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Hello, This site is my musings, opinions and observations on all things related to Blender 3D, an open sourced 3D modelling environment. It is in no way associated with the Blender Foundation or NaN or anyone else other than me. All trademarks and copyrights are the properties of their owners even if not stated. All the stuff I write is public domain and you are therefore free to use, modify or derive works from it. |
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Andrew Price - The Wow Factor - Ebook Review The thing about Australia is that it's big, and mostly empty. This means that at anyone time, there are large swathes of Australians with not a lot to do. So obviously, to fill the vast chasms that are their lives, they pray to Kylie Minogue, drink Fosters and watch Neighbours or Home and Away, on alternate days on the Television. While most Australians are totally happy with their lot, there are the odd aberrations, the ones that don't own a cork hat, that do hate Steve Erwin, the ones that maybe think cricket is a totally pointless game and that England plays it better anyway, sort of Australians. These Australians, although rarer than a healthy Tasmanian Devil, do indeed exist and are making useful things, things that don't involve sheep/lousy beer/soaps and midget sized big assed singers. One such rare Australian individual is Andrew Price, whom a lot of Blender users will know from the BlenderGuru.com website. He is a very accomplished Blender user and has made multiple tutorials and guides covering both Blender 2.4x and 2.5x series.
This time round Andrew has produced an EBook in PDF format that covers various techniques of creating special effects in Blender 2.5's using the Compositor. Product Specifications:
The Ebook is organised in to a series of bite sized sections, each covering a different special effect, achieved using the Compositor. Topics Covered Listing:
Most of the topics are covered with minimal reading involved, which to be honest when dealing with the Compositor is a good thing. The pictures within the EBook are very clear and Andrew takes enough time to explain most of the important node features used to achieve the particular effects he is after. I would have liked a more detailed description of some features used by certain nodes, but for the purposes of getting certain effects, they were described adequately. For the amount of information and number of pages within the EBook, some could argue that the price is a little high and while it certainly isn't a cheep EBook, it probably justifies the price. Because it covers Blender 2.5's way of doing things (one of a very few that do) and covers special effects using Blender's Node editor, so it is worth the price for people who want to get up and running with Blender 2.5's Node Editor as quickly as possible and have a set of special effects technique available to them after having read the EBook. As an added bonus Andrew mentions that the book will be updated as things change in Blender 2.5's Compositor up to year 2012, so looking at it from that point of view, the price is not quiet as high as it seems. The Beginning and Intermediate Blender users will, I think, get the most benefit out of this material rather than an advanced Blender user, as it is likely that someone with extensive knowledge will already know the Compositor tricks to produce the demonstrated special effects. Overall an excellent resource for special effects and Blender 2.5 Compositor functionality. Just goes to show that there are some good things coming out of Australia, get this EBook, it's more useful than Kylie Minogue! Review Score 85% |
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www.cartoonsmart.com - Blender and Second Life - Video Tutorial Review As mentioned in a previous review, CartoonSmart.com came out with 2 new Blender video tutorials, the first one being "Blender Basics Series 4", and now it's time to take a look at the second offering from CartoonSmart.com, "Blender and Second Life".
