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.

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.

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.

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.

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.