just a quick update

hi all, i am making this post to reassure you that i have not stop making this film, i am currently rigging the hardest part of the human body - the shoulder- I have gotten some great advice from bassam and he has allowed me to study his mancandy2 rigg before its release, speaking of releases, Blender2.43 will be released in the next couple of days (we hope) , and due to that i am going to be a little too bus y to work on this rigg, but rest assured i will finish it!, thats all for now

see ya's

Rigg Revision4 (hand)

hey all, I have finally finished doing the weights and shap keys for the hand...again and i tell you thew rigg is holding up quite well with more controls then previous revisions an i am very proud with the results of this rigg

here (.mp4) is a test vid of the final rigg

PS. i have done the upperarm after i made that vid and sreenshot

well cya's later

Stage Update

Latly I have been learning alot about shadow Buffer lighing techniques and i have applied them to the stage for this film, as you can see i have changed the feel of the set to a much more darker, cooler feel.

The greatest aspect of this new lighing setup is the rendertime
This image: 2:39mins
Old setup: ~50mins

I won't be using raytracing anymore as it takes too long to render, may use AO on the characters but not the stage

well see ya's later

Rigg revision4

Here is the crrent state of the rigg revision4

this rig is alot better then all previous revisions as it has a proper bendy spine with 3 controls, inproved foot rigg with alot less bones overall, it contains a hip bone and obviously custom bone shapes which makes it easier to see what postion the bones are in

generally its a great new rigg all over

some functionality needs to be added aswell as doinfg the deform groups and driven shape keys, thegeneral rigg is finished :)

well see ya's later

once again, A new Sub-Zero!!!

MakeHuman is now a standalone app and produces great models, with great topology (edge flow)
and come already UV mapped (alot better then mine).
So i Have decided to to use a makehuman model instead of my crappy thing, this also means i will have to rebuild the rigg again, which is ok as i needed to rebuild the rigg as it would have been a nightmare to animate

the image is a comparsion of ythe new subbie and the old

see ya's all

More Practice animations

yes I have been practising animation lately and i thought i might share my results with you guys

here they are
sneaky
Flying
Ball interaction
Fighting
Jump
walk then jump

they are in .mp4 and was made in blender2.43CVS(testing build) as i used the new renderpasses and render layers and composite node in the rendering of these anims

the character is called mancandy it is a community model and rigg designed to help new commers to blender, made by Bassam Kurdali, director of elephants dream

Fun With Nodes

with the latest release of Blender , came the introduction of node based materials (shaders)/compositing, and during that time i have become very proficient with them. i am hving plans of redoing some of the shaders/textures with nodes like suby's skin (very ugly and hard to adjust.



well i thought i might show you guys the results of my latest exeriments with screenies of the node setups.

Material nodes



Composite Nodes



See ya's later

new rigg update

sorry for the latness as i am now a blender dev, also a member of the Blender Documentation project, i also help administer/compete in #smc (speed modeling challenges), and help maintain the smcIrcbot. and many other things (recent Blender conference) i have just been pressed to find time or Drive to work on this.

now time for some good news. Sub-Zero's Hands are now fully rigged animatable :)

here is a screenie

sorry to say this but with the new release coming up and renderer is being finished and code cleaning and documentation meeting and dev meeting this weekend it will be a little while before i will work on this, but it will be easy to rigg the rest of the arm and i have aquired a tut for rigging shoulders, so look forward to some nice looking movments :)

see ya's later :)

Rigg-Revision3 FINISHED!!!!