Product Specifications:
It will likely come as no surprise to you given the title that this tutorial covers how to use Blender to integrate with certain features of Second Life, specifically how to use Blenders texturing abilities to create textures which can be used from within the Second Life environment. For those not familiar with Second Life, it is basically a 3D, almost real-time, interactive environment, where users can chat and buy items for their 3D world and create objects such as clothes and other items which can then be integrated within the world of Second Life. The tutorial from CartoonSmart is split up into a series of videos covering the following topics:
So with all that out of the way, let's get down to describing what is in the video tutorials. Video 1 - Covers the basics of using and interacting with Blender in terms of how to navigate the user interface and interact with objects, as well as describing some of the different modes in which Blender can be operated in. Usefully the process of getting the Second Life Meshes and resources are covered for people who do not want to use the files that are included with the video tutorial. Obviously this video will not be telling long time Blender users very much, but if you are coming from Second Life and just want to use Blender to get something uploaded to Second Life then this section will give enough information for a completely new Blender user coming from Second Life to get started. Video 2 - This video goes through some of the features and preferences that can be configured within Blender to give a better user experience when it comes to Blender's interface and interaction with it. After getting the configuration details out of the way, the process of describing how to import the Second Life mesh resources and uploading textures to Second Life are demonstrated. This section to me was very clear and I think anyone with even a passing knowledge of Second Life will have no problem understanding what is going on. The OBJ files that come with Second Life seem to have inbuilt UV Maps within them, so at this point in the video only adding textures to the UV Maps is covered. If you have never used Blender UV/Image Editor before it is explained in a clear and concise way. Then after all the textures are applied, the procedure for uploading the modifications to Second Life are carried out and again seems very clear. The end result being that you will now have an avatar within Second Life that has a new pair of Denim Jeans shown on your avatar (assuming you have the Linden Dollars). Video 3 - This seems to be a slight addition to Video 2, in that it covers how to texture a skirt in Blender for use with Second Life. The exact same process as for the Jeans is used for the skirt so it is somewhat puzzling as to why this was not part of Video 2, still it is a quick video, so is no real chore to watch. Video 4 - This section is a standout part of the overall video tutorial, in that it covers how to use a very useful feature of Blender called Projection Painting. The video author goes through the steps of setting up projection paint and shows the user how to paint a pair of jeans onto the Second Life base meshes. Even if you are not a Second Life user, if you are interested in one of Blender major features then this projection paint video section is very interesting to watch, as it's not one of the easiest things to setup without being shown how it is done. Also covered is how to do manual unwrapping of UV's and how to individually alter UV Map layout to help with painting of a mesh. It's a bit of a shame that seams do not seem to be covered but, for the most part it does not matter in this tutorial. As a bonus, how to use alpha transparency to create holes within a texture is demonstrated, which is very useful as not a lot of people know about this feature. I really liked this video and found it very informative, this section alone makes it worth the price of the entire tutorial. Video 5 - This video is somewhat of a grab bag of topics as it covers various subjects. Subjects such as how to remove artifacts from a mesh texture. One of the best parts of this video are the methods described that allow a single continuous mesh to be assigned and partitioned into different sections using Vertex Groups, which then allows much easier texturing. Also covered are the various options of the OBJ importer and how to use them and their affect upon the base Second Life mesh. Although this videos topics may sound confusing I found it very handy and actually learned some new things from it. So well worth a watch. Video 6 - Is a highspeed run through of how to assign textures to a Second Life mesh, only without all the extra explanations of the previous videos, it intended to be used by people who know how to use Blender and just want a quick run through of the process of getting resources uploaded to Second Life as quickly as possible. Not sure how useful this is given that if it is all you need to get up to speed with textures and Second Life then maybe you would not need the rest of the videos. Still it is small in runtime and someone may find it useful. So overall an excellent video resource for Blender and Second Life users, especially given the fact that Second Life's native modeling tools don't hold a candle to those provided by Blender. As I have said previously even if you are not a Second Life fan you will find something in this tutorial, especially if you want a detailed demonstration of Projection Painting. Review Score 80% |
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www.cartoonsmart.com - Blender Basics Series 4 - Video Tutorial Review Periodically I like to check various websites that make Blender tutorials and see if anything new has been produced. Though recently I had overlooked one site, that being www.cartoonsmart.com, as I had checked it periodically many times before and had found that they had not made anything new for an extended period. So I thought that they had either stopped doing Blender tutorials or were waiting for Blender 2.6 to come out and restart them. Anyway turns out I was wrong as I went to the site recently and found 2 new tutorials, It really pays to check often. So belatedly here is a review of one of those tutorials, the other review will likely follow soon as well.
