Tag Archives: blender

Blender Game Engine Resource Kit

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Hi all, I am putting together a collection of sample files for the 2.55 game engine that intend to serve as learning material for people who is new to the Game Engine (and for all the 2.49 people who are afraid of touching the new 2.5 interface). One of the main problem with the BGE seems to be the lack of good quality ‘components’ for people to reuse, and beginner’s tutorials are rarely advanced enough to get people through a real big production. This is my way of trying to change that…

My aim is to prepare at least 12 files before Christmas.  If this is not enough, you can always, oh I don’t know, get a book on the topic or something. :)

Merry Early Christmas!

A new animation project – teaser

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Just a little something I started working on.  This short animation will be mostly eye-candy without much of a storyline, although I am trying to get some sfx shots in there. (explosions and fire,  etc)

The above image is displayed using GLSL view + the new ‘Only Render’ view option in Blender 2.5.  A really nice way to visual the bird animations without all the excessive lines and wireframes.

Sequence editor showing the 720p rendered clip.  Due to time-limitation, I have decided to render this movie in 1K resolution only.  2K is just too demanding on the artist and the computer…

24GB of RAM

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My lucky day!  Naturally I tried to do some heavy-weight visual effects on this awesome machine.  Sadly, Blender’s fluid engine is not really reliable at this setting, the OpenMP version failed time after time (using a x64 verion on Win7), and the single-threaded version simply takes an hour to return a single frame.  Since I only had access to this computer for a day, nothing was made in the end.

The Blender SFX engine (Fluid, Smoke, Softbody) is still lagging the industry by quite a bit in terms of speed and functionality, especially considering all the recent research into GPU-powered physics calculation.  It would be interesting to see how Project Mango (which is the Blender Institute’s next production, allegedly SFX-heavy) addresses these problems.

The Links Collection

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Been busy, so here is a few links of things going on around me

Talk: Me and Dalai Felinto at the 2010 Blender Conference in Amsterdam talking about Cosmic Sensation Project [Youtube] [Preceedings]

Talk: Me and Monica Zoppe at the 2010 Blender Conference in Amsterdam talking about BioBlender [Part 1] [Part 2]

Visualizing Proteins: BioBlender’s official website which I helped design and launch [BioBlender]

Saving Fishes: A program that I am involved with that is going to ensure there is still sushi for everyone in 10 years [Nereus Program]

Mastering Blender Game Engine – My work-in-progress Blender 2.5 book to be released in 2011 [Amazon]

And lastly,

Dropbox: Everyone needs a DropBox account to sync their files.  It’s the best way to keep your data safe and available from everywhere. [Referral]

Sintel Premiere

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IMG_1869

Blender’s 3rd in-house short film was premiered last night in Utrecht, The Netherland.  and I was lucky enough to be a part of that!  More pictures on Flickr.

The movie – Sintel – is an amazing accomplishment, I was a bit worried that I’d spent the entire time looking for cloth intersection, rendering artifact and bad physics.  But as soon as the first scene fades in, it’s easy to let yourself go and enjoyed the movie.

Update: The movie is released, watch it online here: http://www.sintel.org/

Blender Workshop

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We just wrapped up a full-day Blender workshop yesterday under the blazing sun of Pisa, Italy.  The seminar went smoothly and was well received.  A total of 35 attendees showed up despite the fact that the event was announced only a week prior.

In the morning, the attendees got a high level overview of what Blender can do, followed by a crash course on scientific visualization as applied to cellular biology and biochemistry as well as an extensive Python lesson.  In the afternoon, we moved to the computer lab and covered some of the Blender fundamentals, giving a lot of the attendees their first hands-on experience with Blender.

Even though this is my third time running such an event, there is still lots of rooms for improvement.  (For example, Blender 2.5′s UI was corrupt on some of the machines running older Ubuntu installations and Intel graphics chip, which made running the tutorials very challenging)

Photos of the event are on Pisaca.  Special thanks to the Pisa Linux User Group, without them, this workshop would not have been possible.