Yes My 3rd Rigg is now completed all thats left is to do the Vertex groups and wieght painting and i will have an animatable Sub-Zero Horray!!!! :)

Here are some screenshots of the new rigg

Deforming Bones


Helper Deforming Bones


Contol Bones


Proxy Bones


All Bones




See Ya's

Ps i am always on #Blenderchat@irc.freenode.net if you want to talk to me

A happy Time

as i promised i am starting production back up, My rigging/modeling/lighting/rendering skills have greatly improved, i am also working on a different platform, i am now working under a Linux OS (SuSE 10.1) now

Sub-zero's rigg has been greatly improved and many uneeded bones have been removed as muscle movment is now going to be handled by DrivenShapeKeys, the new rigg is alot more predictable hence removing alot of keyframes, and is also alot more easy to use and animate, but it is far from finished

I will post pics&vids as soon as i have finished the rigg

see ya's :)

Practice animation II

time to show you the results of my second parctice animation
-Model created and rigged from scratch
-Found appropriate 'Base' composite setup
- more then a simple walk cycle
-worked with limbs that have more then 1 control point
-worked with limbs that have a high number of bones (18)
-found out rendering timeframe (> 3 hours rendering required)

the animation can be found here (DivX 1.2Mb) .blend file can be found here

See Ya's

Practice animation

Just because production has stopped for the time being doesn't mean i should stop practicing
Here is a small vid (divx 300Kb) of a practice animation using one of the 'ducks' from Elephants Dream

enjoy

see ya's

Blender2.42 Realeased!!!!!!

A Great day In the History of Blender3D Has Arrived. 2.42 has been released after almost 1 year of development.
The New release has lived up to and more of my expectations with Many major new features and many workflow and UI Improvments.

Release notes can be found here

the Picture was made in 2.42 utilising Node Materials, Node Compositing, And the New Array Modifier (Title was added with GIMP)

See Ya's Later And Download Blender3D www.blender.org

A Sad time

Hi all, I regret to inform you that production on this film will be halted Until August/September

I am doing this because my skills are not up to par for this film so production is going to be halted until my skills are improved. To that end the 'Google Summer Of Documentation' has many Books relating to Blender Being Produced, also Blender2.42 is soon to be been released :) with an Overwhelming amount of new features (List of new features can be found here) and it will take some time to get an understanding of the new features

Do not Fear "I WILL FINISH THIS FILM!!!!!!"

So see ya' s Later

ps GET BLENDER!!!!! www.blender.org

Particle experiment

this has nothing to do with this movie but i thought you might want to have a look

I was just playing around with particles and the TIME IPO

Here is my results
http://www.f-forge.com?d=m8uTLQxgcIW1PrVnylRZ
its the .blend file the .movwas to big to upload/download (148mb)

enjoy

Eyes Rigg

just a quick update, I have developed a rigg to control the Iris of my character's Eyes

here (.mov) is an test animatoin from the rigg

Blender World Cup

sorry to say this but for the next 2 weeks it will be taking part in the qualifiing round of the Blender world cup and I will have no time to work on this movie......sorry

See Ya'
Wish me Luck

UPDATE!!!

I came Dead Last :(

Blender 2 Terragen script

This Blender/Python script takes the Active camera's movments and generates a terragen script for backgorund plates and animations

eg. Hills outside a window or a plane flying in the hills

Please note** this script has no GUI and i have no intention of giving it one as it an in-house script if you wish to add a GUI feel free to do so

Please note **Sun's attributes are altitude=LocZ heading is RotX not its LOC generally point the sun towards the Global center

For best results 'export target'

it is found here (ignore the commented lines in the script)
http://www.f-forge.com?d=kOe5aMUwTVJbfAHzcpu8

here is a small animation (.mov 1.2Mb) of the results of the script
http://www.f-forge.com?d=EbyPds5ZqGnJBiISo7fk

Good Luck and Have Fun

REQUIRES:Blender 2.37(and greater) and Python 2.4

New Member 'Steeve'

I think it is time for me to introduce you to Steeve my Test Dummy. 'clap' 'clap' 'clap'

Steeve is mainly used for test animations and pre-vis work

Here(.mov 1.2Mb) is a video of him in action doing a funky walk

See Ya'

New Sub-Zero Finished upper body rigg

After a few months rest iI have finally finished Sub-Zero's Upper body Rigg also i have a nrew production pipline in place which keeps Blender up-to-date and provides interconnectivity
A new feature utilised is Bone Layers

Skeletal bones


Muscles


Control Points


Full Rigg


Here is link to see thr rigg in action (.mov)

Enjoy
See ya's