Joelecdote

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.

As promised here’s the video of the silly walk that I made in Blender (note: YouTube’s decided to compress the video really badly, so I’m using Vimeo instead!):

3D Silly Walk from Joel Davies on Vimeo.

I basically found an old Blender test file for using a feature called DupliVerts (where one object can be repeated on the vertices (or corners) of another object) that I made a while ago. In the end I didn’t actually use dupliverts as there were some problems with applying an armature to the meshes (possibly a bug). So I just manually duplicated the characters. Anyway it turned out looking a bit like a “silly walk” (like in Monty Python, Ministry of Silly Walks), so I thought I’d post it! The music is Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op. 16 from Musopen.com.

I’ve finally completed the “architectural modelling” tutorial, and come up with the following render:

I composited it with a background image I got from Flickr.com… It’s hard to tell but the image is actually stretched in the render - I only just noticed it now!! I’ll be posting another render soon without the stretched background… I might try and add an entrance to the building if I have time.

There is a possibility that I might try and recreate the “Saying goodbye to an empty train” cartoon in 3D - it would be quite a challenge, but also would help me to learn more Blender!!!

Just a quick doodle type of thing I did t’other day, I think it’s pretty cool:

I’m rendering a 141 frame (5.64s) fluid simulation at the moment - it’s taking aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaages!! On average it’s taking like 4 minutes per frame! Anyway I’ll probably post that up by tommorow.

As I mentioned before I’ve been trying to get this optical flow effect to work in Blender using the displace composite node. I tried it out on some real ‘live action’ footage (as opposed to the cube I used before). It didn’t really work that well - mainly because the shot contained some very dark spots where you couldn’t really make the effect out. Also I think the clip was too short, so you barely noticed the effect at all. I think I might try and make it work by looping some fire footage and duplicating it a lot of times. Another possibility is to use a development version of Blender, which has enhanced particle effect features (see the progress here), to use a technique called billboards, which means that you use particles to control a certain video, which in this case would be the looping fire footage. This would mean that I could have a controlled randomness to the fire footage. Unfortunately I’m having trouble getting the billboards to work without crashing Blender! Anyway, hopefully I should have a nice optical flow effect to show by… the end of the year!

Just did a quick sketch of Gollum the other day, based on the picture of Gollum on some making of Lord of the Rings book:

Click here to view a higher quality version… (PNG, 516Kb)

I got the proportions a bit messed up, so his face is a bit longer than it’s meant to be…

I’ve just finished editing four 1 minute video clips for the Anglesey Youth Theatre, it was actually quite fun to do. Avid went a bit weird the day before I was going to start editing it. Every time I tried to play back a video it was start stuttering and go all messed up. I think the problem was that my old hard drive is dying/slowing down, so it couldn’t keep up to speed or something. That and a combination with having the audio buffers set to high.

I was going to make another short film with Huw and Laurence, but even after we came up with an ace idea, we were a bit too hyper to make it and ended up filming random stuff in the forest by Treborth running track, i.e. me doing my ‘awesome’ Russell Crowe and Russell T. Davies (writer for Doctor Who) impressions and Laurence doing his Russian millionaire accent. Thankfully Avid wasn’t working, so I couldn’t edit it! I think I’ve taped over most of now as well… what a shame!

Anyways I’m hoping to do some more sketching in the coming weeks, as well as some modelling in Blender - see if I can actually complete a project… I’m thinking of going for a really simple creature type thingy that will be really easy to model (hopefully) and then I can concentrate on getting really realistic fur and stuff.