ANT Landscape Update

So I've made a bunch of progress on the ANT Landscape cycles update.  The materials need a little work, but the basic engine is running.  Here's a demo video:

https://vimeo.com/44087740

53 Dodge, Audi TT Roadster

Taking a break from the ANT update, I modeled a 1953 Dodge pickup.  I grew up learning to drive this trunk and it's really FUN to drive.  My dad just finished restoring it and it inspired me to model it.  I also retopoed the AUDI TT roadster in the background.  All for good fun:)

Python Generated Materials!

So I've come a long way on the script.  I submitted four bug reports and they fixed two, said one wasn't(and it wasn't) and the other is still pending.  Anyway the two they fixed enable entry of materials via python.  Here is my first python generated material.  If anyone is interested in having the script, leave a comment and I'll post it up.  All you need do is add a monkey and run the script and it automatically applies this material to it.

Mountains

I finally figured out dot product node setups in cycles.  I really need believable mountains on my skylines so this is what I came up with a procedural material in cycles.  I am contemplating modifying the ANT landscape script to include adding materials like this automatically, no promises, but considering.

Here's a look at how to do the material:

Slow Progress......

I finally got some time to start the courthouse, and added some street lights.  I'm pushing how much I can get into the GPU.... so far so good.  I plan a major courthouse at the end of the street.  I also need a bunch more cars.  This is still less the 5 minutes per frame.  I've also been reading and rigging Joe.

Still working on the street.

If you're following the blog, please forgive the way too many works in progress, I guess I'm using this as a sort of diary, even if no one besides myself is reading it:)  I am prone to getting off on tangents, but I've really enjoyed doing virtual tours of small town america looking for buildings I REALLY LOVE.  The buildings here come from Baker City,OR and Bozeman Montana.  All of this still fits fine in GPU memory (2gb) and each of these renders were under five minutes.  All of these buildings are linked into a main set and then particulars of characters and cars are linked into a shot file, works great with cycles.

I kind of have a fun time looking at this as a sort of scrap book.  I would LOVE any comments on how to make it better etc though if you're interested.

Working on the street outside the cafe.....

Slowly replacing the boxes on the streets with buildings.  One nice thing about CG is you can take every building you've ever liked and put them in one town on one street.  Still have a ton of work to do, but I was impressed with cycles as it rendered this in about 6 minutes on the GPU.

Sue is RIGGED!

Hooray, talk about a difficult two weeks.... I shape keyed her once, then retopoed her and shape keyed her all over again.  Got all the drivers working nice.  Only have to do Joe now and I can start my first scene:)

Mining Robot

So I built this robot for my son as a fun project.  It's a mining robot and since I used to design mining equipment I tried to make it in the same style as that.  He isn't rigged yet or have a hydraulics system, but I thought I'd post it up as a fun aside for the movie.

As for the movie, I have spent the last few weeks rigging and shape keying Sue's face.  I had a major topology error that prevented her from smiling properly, and the corners of her mouth had too many verts, so I retopolgized her last week and am remaking all of her shape keys.

A friend of mine modeled this in solidworks and I added tires materials headlights etc for fun.  This car has non ideal topology, but looks fantastic.  It makes me wish blender had better curve control.

Sue AND Joe

So here's Sue and Joe in the cafe.  This is the first test shots of the animation.  I've figured out lyp synch, but I haven't rigged their heads yet for motion.  I threw them in the scene to test out if Cycles could be used for everything.  This is GPU rendered about 1000 samples 10 minute per frame render.  Obviously I have a LOT of work to do on the set for detail, but this gives the be ground work to start working out the animation portion in a fairly low poly scene.

Vermeer is interesting...

I have decided to start studying light.  I was inspired this Christmas season by Vermeer and  his use of light.  I still have a long way to go, but am enjoying it....

So here's the animation I've been working on.....

Centrifuge Cottonwood Creek Charter School

My brother teaches grade schoolers animation. This is their most recent animation. They animate in poser. Yes I know the abhorrence many blender heads have for poser, but my brother has tried to teach them blender's user interface and it isn't really meant for grade school kids (I sort of wish someone would put together a UI for blender that was, but hey, you can't have everything). So anyway, we exported out the animations as MDD files (had to buy a script to do it) The MDD exporter didn't work very well and I dare say we will never use this method again although there's nothing fundamentally wrong with it, the poser export script just wasn't production ready. I submitted a patch to the MDD exporter for blender and Campbell incorporated it into trunk (thanks Campbell), but he didn't accept my transposition selector so I had to tweak the trunk version so people didn't come in rotated or flipped. Anyway once we got the pipeline working it worked great, unfortunately MDD takes a LOT of Ram so you need a 64 bit operating system and at least 4 gigs although on my quad I had 8 for some of the really big shots. Anyway, my brother did all of the extraneous shots in Vue, which does great landscapes but takes FOREVER to render. The blender stuff rendered like blazes compared to Vue. So all of the shots in this film that take place at the river are rendered in blender and all the others are the kids drawings or Vue.

A quick thank you to 0ptikz for his/her great sky texture:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/show...ck-for-Blender

All Done in Blender internal...

So I was travelling last week and started from scratch on the plane.  This is a first stab at another main character.   She's rendered in cycles.

Meet Sue...