.: Feeblemind :. Weblog

Second of the serie about Monsters of MountyHall. This one wanders the Hall, collects and then eats all the gold coins abandoned by the trolls adventurers.
He is cunning and dreadful when needed. These monsters are somehow inspired by the Beagle Brats from Disney, hence the colorful tribute and the famous 176-671 prisoner number!

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According to Wikipedia, Melusine is a figure of European legends and folklore, a feminine spirit of fresh waters in sacred springs and rivers.

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Vector Blur is an interesting solution to go beyond the limitations of regular Motion Blur. It relies on the Composite Nodes Editor to perform. But even if the Nodes Editor could look intimidating at first glance, it's in fact very easy to set up. This short tutorial will go through the basics steps for enhancing your renders (both stills and animations) with good looking motion blur.

Thanks to Vector Blur, the red sphere stays in focus almost all time, but the background gets blurred because of the camera movement.

For Blender: 2.50 Alpha 2 and better

Global illumination is a very popular method for lighting three dimensional scenes. Unfortunately, most of the methods are very slow and requires lots of ressources. Ambient Occlusion is a method for simulating global illumination, while keeping a respectable ratio between results and computing times.

For Blender: 2.50 Alpha 2 and better

Hopefully, you now have a working tablet. It is time for you to configure your favorite painting software so that you may work with both the pen and the software, the most efficient way that you see fit. This short article is about configuring Gimp in order to achieve a comfortable setup that will ease your painting workflow.

Image courtesy of David Revoy, for Sintel Open Movie (Durian Project)

For Gimp: 2.6.8 or better

Blender is able to produce soft shadows from any of its main lamps, quite easily. But we would still have to deal with the main usage for area lights (in order to answer to a very frequently asked question by many beginners), that is achieving shadows with soft borders, useful for simulating the lighting of a supermarket, a computer screen or a cloudy outdoor.

This article shows the usage of soft shadows, and then of the Area ligths whose settings are sometimes difficult to master.

For Blender: 2.50 Alpha 2 or better

In the past, Blender used EnvMaps (environmental maps) in order to simulate the reflectiveness of objects. But this way was quite difficult, needing the use of Empties (null objects) and layers when a simple reflecting plane was needed. Fortunately, including Raytracing into the renderer eased the whole process and helped to achieve a greater realism.

For Blender: 2.50 Alpha 2 or better

This short tutorial aims at showing you how to give many different materials to the same mesh.

Obviously, even if for the sake of simplicity, we use in this tutorial only materials with plain diffuse colors, the materials can be textured or combined through the Material nodes as per the needs of the artist.

Using these techniques, you can virtually assign one different material per mesh face during the shading process, and do smart faces selections during the modeling process.

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For Blender: 2.50 Alpha 2 or better

There was a long time I wanted to buy a decent graphic tablet. After having a mediocre experience with a Trust 1200 Wireless (aiptek driver) tablet I decided to give a go to the renowned Wacom Bamboo Fun & Touch. I had to recompile the module (same in french here) before using it on my Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx, but it was almost painless.

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I'm also a lucky friend of David Revoy, and he made me a gift: his DVD training Chaos & Evolutions, released by the Blender Foundation. I really enjoyed the video tutorials, because they cover everything I'm lacking. Since my childhood, I always made a lot of drawings, mainly drafts without techniques at all, and I never managed to get to the color stage. By playing this DVD, it was almost compulsatory that I'd try again.''

Please click to discover the content and buy the DVD from the Blender Foundation

Allan Brito, author of the famous weblog Blender 3D Architect and of the Blender 3D Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery book did it again: he recently published a new book at Packt Publishing.

His new book is titled Blender 3D 2.49 Incredible Machines. I should receive it soon, and I would be pleased to review it on this blog for your very pleasure. Before it happens, you can check the full table of content or the attached sample chapter, courtesy of the publisher.