This is the second part in the series I’m doing on Integrating CG into photos, you can view Part I here. Obviously this can be extended to video, which I might cover in another tutorial.

Whilst these tutorials are demonstrated using Blender, the techniques should be easy to apply to other 3D packages – so don’t be afraid to try this in SUPER 3D CREATOR MAKE ACE STUFF WITH ONE BUTTON PRO v2, or whatever software you use…

Sorry this latest instalment of the tutorial has taken so long, but anyway here we go!

So basically you have your environment map (like the one on the right), and you need to bring this into your 3D application and apply it to some object(s) in a scene.

For this tutorial we’re going to have a sphere reflecting the scene (of course once you know how to do it for a sphere you can do it for any crippled zebra  or whatever model you may want to apply this to), and will be using Blender for this.

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Bonjour and welcome to the first of my two part (possibly 3, who knows maybe even FOUR!) tutorial on integrating computer generated imagery into photographs. This obviously can be extended to video, which I might cover in another tutorial.

Whilst these tutorials are demonstrated using Blender, the techniques should be easily expanded to other 3D packages – so don’t be afraid to try this in SUPER 3D CREATOR MAKE ACE STUFF WITH ONE BUTTON PRO v2, or whatever software you use…

So I got a bit bored the other day, and decided to attempt to create an Environment Map from a set of photographs… and it WORKED!

Summary of photos you need to take:

• 6 photos for cubic mapping – front, back, left, right, top, bottom
• 1 (or more if you want to try out different angles) perspective photo (has to be taken in the same/similar lighting to the other 6 photos for the best results).

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I’m currently testing some atmospheric type of lighting for my next art project, which is going to be loosely based on clichéd horror film type of imagery. As a result I’ve come up with the image on the left (click it to enlarge!). It’s my attempt to “copy” a scene from No Country for Old Men, where the protagonist is sitting in a hotel room, and he can hear his attacker (crazy guy, with crazy haircut!) outside, so he turns out the lights. This inevitably means that room is completely dark, apart from a glint of light spilling out underneath the door. Then the attacker crazy dude’s shadow blocks out the glint of light as he steps in front of the door – seriously creepy stuff. I don’t think I’ve got the effect quite nailed yet, but as I said I’m just experimenting at the moment – it’s not like it’s a FINAL image or anything; really what were you THINKING?!

And if anyone wants to see the node setup is below, not that there’s much stuff going on there…

Although I did change the colours of the connecting wires (not sure if they have a proper name really), and the In/Out nodes… Oh and you can see how in the RGB curves node my (onboard!) graphics card can’t show any curves in blender – yeh I know I’m getting an actual graphics card soon!

That’s it for now… Au revoir!

Made entirely using Blender and GIMP. Thanks to detonationfilms for the explosion footage!

NOTE: As far as I’m aware Gordon Brown isn’t endorsing John McCain… this video is merely a joke. As for Betty Williams she’s likely busy eating red lentil dahl in South Uzbekistan pondering her retirement and how best to relate her latest journey to the current toilet problems at Ysgol Newborough (for her next speech!)…

I was inspired by a post over at the BlenderArtists forum about matte painting, to give camera mapping (a technique employed in the modern matte painter’s toolbox) a try. I remember a while ago following this tutorial, but it was very “hacky” and complicated, now there is a much easier/simplified way of doing it.

I partially followed this tutorial over at the Blender Wiki, but I decided I wanted to try something more organic, and found this picture:

The first thing to do, was to isolate the foreground hill in the image, by cutting out the original reference image in GIMP:

Then I roughly modelled the hill in Blender, before using a “UVProject” modifier, which (as the name implies) projects the isolated image onto the 3D geometry.

The next thing to do was to prepare the background. Using the clone tool in GIMP, I repainted the parts of the background that the foreground hill were covering to produce a background image.

Admittedly the cloning was a bit rushed, so it’s not a very good result!

Anyway, all I needed to do now was to map this image to a plane (for even more realistic results, I could have roughly modelled the background mountain, and made a second projection), and make a simple camera move.

The result was quite good, but just to had some of the errors in my model, and to add “real-world” camera properties, I also added some motion blur (or Vector Blur, as it’s called in blender).

OK, so after all that, here’s the result:

Camera Mapping Test (AVI, h264)

Camera Mapping test from Joel Davies on Vimeo.