Product Specifications:
Blender Basics 4 is as the name suggests part of a series of Blender Video tutorials created by cartoonsmart. The previous videos build upto this 4th video tutorial. It covers some of the areas covered in previous video series 1 through 3 but also covers some areas that were not covered in the earlier videos. The various topics covered within the tutorial according to the cartoonsmart website are:
Given the 3 hour running time of the video, plenty of time is taken to go over the various topics enumerated above and for the most part I found all the descriptions of the various topics and techniques used to carry out tasks very clear and well explained. I almost never had to rewind the video to clear up my understanding of what was being carried out within the video. My personal standout sections of the tutorial were the coverage of Cloth Physics and the Baking of the Cloth in simulations. At least half the running time of the video is taken up demonstrating various techniques involved in using cloth. Another section that caught my attention was the description of how to use the Node Editor with the Z-Mask feature an often overlooked and not very well understood feature of Blender which can be extremely useful. After the major Cloth Physics section of the video is completed another major topic is covered, that being fur creation. Like the previous section fur is covered in a clear and precise way which should be more than enough for beginning Blender users to get a good understanding of fur and how to use it. The usual areas of fur creation are covered such as clumping and weight painting and child strands and ramp shading of hair strands, combing etc. The sections on using the Action Editor and NLA Editor are also very useful to the beginner and although not covered in the same depth they are still useful. All in all the video does what it says it will do in the topics list, very useful for both beginners and intermediate level Blender users. Intermediate level users will like that way the various topics are brought together and used in combination to produce something at the end, and beginner Blender users will like that fact that each topic is explained clearly and be able to pickup the indivdual processes without having to rewind the video too often. One thing to be aware of however is that the video download is over 600 megabytes in size, so either have a lot of patience for the download or have a reasonably good internet connection speed. That said I had no problems downloading and hopefully that will be the same for you, and the size is justified given the encoding quality of the video. A video tutorial well worth having in your collection. Review Score 85% |
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Tony Mullen and Claudio Andaur - Blender Studio Projects - Digital Movie Making - Book Months ago I pre-ordered "Blender Studio Projects" book, and a few days ago it arrived and I set about getting my reading head on.
Authors Tony Mullen and Claudio Andaur wrote this book under the Sybex Serious Skills series, meaning that it is not a beginning Blender users book. Tony Mullen has produced several books and is well known. Claudio Andaur works for Licuadora Studios and has also worked on Plumiferos (a feature film made in Blender). He is known as Malefico in Blender IRC circles. The two authors combine their fields of expertise to produce this Intermediate/Advanced level breakdown of the various studio quality production pipeline processes, using multiple scenes from a short feature made at Licuadora Studio. The end result being an understanding of the major tasks involved in making a short feature. I think the book manages to work its way through the various stages very clearly and efficiently. Not dwelling too much on the little details most of the time, but when the small details do need to be described, they are. I was especially impressed with the modelling section and the compositing sections, each gave a very clear and detailed description of the various tricks and time savers that help to keep a large production such as the one presented in the book on time and computer efficient. One thing I did notice quiet a lot was the numerous references to other Blender books, so it would probably be very beneficial to have read most of the other Blender books out there before starting this one, especially "Introduction to Character Animation" and "Animating with Blender", I would also recommend reading "Blender for Dummies" if you are a beginner also. Various Blender 2.5 features and changes are covered in brief throughout the material giving hints as to what to be expected when it is finally released. Although for the most part the version of Blender covered in the majority of this book is 2.49b specific using a custom build from Licuadora Studios. Another highlight was the coverage of drivers using Python and how to leverage their power for various modelling and texturing effects. It was describe in a fair amount of detail and people interested in the Python side of things will find this small section of the book very interesting I would imagine. It reminds me very much of Roland Hess's book "Animating with Blender", and that was a very good book also. So all in all a very good new Blender book, well worth adding to your collection if you are interested in studio project productions using Blender. Review Score 89% |
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Michel Anders - Blender 2.49 Scripting - eBook A few days ago I recieved an email from Packt Publishing informing me of their new Blender 2.49 Scripting book. I was very interested in reading this book as there are very few Blender books that cover the scripting aspect of Blender 2.49 and Python. So I navigated my way to the packt publishing website and ordered myself the ebook version. They were having a special at the time and I ended up getting a full color ebook for less than £9. If nothing else the price is extremely impressive.
