mattjordan.com

Blender 2.5 texture node problem

Matt — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 23:34:55 +0000

I’m following Andrew Price’s Introduction to Texture Nodes tutorial and applying it to Blender 2.5. Everything seems to be working except the Bump map portion. For some reason, it doesn’t seem to apply in the texture channel even though I can see it correctly (as far as I know) in the node editor. A screen cap is below (click the image for a larger view):

Blender 2.5 Nodes Problem

I didn’t put up a screen cap of the other three channels because they all display properly. I realize that this may just be an “alpha” problem, but if it isn’t, anybody know what I may be doing wrong or what the problem is?

Late night Blender play

Matt — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 07:56:07 +0000

Here’s my first go at the whole hair thing:

Hair Ball

And here’s the final result (so far) of my attempt to make a cobblestone street with purely procedural textures and the material and texture nodes. Not quite there, but on the right track.

Cobblestones, shmobblestones

Nebular woes

Matt — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 17:46:44 +0000

I’m trying to adapt Colin Litster’s classic nebula tutorial (PDF) to Blender 2.5 alpha 2 and, so far, the gaseous effect isn’t happening. I suspect that maybe the texture isn’t being applied to the mesh properly: the overall glow and alpha parts look right, but it lacks any wispy, nebulous appearance.

Nebula Woes

Okay, with the render emitter option off, it gets better:

Getting better.

Here’s the basic idea. It needs a fair amount of work to look really good, but the concept is there:

Reel Progress

Matt — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 06:10:04 +0000

Slowly getting better. Metal looks decent. Film part … not so much.

Metal looks decent. Film part ... not so much.

One problem I’m having is the inside of the reel. In the shot below, you can see this odd – and to my eyes, unnatural – pattern of dark shapes.

Strange dark patterns inside reel.

If I remove the front piece, the metal appears more or less normal:

Looks normal to me.

And, going the other way, if I put something in front of the full reel, I can really see this odd shadow effect:

Definitely something shady going on here...

So I’m thinking that I somehow don’t have the shadows interacting properly. If anybody has any tips, I’d appreciate them.

EDIT

Okay, one suggestion I received over at the blenderartist.org forums was to increase the number of samples for the light that’s causing the weirdness. Here it is with samples bumped up to 5:

Increased samples to 5 for the key light.

It definitely helped with the shadow cast by the ball, but there’s still the weirdness on the inner portion of the reel itself.

Beginnings…

Matt — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 21:40:34 +0000

Taking another stab at Blender. This is a test of a small piece of something larger. In this case, I’m trying to make something that looks like old brass. I’ve got quite a bit to figure out.

A test render from a Blender project, using Blender 2.5.

After some additional fiddling, the weathered part is better, but still not quite like brass.

A little more weathered looking, but still not brassy enough.

I increased the light intensity on this one.

Harder noise, but with a bit less normal distortion

A tad more like brass?

Mostly like the previous one, only bigger. (Click on this image to see the bigger version.)

HeroesCon 2010

Matt — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 00:22:50 +0000

We’re back from my very first comics convention, HeroesCon 2010. I’ll have a more complete rundown of the weekend’s happenings in a later post, but for now just know that De and I had a great time, we met some really fantastic people, and we’re definitely going back next year.

WIP: Creepspace Promo

Matt — Thu, 20 May 2010 20:44:09 +0000

A frame from an upcoming Creepspace promo.

This is a frame from a Creepspace promo I’m whipping up. It works better as an animation than as a still image. This part was done entirely in Synfig. I have one more bit to do to finish – maybe as early as tonight. Click the image for a slightly larger version.

Bubble practice

Matt — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 23:12:29 +0000

After picking up a used copy of Elemental Magic, I tried a first go at a surface bubble. This was done straight-ahead in Pencil and it’s kinda-sorta-okay for a first try, I guess. For one thing, I realized during the process just how little I know about what happens inside the bubble. And, in spite of my best efforts to make things overlap, all of the drops seem to hit at the same time. Lesson: 1 or 2 frames is not enough space to give a sense of overlap. One other problem is that, since I haven’t done much straight-ahead animation, my hang time on the droplets really sucks.

For a look at somebody who knows what he’s doing, check out this lava bubble by the author of Elemental Magic.

John K’s $100 K is OK with me

Matt — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 15:05:38 +0000

I’ve decided to really focus on some of the fundamental drawing skills again and see if I can push past this mediocre plateau I’ve been on for a while now. To this end, I’m doing John Kricfalusi‘s “$100,000 Animation Drawing Course.” Here’s a small batch of starter sketches. These will mostly be used to compare against later. I imagine it’ll take a while to get me out of the first lesson.

Starter sketches for John K's $100K

And, here’s a frog study:

Frog study

And, here’s a little practice drawing directly in Pencil with a background wash in Gimp:

Drawing practice in Pencil (with Gimp background).

Something old

Matt — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 14:05:05 +0000

I found this old snippet from an abandoned project while cleaning out my hard drive. It makes me want to revive the project. Most of the art was created in Inkscape and then imported into KoolMoves where I added a few faint, wispy clouds (using a blur filter) and then animated the camera moves and the train cars. KoolMoves, unlike most of the software I use, is not open source, but it’s a really good and very inexpensive alternative to Flash, and it imports SVG files (which is what Inkscape makes). I’ve even been able to get KoolMoves running on Ubuntu using Wine/CrossOver. I plan to use KoolMoves to make a few original games for the Creepspace website. Take that, Adobe!

On a completely unrelated note, I’m not crazy about the new page layouts for individual videos over at YouTube. In particular, having the “more videos by this user” link on top of the main video seems like a really bad idea since opening it pushes the video you’re watching down the page. Not sure what YouTube is thinking with this redesign.