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Image Planes Part 4 (Object IDs)

Eugene — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 04:00:25 +0000

Didn’t think the image plane series was complete enough so I tacked on this little diddy. I covers how to get object (or primitive) ids using image planes in Houdini and what you can do with them in the compositor using the lumakey COP. The compositor part I learned from SYmek, who I feel is an integral part of the Houdini community (and who I had an argument with about points on the Sunflow forum a while back ).

Building Blender With OpenMP And VC9

Eugene — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 03:24:17 +0000

I’ve been asked a few times about building Blender using Visual C++ Express with OpenMP. It’s an option in CMake and is being utilized by several parts of Blender. Sadly, it turns out that the Express editions of VC9 (or VC8 for that matter) do not support OpenMP. The full Visual Studio does though, so if you have it, you’re golden. I’ve updated the the tutorial to state that if you are using Express you need to set OpenMP in CMake to False. But if you have Visual Studio, I’ve included how to make Visual Studio support OpenMP.

Building Blender With CMake Updated

Eugene — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 04:30:30 +0000

I’ve just updated the very popular written tutorial on building Blender with CMake to make use of MSVC 9. I wanted to do it the day VC9 came out, but CMake was a little slow to catch up in offering a VC9 project file type. After waiting a while, CMake has been updated so now I can safely make VC9 the default IDE for building Blender in my tutorial – hooray!

Jahshaka Returns

Eugene — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 18:08:27 +0000

This is big news in my mind and I can’t believe I didn’t know about it until today. After seeing it at Siggraph 2006 I had the impression it was going to be a really cool program, so much so that I started to learn it which resulted in the lone video tutorial I did for Jahshaka. After I saw the sudden drop in development a while back I thought it had died or was developing at a very slow pace, so I kind of let it go. But now, seeing this news really makes me optimistic because this kind of application really doesn’t have strong open source representation, plus it will be great to add to my toolset. So I can only hope they start back up and get something out to the community as soon as they are able because I am ready to jump on board.

Sunflow Wiki

Eugene — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 17:46:04 +0000

Yes, I made one. I made one despite a poll that showed a pdf manual would have been preferred. I just found using a wiki so much easier to update and way faster than sourceforge when I want to remember some code block, grab a janino shader, or recall a tip someone mentioned in a post 8 months ago. I consider it totally unofficial and I’m not going to advertise it’s out there by mentioning it all the time but I will add a link on my site and I’ll point to it in my signature on the Sunflow forums. Hopefully, a new Sunflow user/developer will stumble upon it and find it useful.

What’s amusing is the addictiveness that comes with creating a wiki. I find myself constantly adding to it or tweaking it here and there. The truly daunting task will be to do the new Sunflow .sca format. Since it’s not yet finalized I’m not going to start on it, but when the next version hits I’ll scramble to get all the .sc info moved to the .sca section.

P.S. I’ve been off and on with a WIP, but I put an early version of it in the gallery.

Auto Keying In Blender

Eugene — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 03:00:39 +0000

*Re-done late November 2nd, 2007. Keeping with tradition, I’ve re-done the video to cover a bit more.

It’s been a while, I know. I haven’t been doing videos lately, but in discussing animation speed with someone, I though this was worth mentioning. In other packages this feature is fairly prominent, but for newcomers to Blender, it’s not so apparent. This video weighs in at just over 2 minutes, but it didn’t need to be longer. If you want to see a simple button that will remove the need for the “I” key to insert a key frame, then this is the video for you! You can find it on the last link in the animation section.

Sunflow Shader Writing

Eugene — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 18:32:26 +0000

I’m sure it’s apparent that I’m into Sunflow. I enjoy it thoroughly. I’ve also gotten into the source code enough that I am grasping even more. Case in point: I’ve produced my second janino shader. The first was just stripping the diffuse component out of the phong shader leaving only the specular – nothing fancy. The second is a little more than a standard shader stripped down to the wires (though still not on the level that Don is at). What makes it special to me is that it actually does something I can use and it looks like I intended: implementation of a reflection map on one of the shaders. I’m finding that the real power of Sunflow is the integration of Janino so that you can access everything in the source. Not only is it a great deal of fun to have access to everything the renderer has, but you can create things beyond what is there now. Plus, it helps me strengthen my use of Java.

Sunflow Distributed Rendering Now Housed Here!

Eugene — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 19:08:28 +0000

Earlier this year, Szabolcs Pota used a Jini based grid system called JGrid and hooked Sunflow to it. Needless to say this was a cool thing since it is entirely open source – no CPU limits here! – and it gave Sunflow real distributed rendering capability. It seems that the site that had all the files on it was no longer functioning, but luckily I collect files, so I had everything but I was concerned that Sunflow users wouldn’t have access to it. A quick e-mail to Szabolcs, and an offer to house it all on my site brings us to the title of this post. The site is as it was at its new location. So now all Sunflow users can once again have access to this amazing tool!

Iterated Fractals, Meet Sunflow

Eugene — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 01:28:28 +0000

Thanks to Sunflow user and fractal enthusiast Don Casteel, we now have a pretty cool fractal method. Don is no stranger to fractals (1, 2) and once he found Sunflow he started creating some really cool stuff. Of course he did a teapot fractal, so I thought I would “represent” by doing a Suzanne fractal. Take a look at my results in the gallery. I like it so much I made my header of the site from one of them.

Thoughts On Rigging

Eugene — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 00:33:33 +0000

A while back I got an e-mail asking about where someone could start to learn rigging in Blender. I thought the e-mail was good enough that I should probably post it for people looking for a few links and thoughts. Here is the slightly edited version of my response mentioning four main places to find rigging material:

The first is something you might be more interested in which is tutorials: One on rigging which can be downloaded as a pdf here.
Another good one (probably better then the one I just mentioned) is here which is part of the character animation overview. The pdf version of the whole animation tutorial can be found here. This last one is my FAVORITE beginner rigging tutorial.
There is a BlenderNation post linking to a bunch of rigs. Each rig is a lesson in itself, but they are all as-is with little instruction on how they were done.
The fourth is a rig done by one of the elite: animator Daniel Martinez Lara. This rig looks simple, but there are hidden bone layers. It does however control a leg with only two bones. You can find these and more goodies on his site. Find the .blend here and the demo video here (mpg).

If you’re looking for seven things to think about when rigging, think about how the rigs can be made:

1) Using bones to control vertex groups (I cover that in animating box flaps)
2) Using weight painting to control how bones move vertices (I cover that in the fake muscle video)
3) Using envelopes to control how bones move vertices (and in the SVN, heat weighting)
4) Using constraints to make bones do different things under different circumstances (IK solver, limit constraints, etc.
5) Making use of the bone layers in the Armature panel
6) Using the ipo/action/NLA editor to make your life easier
7) Using drivers to make controllers for your rigs.