The author is Michel Anders, known as varkenvarken on Blender Artists forum. He is an extremely talented Blender Python scripter and has written many very useful scripts for Blender. Knowing who is behind this book explains a lot about the way this books is constructed. The teaching aproach taken, is to present a series of tasks that need to be achieved and then present sections of scripts that demostrate the most important concepts and Blender Python code, to allow the tasks to be carried out. At the beginning of the book a basic explanation of some of the terms and concepts are gone over and a few very simple Blender python commands are demonstrated to do the equivalent of a Blender Hello World script. This beginning part of the book is the only part that really can be classed as beginner level, everything after this has a much steeper learning curve. Many of the scripts written by Michel are very technically advanced scripts, the same also holds true for this book. Most of the scripts and techniques described within require a very good level of understanding. I debated with myself as to weather it is an Intermediate/Advanced level book, but one thing is certain, if you are a beginning Blender user and your Python knowledge is beginner level, you will struggle to get much from Michel's latest work. I think that to get anything out of this material a very good understanding of Python, Blender and Mathematics (especially vector math and 3D related mathematics) will be required. Assuming you have the requesite knowledge all the bases of using Blender through Python scripting are covered, for example, setting up materials, ipo manipulation, texture setting, texture nodes and so on. But again very simple things are not covered. To me it seems that it is assumed that you will just read the Blender Python API docs for the very simple things such as how to do rotations and scaling on objects, deleting and adding vertices, etc. You will have to be prepared to get a lot of information from the scripts supplied rather than be spoon fed information. So if you are very knowledable with Blender and Python you will likely find that this book is very handy as it covers ways of scripting and leveraging Blender Python scripting to do some very clever things. I do think it would have been very helpful to have a less steep learning curve but that's a matter of my personal taste. I am not a Python expert and so this has probably affected my ability to properly appreciate this book, that said I can see that a lot of time and effort has gone into putting this book together, especially given thw fact the Python scripting books for Blender are so few and far between. It probably hasn't escape most Blender users notice that Blender 2.5 is now currently in Alpha state and it uses completely different scripting model, so stuff learned in this book unfortunately won't transfer to Blender 2.5, as it uses Python 3 and has a completely different API structure. This book would of been much more relavent if it have been released a year or 2 earlier. Still if you're used Blender 2.49 and need an advanced Blender scripting book, you now have one to read. I really hope Michel does a Blender 2.6 version when it comes out, and maybe makes it slightly more targeted at beginners and experts, so my head doesn't hurt quite so much. Excluding the fact that I am not smart enough to fully get this book, excellent work Michel. Review Score 75% |
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Tony Mullen - 3D for IPhone Apps with Blender and SIO2: Your Guide to Creating 3D Games and More with Open-source Software - Book I ordered this book from amazon a while back and it finally arrived. I have been looking forward to reading it for a couple of reasons, the first being that it's another Tony Mullen book and this is a good enough reason for me, the second being that it covers an area of software development for the iPhone while using Blender 3D software, which I have not seen in a book up to this point.
The first thing I should make clear is that I run and use a Linux Fedora 12 operating system platform, I have never and most likely will never own an Apple Macintosh or iPhone! This you would think would matter given that this book covers software development on an all Apple software toolchain. You will need an Apple Mac to follow along with the tutorials presented within the book. So even though the Blender and SIO2 game environments are opensourced, the iPhone SDK and Apple Mac are not. The book does a very good job of covering the basics of how to develop iPhone applications in concert with SIO2 and Blender 2.49. So even though I don't own any Apple software I was able to follow along with the tutorials presented in the book and understand the clear and well described tutorials. SIO2 for those who do not know is the equivalent of Blenders Game Engine but for an iPhone. Although Tony presents everything in a clear and concise manner, this book NOT for beginners, he does take some time to describe and go through much of the background information a beginner would need to follow along. However something as big and complex and C programming and OpenGL programming and SIO2 game engine programming is just not able to be covered in enough depth in such a small page count, so many times the book refers the reader to the relevant websites for more information. You will be expected to both understand C/C++/Objective C, and OpenGL. There are many code examples and some are slightly advanced but they are well described and clearly laid out. The appendices at the back of the book will be very useful to beginners in getting them upto speed with Blender and the very basics of terminology with OpenGL. The book starts by going through the steps required to install the iPhone SDK, configuring XCode (Apples graphical programming IDE), obtaining and installing Blender and SIO2 installation and setup for use with the iPhone OS. How to use the iPhone simulator is gone over, showing the user how to use it for debugging and testing while developing iPhone apps. Once the setup and installation preliminaries have been gotten out of the way the book then moves to actually developing a very simple Hello World type demonstration application which covers getting applications running in the iPhone simulator and uploading it to an actual iPhone device. Once the demonstration application is covered the book moves on to creating a useful application from the ground up in stages. The first Application displays a rotatable Globe on the iPhone which responds to screen touches and tapping. I found the sections on baking and using texture and materials as well as unwrapping textures from Blender and the details of how to export them to SIO2 using the export script very easy to understand, and I think even if a person had never used Blender before, they would be clear on what to do. The coverage of animation and actions within Blender and how to use them within SIO2 was brief but very easy to understand. By the end of the book you have a little usable iPhone application which covers a lot of the features and functionality of the Apple iPhone. The very last section covers widgets, rounding out the books coverage of iPhone and was a little brief but still useful. So all in all the book does what it says on the cover, but only if you come with required prerequisites of understanding at least a little of Blender, C Programming and OpenGL information and transformations or at the very least are prepared to do a little background research. Excellent book, clearly written and get right to the point. Review Score 85% |
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Sebastian Koenig - V-Ray - Introduction - The Blender Connection - Streaming Video Sebastian Koenig has been busy making video tutorials, this time it covers V-Ray a 3D render which supports many advanced rendering features a well as being very quick to render. V-Ray was created by a software firm called Chaos Group. It is a proprietary, closedsource render, which comes in many different versions. One of those versions being V-Ray Standlone, which is the V-Ray render working without the use of a graphical frontend.
