January 28, 2014

Commonly Ignored Feature #10: Continuous Grab

While I’m sure almost everyone knows about Continuous Grab, I have every now and then come across someone who doesn’t.

It’s simple really, when doing any kind of transform in the 3d view, or even sliding some values around, when the mouse reaches the edge of the region it will jump to the other side allowing you to continue moving the mouse without hitting the edge of the screen. This is something I sorely miss when using Maya at work.

It is enabled by default now, so the only folk who won’t know about it are those who saved their own preferences with it turned off before the defaults changed.

January 25, 2014

Commonly Ignored Feature #9: Alt+Scroll

Here’s a little hidden gem for you, holding Alt and scrolling the mouse wheel will increase and decrease any value, including the brightness of colours. Not exactly life changing, I haven’t even used it myself ever, but someone is sure to use this :)

Perhaps if there were some way to get more precision, like holding down shift to use smaller increments, it would be a better feature.

January 21, 2014

Shroom

Entered last weekends challenge on BA – ’twas quite fun!
The theme was Fantasy Creatures, and it was quite well-attended :) Go and vote for your favourite artwork!

If you’re never done it, I highly recommend participating in these challenges. You’ll see most folk are very much beginners, and participate purely for the purpose of improving themselves (alliteration much?). Winners get to choose the topic for the next week, and the rules are very loose (you can even use other peoples models to an extent)

A new challenge is posted early every Friday, and finishes late the next Monday (in fact it’s Tuesday in my timezone) – so time is limited, but it’s a really great opportunity to teach yourself how to create great art on a short deadline, or to improve a portion of your skills. After the challenge is closed, voting opens and the community decides who wins!

January 13, 2014

Saturdoodle: Tower (2)

There’s an uncanny resemblance to my last Saturdoodle here… I seem to have a weakness for lonely medieval structures.

I found a random image on Saturday morning, which seems to be a 3d model for sale, and decided it could be fun to recreate. After a couple hours of modeling, the fun slowly wore off and once again I felt like I was actually working. I was however looking forward to texturing it, so I pushed on and eventually (after UV unwrapping it about 4 times) enjoyed the last part of the modeling and then stretched those old Cycles muscles I felt like I haven’t used for so long.

As you can see, the bricks are not modeled in, but in fact a displacement. Modeling them by hand would be painful, but it nearly came to that.

Instead, I created the displacement map by “modeling” each brick in 2D, tracing over a CGTextures image, and giving them a random value. A little tweaking to make sure it’s tileable, render that, blur it a bit, and you have yourself a displacement map for randomly jutting-out bricks.

Take this texture as CC-0 :) use it as you please – it goes with BrickOldRounded_0236 from CGTextures. After all, the tiny statue in the center of the front wall was sculpted by Ben Simonds and released as CC-0.

Crits and comments are welcome as always.

Hope you all had a nice relaxing weekend :)

January 9, 2014

Commonly Ignored Feature #8: Quick Simulations

I really like these CIFs, I really wanted to do these more often – the plan was twice a week. But the problem is, I’ve run out of things that people usually don’t know about :)

Anywho, here’s a little hidden gem I remembered recently:
Quick Fur/Fluid/Smoke/Explode

As far as I know, there is no shortcut to these operators, nor do they appear anywhere in the interface (nor can I think of a good place to put them). The only way to find them is to search for them in the Spacebar menu.

These four functions are simply a quick way to set up a basic simulation. Each of them have some options you can adjust in the lower part of the toolbar, or in the F6 popup.

Honestly though, I’ve never actually used these. Old habits die hard perhaps? :P

January 6, 2014

ISS Renders and A Review/Rant of 2013

Chris Kuhn and I have collaborated before, he’s an epic modeler and I have an itch to shade and render things. Both of our previous collaborations are among the top 30 most liked blends on Blendswap, and both are ships of sorts: a Hyperspace Shuttle and a Victorian pirate ship.

This time, I had absolutely no hand in creating anything. Chris modeled, textured and shaded this epicly detailed accurate model of the International Space Station, and the full mesh can be downloaded for free. He is selling the textured version on TurboSquid for $99 – which is 10x cheaper than some other ISS models that are only a portion of the full thing. If you’re one of those FOSS freaks that would shout about how expensive that is, it’s not even worth trying to explain to you why it isn’t.

Chris sent me the full shaded thing just so I could make some renders of it, but I struggled a bit with the lack of any other elements in the scene to play with composition. In the end I gave him the two above images, though I don’t particularly like either of them.

Which brings me to my next point:

Victorian Pirate Ship – “Suzanne’s Revenge”

The last Blender project I worked on at home for the fun of it and actually finished was the Victorian pirate ship I worked on with Chris.

Which was last year February.

Of course I did some small things, like that 10mm SMG I uploaded the other day, but like the SMG, most of the stuff was either unfinished or a piece of a bigger (unfinished) project. The only thing that I finished since then was a weekend challenge on BA.org, which hardly counts.

I know I’m not the only one to have dozens of unfinished projects on their HDD, but I’ve only been blending for about 5 or 6 years, and this last year I seem to have made almost no progress in terms of shading/texturing skills. In fact I’m quite sure I’ve even regressed a bit. Maybe I know a little more theory, but working full time shading and lighting simple stylized scenes at BugBox seems to have made me both lazy and see anything CG-related as boring work.

“Low Light” weekend challenge

Still, working at BugBox for the last two years has taught me a lot. Even though my shading skills are taking a hit due to lack of exercise, I’ve learnt a lot about the more important side of CG: what makes things appealing, colour theory in practice, the difficulties and responsibilities of being the last guy in the pipeline, the time and skill that goes into good character animation, and the madness that is the political warfare of clients, agencies, competing studios and low budgets.

Sure, you could easily tell me I have plenty of time on the weekend to work on keeping my shading skills in check, but the biggest problem is my waning motivation. Coming home after 40 hours of CG, the last thing I want to do is push myself to do more CG.

Well I won’t bore you with any more depressing ranting, (actually I’ve just run out of energy to think), so here’s a picture of my cat: