The walk cycle here really needs work, but the rig I made previously is working pretty nicely. I have to practice more on the animation aspect, but there’s two different versions here. Particle effects are awesome, but I need to work on them as well.
A quick test of a lava material combined with a fluid simulation. I cannot get the material to flow without UV’s, which is a bit of a stumbling block. Something for later.
3uhox posted a really cool model on the Blender subreddit, and went on to generously provide the .blend file. Rigging it provided some interesting challenges. In particular, the weight gradient option is very useful when combined with the smooth operator for weighting meshes that connect two bones.
Here’s a still. I’ll post the fully rendered video tomorrow, when it’s done rendering tonight.
and here’s the video.
I made a clock. It’s based on the clock that sits in front of me when I’m working.
As a modeling exercise, this isn’t particularly challenging. So I tried to make this clock do something the one on my desk never does: tell time properly.
My first instinct was to use object constraints to copy the rotation from the second hand at 1/60th the rate, then copy the minute hand’s rotation at 1/12th rate to the hour hand. This quickly ran into problems.
First, driving rotation from the second hand means that it takes forever to move the hour hand. And I wanted to be able to set the time on this clock easily. Why not just use the hour hands rotation as a base, and multiply that? Blender won’t allow that with the Copy Rotation constraint. It will, sort of, allow that with the Transform constraint, which purports to turn rotation, scale or location from one object and pass those transforms to another object. You could use one object’s location to determine the rotation of something else. It sounded cool, but I couldn’t get it to work. Which brought me to Drivers.
Drivers appear terrifyingly complex. Appearances are not deceiving in this case, but it doesn’t matter, because Drivers work, and when they don’t, there are clear error messages to help you troubleshoot. That alone makes them worthwhile. An hour working with object constraints will drive you mad trying to find what’s parented where. If you want to give drivers a try, this guy’s video is a fantastic place to start. As for me, I’m using drivers whenever possible from now on.
Not really. All I managed today was getting these two rigs to play nice. Very tricky, but manageable. Rigify gets touchy if you don’t rename things before attempting to rig something new. The safest method is to rig in separate .blend files, then append the groups into a management file. On second though, linking is probably a better choice, so you can manage the rigs via their separate files.
All I managed this evening was a pose of these two, though I intend to make something a bit more involved later.
Kind of tricky to use. There are more than dozen pertinent settings, hidden among less useful settings, that all affect each other in less than obvious ways. But Ambient Occlusion looks nice as always.
I had some trouble getting cell fracture to work; the primary problem was the edge crease persisted after the fracture step. If I had a chance, I’d add a step to set the edge crease of the shards back to zero.
Here we are!
Here’s a quick shot of a cavern. Blender unfortunately doesn’t allow you to use a generated texture for the displacement modifier and shading at the same time. I tried to make do, but I want to come back to this later with a proper tiling texture so I can match the colors with the grooves in the cavern walls.
I got it to work! It was a bit of a struggle, but it’s rather pretty. I’m not happy with the model I made, but I wanted something with geometry more complex than a cube to test the baking on.
Here it is!
I’m trying to figure out if Blender could be used for pixel based animation. At the very least, it could be used to create the animated background art for a more traditional pixel animation.
I spent most of today attempting to set up Brenda with AWS, and failed. It was frustrating, but I learned from most of my mistakes, and I have a better idea of how to do cloud rendering in the future. At present, though, I’m recovering from a extended bout of willing my computer to combust. Progress!
One of my New Years resolutions for 2016 will be to produce something with Blender every day. Mostly, this is for my personal edification. Blender is a program that rewards constant use, as you get quicker and faster with some of the more arcane shortcuts and features.
The rules for this are as follows:
And as a start, here’s something from yesterday. I’ll do another one later today as well.