Sebastian describes the various steps involved in obtaining, installing and configuring for use both V-Ray and Blender, so as to integrate them together into Blenders workflow. It is important to note though, that V-Ray unlike other renderers such as Yaf(A)Ray or LuxRender is not free and is not opensourced and comes with a DRM dongle. If you do not want to install the commercial version of V-Ray you can get the demo version but you must register with the chaosgroup.com website to download it (very annoying). The demo version limits the maximum resolution at which you can render a scene (600 x 450 pixel according to Sebastian), this won't be an issue if you are following along with Sebastian's tutorial apart from at the very end when he renders a scene which is larger than the limit imposed by the demo version. The V-Ray Standlone render costs $299 U.S. Dollars (as of 13 January 2010) according to chaos groups website. Also V-Ray requires a dongle (a USB key) to run with a valid V-Ray license key installed on it. The DRM issue with the license dongle, I know is a big issue with a lot of people (me included), as is the fact that it is closed source. I have no real issue with the price for this version of the render (as it is an excellent render) but I do with the closed source, DRM'ed, status of it. I run Fedora 12 Linux which is completely opensourced and totally free, I also feel that V-Ray goes completely against the spirit of Blender. My innate distrust of all DRM based hardware and software (aka potential for root kits and the like) made me loath to review V-Ray at all but Sebastian put a lot of work into making the tutorial, so a review of it seems only fair. So with the above in mind, I know all the criticisms above are not things Sebastian can do anything about. With this in mind I will review this tutorial ignoring the issues above and just rate the video in terms of the information Sebastian provides and how well he presents it. At the beginning of the video Sebastian goes through downloading both the Blender V-Ray export script and obtaining and installing the V-Ray Maya software (which contains the V-Ray Standalone executable). After having obtained all the relevant pieces of software and scripts, Sebastian goes through how to configure them on both Windows and Mac platforms, though not for Linux platforms, although the procedure is pretty much the same for the Linux platform as it is for the Mac platform. One issue to be aware of is that Sebastian installs the software using root account privileges, this is not needed and should not be used unless you are sure you know what you are doing. Also when Sebastian was going through the procedure to connect to the License server he used ip addresses to specify the address of the license server, if you are using dhcp to assign addresses you may have to adapt the method used by Sebastian. More information on getting the information required for the license server (such as ip addresses) could have helped the viewer here for those that don't know networking specifics, though Sebastian does mention that V-Ray comes with a good online manual to explain setup, though if you are going to read the V-Ray manual it could somewhat negate Sebastian video tutorial, at least as far as license server setup goes. Having got all the software and script installed and license registered, Sebastian moves on to briefly describing and setting some of the most basic and important settings that the Blender V-Ray script exposes inside the Blender interface, demonstrating a large number of the scripts features on a demonstration scene. The resolution of the streaming video from cmivfx.com causes a slight issue here as it was often difficult to tell the effect of various settings and changes Sebastian made to the V-Ray interface script even though he did a lot of compare and contrast shots of render results. Though Sebastian was careful to explain as well as he was able the various features verbally, so the low resolution issue was somewhat mitigated. Another issue with the video was that the streaming site must have been under heavy load, because at certain times of day the video would not stream without stuttering and occasionally dropping the video stream, causing me to have to retry to watch the video later. This did not happen often but is always an issue with streaming media that don't allow you to download the videos you have paid for (another of my pet annoyances). Once Sebastian had explained some of the basic features he gave a very useful description of the various Global Illumination methods and settings, covering how they relate to Blender and the V-Ray script. Strangely even though V-Ray supports caustics this was only briefly mentioned and not used in the tutorial, because Sebastian says it was really an advanced feature, which was a shame as really it should been used. Especially informative was the information on Irradiance Map and Light Map Caching and the ways in which it could be used to speed up the rendering times. The other major features are also covered in some detail such as Multi-sampling, and various other features to numerous to mention. One area where I think a clearer explanation would have been useful was for Hemi-spherical Subdivisions. I was not really clear on what they were representing as far as lighting and shadows were concerned, and to me it just seemed to be some arbitrary value which makes the quality of renders