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So, I guess I should have posted this earlier, but I've been hired by Thomas Kole (dilopho DD) to work on Cyclon, a FPS game in the BGE. I'm down as an animator, but because there isn't much animation to do, I'm also doing some scripting and shading.

There isn't any eyecandy yet, but me and the other animator are working on some neat stuff, and we'll probably get to show some of it soon.

blea

Here is the thing that wasted my time during spring break. Looks cool, doesn't it? It's screen space AO, that great thing that Crysis introduced to a while back. I had a lot of fun coding this into blender, and I hope you enjoy the results.

Links:
Video Above
Thread on BlenderArtists
.Blend File
Technical Paper

I've been looking at the awesome facial rigging stuff coming out of Durian, and wanting to understand a better way. What I mean by that is, Durian is going to use the box+slider method. A thread was created by Nathan(cessen) on BlenderArtists to discuss the matter. A very interesting technique was mentioned on that thread.




The technique basically consists of this: the controls (three for the mouth, three for the eyebrows) directly deform a meshdeform cage. The cage deforms the face. On top of that, corrective shape keys, for wrinkles and volume preservation, are driving by the stretch of bones strung between verts on the cage. So you get deformer based controls with the life of shape keys. Pretty cool, huh? :D

So! I had a lot of fun with the Durian modelling sprint, which happened last Saturday. I was at a hotel over the weekend, so I didn't do much modelling until Sunday. At which point I completed the model.

However, during the hotel trip I managed to join the IRC channel, and watch Colin Levy eat a falafel on my dads laptop. The IRC business was a lot of fun, great to see that there are people out there in the community, alive and kicking RIGHT NOW. It was also fun to watch the servers melt into slag when Colin pointed the camera at the chat window! :b

I modelled the broken window, in a low-poly style. I'm not entirely pleased with the materials, but it works, and you can see it here. Thanks, and have a great day!

So, that's some pretty intense rolling right there. The concept is pretty simple, just use a custom constraint made in python to correctly map the rotations to the planet gears. Here's how it works.

Skills you will need:
-Basic knowledge of blender interface
-some coding experience
-fundamental trigonometry knowledge
-ability to find stuff

Start by modeling the gears themselves. Try to use nice, easy numbers of teeth. Mine used 16 for the planets, 32 for the sun, and 64 for the outer gear.(Remember that teeth count increases linearly with radius.)
















Next, open up a text window and find the constraint script template. You will need at least 2.46 for this to work.

When I wrote that somewhat encouraging post oh-so long ago, I failed to mention just how this can be accomplished. With me, I need to know how to do something and that it will work before I begin. Even if I go in with the mindset of "this will not work the first time, I will try and learn something", I always end up disappointed in the outcome. Particularly in drawing.

When it comes to drawing, gesture drawing is an amazing skill to learn. To start, you create a single line, just a swoop on the page, that describes the general posture of the model. Then, you add more lines to define form. You work as lightly as you can. The most important thing to remember when gesture drawing, is that when you make a mistake, or something lacks the correct proportions, don't erase, simply make another line the describes what it should look like.

The outcome of this method is simply that, with enough time, anyone can create an amazing drawing without getting frustrated. I'm terrible at drawing, and I have come up with recognizable and realistic drawings in a matter of minutes. The reason? My hand is drawing, not my brain. My brain does not know how, nor want to know how to draw. When I gesture draw, my hand makes a guess, my brain "spots the most obvious differences", and then my hand makes another attempt. My hand is experimenting, failing, and trying something else before I even know it's really made a mistake. It's a great way to learn drawing, because you're getting better without even thinking about it.

And some updates: My blog has stopped for a while because of a linux/firefox error that prevented me from typing text into the editing fields on Movable Type! Very quickly I lost my good blogging habit to the point of not even checking the status after a securuity update. Near as I can tell, it was fixed a few months ago.

Borealis has been given up. It was getting so complex and hairy, that I didn't even understand how it worked anymore. It had huge deformation problems, which were very depressing. Also, the model was absolutely hideous. However, Ramtin Ahmadi has given me the MooM mesh, which I hope to rig sometime.

I "finished" my April 11SecondClub entry, and you can see it here.

In my current animation project, I've noticed extreme floatieness and/or poppieness. Here's a tip that I have not mastered, but does help when I learn more about it.

Okay, say we have two poses.

 

Two basic poses.

Now, we could do this:

Okay, so the most important thing about learning animation is this: guess, accept failures, and keep at it. When I got into animation, I didn't know about what good animation looked like. I thought, wow, I just need to prove what I can do, and then, it's on to Pixar! I had done about three animations at that point, and almost no drawing. Now, whenever I try to animate something, I just get frustrated that it doesn't work.

My eye, it seems, is growing faster then my hand. I now know what good animation is not,  but my hand doesn't know what it is. This, of course, is frustrating. The trick to learning is not proving your worth, it's simply guessing at a new idea, seeing if it works, and trying again until the shot seems to flow right.

This can be challenging, because young OCD animators, (like me) need to know exactly what to do, and that it will be perfect, before we do anything. It's a skill young-ins all need to learn.

Hi! And while the movie is now officially off, we've got some rich eyecandy for you! An explosion.

This explosion was brought to you by: Macke, Rhysy 2, and Me!




I will be helpful and produce a tutorial on how to build your own explosion.