how to get the most from your images and animation to work with the emotion you want to create.

After the break, will be the video, and a lengthy few paragraphs about light and how it works...

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Randomness, Seeds, Wood... Wood Pattern Generator?

I've been thinking about this for some time, I don't know why this doesn't exist... I mean it could.

When working with textures, I've felt, you have to pay for really good textures, or hope you can make something decent with low high resolution pictures into low resolution textures, or use low resolution textures. Why don't we have good textures generators?

Saturday, June 9, 2012

Another Preface to Tutorial #2

This is one reason I love the community. In order to understand light and how to use it properly, it helps to look at examples from real life, and other's use of light. With digital photography our ability to take pictures has greatly increased, we can change light on a whim. Sharing this information has also increased.


Friday, June 8, 2012

Clouds, Skies, and Worlds!

Long before I ever touched blender, I played with Planetside's Terragen. Able to create terrain, clouds, skies, beautiful worlds with the touch of a button. Unfortunately it does not work in linux too well...

Monday, June 4, 2012

Horrible Tutorial #1 - Fluid Simulator Explained

So here is Horrible Tutorial #1, Blender Fluid Simulator, explained... as best as I can.

So this tutorial goes into the basic setup, and design of the scene. The main event is the Fluid Simulator, how to set it up the simulator, configure settings, and explains what most of it does. I show and explain the domain, the fluids, and obstacles. And finally how to set up the domain, and get you to understand what it all means.

After the break, you'll see the video, and I'll give an outline of everything I went over in the video.

Saturday, June 2, 2012

Preface to Tutorial #2 - Lighting a Scene

So browsing reddit, I noticed a perfect example of something you need to see. In order to understand how to light a scene, you need to see how scenes are lit properly. Which is a perfect set-up for my next tutorial.

After the jump you'll see the video that I'm talking about, hopefully as long as it's still up...

Friday, June 1, 2012

Horrible Tutorial #1 Sample - Fluid Simulation


Here's the first end result of the first video tutorial. Using the fluid simulator in blender. I'll post the tutorial I created later. As soon as I can get it on this account.

This sample shows the fluid simulator rushing water into a blank scene, and flooding the scene. Fairly simple.

This render took about 1 and half hours in baking the simulation, and near 8 hours rendering the frames.

Welcome, to Horrible Tutorials

Welcome, I don't have any content put up here yet, but I'm going to add some things soon.

Let me introduce myself, I'm Austere Grim, I like to keep myself abreast of new things, hacking, computer related. Recently I've been playing with Blender a lot, I'm still new to it, but I learn things every day. I'm working on taking what I learn from the community and spew it back out, in what I'm ostentatiously calling Horrible Tutorials.