improve, but what it actually did was never explained (at least as far as I could tell). At about an hour into the tutorial video, Sebastian having covered the basic settings, changes topic to focus more on lighting an outdoor scene and the various light setting of the V-Ray script. Areas that stood out in this section were the coverage of how to use HDRI images and light sources and using Blender node editor with the render images produced by V-Ray Standalone, very useful and very informative. After having gone over various techniques for outdoor lighting, the tutorial then goes on to describe the various settings and techniques used to light an indoor scene, showing how to both light and assign materials and textures of an indoor hallway type building, and using various settings to make it look semi-realistic. Toward the end of the video, as a bonus Sebastian demonstrates briefly how to setup V-Ray by rendering the tutorial title scene, showing some of the more advanced settings like two-sided V-Ray materials and sub-surface scatting settings. So all in all a good tutorial with basic explanations of most of the things you will need to know to get started using V-Ray from within Blender. So if you are a V-Ray person you will find this a very useful tutorial. Now all Sebastian has to do is give us a tutorial on LuxRender and Yaf(A)Ray, so us Opensource types can play as well, as I don't much enjoy reviewing the dark side closedsource stuff! Review Score 75% |
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Allan Brito - Blender 3D 2.49 Incredible Machines - Ebook Things have been moving along lately on the Blender book front, a friend of mine informed me that Allan Brito released a new book called:
I had previously reviewed one of Allan Brito's other books "Blender 3D - Architecture, Buildings and Scenery", which covered the Architectural Visualisation side of using Blender 3D. This new book takes a very different approach to teaching the use of Blender 2.49. It does this by taking the reader through the modelling, texturing and lighting of 3 different objects, those objects being: a futuristic gun, a futuristic spaceship (steampunk styled) and finally a robot. The introduction in the book states that the reader requires no previous experience of Blender to make use of the book. However futher on in the book it is said that the book is not a beginners book and that many things will not be described in detail as the reader is expected to know the basics of how to use Blender in terms of its interface and various buttons and keypresses. After having read the entire book I would say that a beginning Blender user would be able to understand most of the book as most of the time things such as key presses and the basics of how to use Blender are explained in a way a new user to Blender would be able to follow. The book is organised so as to be read from cover to cover and slowly progress from easy tasks to harder tasks. If you have some intermediate experience with Blender then I think the progression is well graded and will help the reader to quickly progress through the book. If you are a complete beginner some sections of the text will get a little confusing at times but with a bit of re-reading they should be understandable. One thing that I did notice right away was the awful grammar of the text. This is most likely because English is not Allan Brito native language. Sometimes the grammar issues get in the way of understanding what task he is trying to accomplish. This does not happen often but I did find myself re-reading paragraphs to get his meaning. Now it is important to point out that I am not blaming Mr Brito for the grammar issue, the editors of the book however should have a serious talking to. I bought the ebook version and that is what I am using to base this review on, this caused me a slight problem because the ebook mentioned some resources and graphics that were available to download from the Packt site, however on going to site the resources are not available for download (yet). As luck would have it though the EBook PDF file had good screen shots and so I was able to copy the resources directly from my PDF reader. Hopefully the site will be updated to have the resouces available from the book. I am also pleased that packt publishing has removed password protection and you can copy and select parts out of the ebook. They do however plaster your address on every page border which is irksome and if i was a pirate I could remove it easily but still they are heading in the right direction. The book tries to present the production of the various objects in a way that is similar to how it would be done in a real production studio. While this may help give a glimpse to Blender newbies about how things are done in a real studio, to be honest those that know more than the basics will know that a lot of steps are missing that would be in a real studio setup. With a few glaring exceptions most of the vital areas of Blender are covered in just enough detail for the information to be useful to a beginner and a memory jogger for a Blender user with some experience. Notable things that were missing from the book were any kind of use of Blender Compositing features, while this is surprising given the aim of the book, there was really no choice given the page count. Given what was just said above, what was surprising was some of the topics that were covered, specifically the use of external renders such as Yaf(a)Ray and LuxRender. The book goes into a fair bit of detail on setting up Blender so as to use the external renderers. You won't be a Yaf(a)Ray or LuxRender guru but it gives enough to get you going. I am a Linux Fedora user and had to compile my version of the Renders from source and the book does not cover this, so if you in this position you are out of luck. There is a nice description of progressive renders and how they are different from more tranditional rendering systems. So all in all this is a passable book, useful for the info on External Renders and as a memory jogger for an experienced Blender user. Review Score 65% |
