House repairs are noisy plus 90s 3D

Would like to record a new tutorial today but Roof Repair people are rather noisy so may have to try later.

In other news, I went to a concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London last night, called Kraftwerk 3D.

You had to wear polarising 3D glasses and it was fun to see all the 90s style 3D Graphics. Some of the particle effects did give me a few ideas for abstract art and tutorials :)

I particularly enjoyed the 'robots' that replaced the performers at one point.

Here are a few images fro the event.

Super Busy Month of May

Whew, you may have noticed that it's been a while since I posted a blog.

The reason is so much has been going on this month (May 2017). Some health stuff that's all concluded now and significant disruption with an extension being built on my house (I believe it's called an Orangery). Work won't finish on that for about another month but hopefully the really noisy stuff is done now.

Despite all the above, I have been giving thought to where to go next with Blender. I haven't been able to completely focus on it of late with everything that's been happening but that should change now.

I'm planning another live event where I have some pre-considered topics that I want to cover.

I'm also thinking about going into detail on specific topics, such as how and why to use certain modifiers. To that end I've been playing with some of the less well known ones to see if I can find either a novel use, or better understand the thinking of the developers for it.

Anyway, enough rambling, after all it is really all about ...


L'art pour l'art

Blender Filmic Adventures

Well I followed the instructions and installed the Filmic add-on. https://github.com/sobotka/filmic-blender

I've been dabbling with the Filmic settings for a few weeks now so Blender Guru's tutorial on the subject was very timely, and clarified many issues (https://youtu.be/m9AT7H4GGrA).

I'm not yet completely convinced by it as while it may be more technically accurate, and have (sort-of) higher apparent dynamic range, I'm finding colour setup to be more challenging with Filmic enabled.

I will continue with it however and as I get more familiar with the necessary default lamp settings etc it will hopefully become easier.

This was the first scene I published using Filmic colour settings.

Busy few Weeks

It's been a busy few weeks.

I spend a few weeks of the new year just producing animations/stills. It's great to just do that for a while to come up with some new ideas both artistically and for new tutorial material. I'm now starting to produce tutorials on them. Here's the first one - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3fGc_QM3yI

I've also been making various cookie cutters (in Blender of course), and the cookies to go with them. Most of the cookies eaten by colleagues and family though!

I was even asked to make do dog biscuit cookie cutters :)

It's been very cold, dull and miserable here so have some summery art to tide you over

Blender and 3D Printing

Having spent some time learning to use Blender, I found 3D Printing was a great way to make some of my virtual creations into real ones.

At first I used a company called Shapeways to which you can upload a model and they will print your model and send it to you. Here is a scene I made showing a honey bee that I modelled from images.

And here is the same model, with a few tweaks, printed by Shapeways. 

They can print in other materials too, here I created a ring design and printed in carious materials including gold plated iron and bronze (modelled in Blender of course).

I designed this mug for my partner and it was printed in clay.

Once I had my own printer, I had a lot of fun printing thing myself, starting with models from places like Thingiverse (I didn't model these I just fixed geometry issues, printed then painted them):

Then I started to model things myself :

I also found uses around the house for my little prints:

Tiny little brackets for shelving.

Here I wanted a large selotape holder (I fixed a blade to it too), makes

present wrapping much easier.

At a 3D Printing show in London in 2016 I saw a vase with vanes so thought I'd have a go at designing, printing and painting one myself:

I found that you could buy LED Tea Lights very cheaply and designed these decorative lamps which were used during someone's birthday party, they fade from one colour to another:

I never stop learning with Blender and finding new ways to use it.

If you'd like to know more about my 3D Printing adventures so far, I have a play list here - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCtL34Gw96S8oXQUaxTgH8skGmk3n3NDN

Sardi

The Holidays are Almost Here but not a snowflake in sight.

Just finished getting things ready for the holidays, just lots of wrapping to do...

Weather has turned mild again but wet, came home with rather muddy shoes yesterday. I'm hoping for a few days of snow (preferably when I don't have to drive anywhere). It's very rare that we have snow around Christmas in my part of Britain.

