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...

A quick progress on Joe:

Still working on it.....

I'm not stopped on the main project, I've been working with my brother on another student film.  As the material is his I'm not showing any of it here .... yet.  My brother teaches grade schooler's animation classes and here is their last project:

I did a lot of modeling on this project, it was modelled in blender, animated in poser and rendered in vue.  For the next project we're converting over to blender internal which will replace vue.  We are still using poser for animation since that is what the kids know how to animate in.  I am still working on my big project, but just between working on the next animation with my brother.  Not to worry, all of the experience I am getting in rigging and simulation will be reused on my projects:)  Here's a quick progress on the truck:



Exterior House Progress.

Still modelling...... 23,500,000 vertices.  Dupliverts rock.  Trees come from arbaro.

Working on an exterior.

This was done in cycles, have a ways to go yet.  This is the exterior to the interior house shown below.  Lot's of grass fences and windows to add, but coming along nicely. 

On a separate note... I've been trying to learn animation so I can start moving characters around in the sets.

Still playing with Cycles.

I think I'm going to be modelling for years, needed some cars (nothing fancy)  I want to concentrate on story some day and flashy cars are going to draw your eye away so I picked 2007 Chevy Colorado, pretty boring.  Still needs a lot of modeling and material work, but coming along nicely.

Count these as learning....

So I've been trying out cycles the new render engine for blender and was doing some tests for it.  I'm still uncertain what the final renderer for the movie is going to be.  Blender is going through major rewrites right now and it's really hard to commit and do a bunch of work only to have to do it again later.  Knowing that blender's internal render api is being rewritten right now I may wait until the api is working with luxrender before I really start working on materials and characters.  Up to now most of my work has been modelling which is why most of it isn't on this blog since I haven't put the materials on the models and rendered them.  I am also trying to learn real shader system way of rendering which is a tricky business.