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David Ward - Johnny Blender - The Complete Series - Training DVD I have had a peaceful time recently, so I was getting a little restless and was looking forward to reviewing another Blender product and as luck would have it I found out about a DVD produced by David Ward called:
The content of the DVD are also provided on David Ward's youtube channel for free so if you don't want/can't spend the money you can still get access to the videos. Though obviously you will be doing good by the Blender development if you buy the DVD. Looking at the price of the DVD you would think that there would not be many tutorial videos but there are 29 video sections on the DVD with a total runtime of roughly 11 hours! There are some good and bad points to such a large amount of video tutorials. The bad points mainly from my point of view being that I had to sit for 11 hours to work my way through the DVD! Though for the most part it is worth the effort. The DVD is split up into small 20 to 30 minute sections covering various aspects of character creation. There are 29 sections listed below:
Part 02 - The face - 20min 11sec Part 03 - The head and ears - 22min 54sec Part 04 - The mouth - 20min 51sec Part 05 - The torso - 19min 2sec Part 06 - The arms and hands - 20min 38sec Part 07 - The fingers - 24min 10sec Part 08 - The fingers, continued - 20min 58sec Part 09 - The legs - 24min 37sec Part 10 - The legs, continued - 29min 35sec Part 11 - Clothing - 26min 40sec Part 12 - Clothing, continued, Creating Seams - 19min 49sec Part 12b - The goggles - 23min 56sec Part 13 - UV Mapping - 21min 13sec Part 14 - Painting the texture - 23min 31sec Part 15 - Eyeball and texture - 23min 35sec Part 16 - Particle hair - 25min 39sec Part 17 - Particle eyebrows, lighting - 28min 55sec Part 18 - Rigging the body - 18sec 7sec Part 19 - Rigging the hands - 26min 5sec Part 20 - Rigging the face - 24min 11sec Part 21 - Bone shapes - 24min 38sec Part 22 - Skinning - 22min 7sec Part 23 - Skinning, continued - 22min 7sec Part 24 - Tweaking a few things - 17min 9sec Part 25 - Creating a walk cycle - 25min 33sec Part 26 - Walking on a path - 19min 1sec Part 27 - Lip syncing - 26min 45sec Part 28 - Normals and cloth simulation - 24min 6sec The DVD is useful for both Blender Newbies and Blender Intermediates. From a starting cube Mr Ward goes through the basics and introduces many new features at a regular rate. The only real problem I have with the DVD is that Mr Ward when first modeling the mesh of the character, occasionally ran into problems which required him to use triangles in the modelling of his character, which as all Blender users should know is a bad thing. Sometimes the odd triangle doesn't matter (depending on where it is in the mesh). But in this case some of the triangles on the character mesh were in places that were likely to be animated. Things were made slightly worse by Mr Ward not explaining why triangles are bad and just saying in effect oh well it happens. It would have been very helpful to Newbies to explain about the issues it can cause with items such as subsurface modifiers. That is the only really serious issue I have with the DVD and it doesn't happen very often, everything else is very good and for the price it is a really good quality DVD. So all in all a great foundation/intermediate level Blender tutorial DVD, which does teach you all the steps you need for a simple character setup, on top of all that all the material is freely available on Mr Wards youtube channel, you can't get much more user friendly than that. Review Score 90% |
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Sebastian Koenig - Blender Shading and Fur - Mammoth - Streaming Video It's been busy for me lately so I had not been able to review much in the way of Blender tutorials and also there was not a lot left to review. So I was pleased to find out about a new video training tutorial release from Sebastian Koenig, this time on the topics of Shading and Fur application to his Mammoth model series created in his previous 3 tutorial videos. This is the 4th video tutorial released by Sebastian and follows on from the previous tutorials listed below: While you don't have to have seen the previous tutorials to understand the ones that come after it, it certainly helps, though Sebastian does explain most of the information you need to know at the beginning of each tutorial and goes over in brief some of the additions from earlier videos. So with that in mind what can be said about the newest addition, here the product overview:
The tutorial starts by going over the initial material, lighting and scene setups that are used. This helps if you either haven't seen the previous videos or your memory is a bit foggy (mine was). Some may argue that this information was not needed and could have been time better used to explain fur topics, but others would argue the exact opposite. I found the information on clip start and end shadow buffer values very informative and even learned a few quicker ways to set clip start and end values (I didn't know you could use the W key in the viewport to set the values). A little more information on what a shadow buffered is and why altering the clip start and end values is a good thing to do could have helped for those that are not clear on what shadow buffers are, but this is not a beginners tutorial so it's to be expected. I also found it helpful that Sebastian explained that fur shadows do not work as expected with ray tracing and have to use shadow buffers, another useful bit of information to store away until needed. After going over the shadow buffers the topic moves on to setting up the lighting in the scene, so as to get a well lighted model to show off the fur and shading better. Ambient occlusion usage is also covered and a few of the options that can be set for it are explained briefly. The tutorial then moves on to a quick overview of the basic materials used on the mammoth model. A lot of this information was covered in previous tutorials but it still serves as a useful refresher (at least for me). For the tusks on the mammoth Sebastian uses subsurface scattering and explains the SSS settings which again I found useful, especially what the Scale value stands for in relation to SSS. At 22 minutes into the tutorial the primary topic of the tutorial is reached, that being adding fur to the mammoth. It may be frustrating to some having to wait a whole 22 minutes before you ever actually see any fur but the preceding information will probably make things easier for a lot of people. Sebastian covers most of the major parameter controls for controlling how hair is generated and affected. He almost from the very beginning quickly explains how to use Parent and Child Strands to improve the appearance and performance of strand modeling, and later on in the video even covers the strand simplification controls, which I think is the first time I have seen that explained in a video tutorial, so to me that is excellent. After covering the strand control parameters Sebastian goes on to explaining weight painting and vertex groups and how they are used to control how and where Strands are generated. The techniques described are used in the video to prevent fur from being emitted from the bottom of the feet and various places on the head of the mammoth, as well as to control the length and density of fur on parts of the mammoth, and use extensively in the rest of the tutorial. On the weight painting section I liked the use of the Blur weight painting mode to make gradual transitions in weight painting boundaries. At this point (35 mins) a test render is done with the current strand settings and Sebastian details how to speed up the render using the Strand Rendering option. Once the render is completed Sebastian moves onto describing the Particle Mode and demonstrates how to alter the positions of strands using the various Particle Mode tools such as Comb and Add etc. He uses this mode to improve the position of the Strands in the render to make it look more fur like. A good demonstration of Point Select mode is given and Sebastian shows how to use the Strand Step value to make the strands more controllable. At this point the video moves on to altering the materials and texture settings of the generated fur strands, things definitely take a more advanced turn at this point. Most of the major parameters are explained, but in some places I found it a little difficult to keep up with some of the material and texture settings. I would have found it useful to have had more information as to how and why the various material settings were used, especially in relation to how to use the Stencil mask type. As this Stencil mask type is referenced a lot and the description of why it was used was not very clear to me. It did seem to me that at some points it became a mass of button clicks with some things not really being explain clearly enough. I maybe need to go back and re-watch those bits. Other than that everything else was well explained. The use of the color blend texture with fur was explained very well, though I think it should have been spelled out that it is used to make hair transparent at the end, to make it fade out and have a feathered and not sharp end. Though again this is not a beginners tutorial, so chances are we are assumed to know this. Multiple Strand/Particle Systems are used and layered together and Sebastian takes some time to explain how they combine together to produce the final fur output. A nice feature of the tutorial is that Sebastian takes the time to explain how to make various types of Strands such as ponytail strands and braids, very handy. Also covered were using various clumping settings to make the mammoth fur look matted and clumped. If nothing else the information on the Kink and Branch settings will be worth knowing as it is very, very useful. So all in all this is another excellent video tutorial from Sebastian, as mentioned above the only thing I found confusing was the use of Mask/Stencil textures to add variation to hair colors, but that is likely to be my fault not Sebastian's. Review Score 85% |
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