Getting ready to record another tutorial, this time to show how to recreate the motion capture scene I did with some drone footage of my garden. I'll hopefully share the raw drone footage too so others can play with it.

Only a few days of the competition left, some good entries so far but it would be nice to see a few more.

Here's a snow scene:

Making Blender Tutorials

I really enjoy making tutorials, although sometimes they can be hard going. In fact, the ones I've typically been most unhappy with, usually because of lots of having to repeat things (which I do 'on the fly' rather than stopping and starting again) or bad sound that I've had to replace, people often seem to like the most.

One of the trickiest parts is that I often create a demo scene or animation, post that somewhere and see what the responses are. If most people like it and want to know how it's done, then I make a tutorial. That way I know that at least some people will watch it.

I recorded a tutorial to go with 'Pipe Run' today and I think it went quite well. 1GB of video before editing.

At least it's Friday, yay :)

Have a Friday picture:

Sunday

Most of my Christmas shopping (online) is complete which is a relief, just have to go through lists to make sure I haven't missed anything and then sort out Christmas cards.

I had some fun using Drone footage and camera tracking. The stabilised footage is much easier to track than the hand held types I've tracked in the past. I started with a castle but ended up with a hole. Here it is - https://youtu.be/DASh8qN6UCc

Some really nice early WIPs for the contest, I'm not going to comment on any until the contest though but I hope lots of people are going to take part, it's great fun looking at the works people have created.

More baking in a few minutes so must go.

Have a picture from the past:

Busy few days.

I've been so busy with both Blender and non-Blender work over the last few days, it's been hard to find the time to Blog. With Christmas coming up I'm trying to sort things out for that too.

Anyway, hope many of you are going to enter the competition, it's only small prizes but I think it's a great way to practice and I very much enjoyed the last one.

Thinking about doing a live event soon, not sure what I'm going to talk about yet though but maybe there will be questions.

Miserable weather here (UK) but nothing serious for the most part. It didn't stop me going for a brisk walk during my lunch break and looking at how different the trees look without their leaves, and a brave squirrel clung to a tree as I passed within a few feet, just watching me. I know some people think they're pests but they do make me smile.

Here's a picture just for fun:

Competition Prize

Very excited that this T-Shirt arrived today. It's going to be a prize (or one just like it) in my new competition.

I've been thinking about this for quite a while.

The T-Shirt logo was designed in Blender of course :)

A Country Walk

I went for a walk today, it was dark by the time I got home but it's always nice to be in the countryside. I took my camera along and snapped photo's along the way and decided to share them so any of my Blender friends can use them in their projects if they'd like to as long as they credit me. I'll take more as the seasons change.

Here's the link : Sardi's Autumn 2016 Walk

I ordered a sample of something today as a prize for the competition I hope to run soon. I want to make sure it comes out OK before I announce the competition subject.

Here's a nature scene from a while back :

Baking

Busy day today, amongst other things I baked quite a few cakes and took them with me to a friends Firework Party in the evening. Everybody seemed to enjoy the cakes, especially the banana and walnut one with vanilla Crème fraîche filling.

Watched a couple of CG Blender tutorials too, the first was on the basics of Particles. I often watch seemingly elementary tutorials because you never know when you'll pick something up you didn't know, and this time I learned about CTRL L to bring up the 'Make Links' menu. Very handy.

I'm also 3D printing many little counters for a friends game (designed in Blender of course).

Here's a food related Blend :)

Epiphany

Today started cold and frosty and ended cold and wet <shiver>.. most Tuesday evenings are 'order in' nights so yay, pizza :) I also had to drive a loan car for the day, which was a manual (mine is automatic) and that was interesting...

As often happens, my mind was still mulling over ways to create a hand pencil coloured effect in Blender Cycles while at work today. I came up with a couple of ideas using colour mix nodes, noise textures, vector mapping and colour ramps. I tried it out tonight and it came out like I imagined, but then came my (small) epiphany. I suddenly realised I had been thinking too much like a 3D artist and not enough like a 2D one. Hand drawn animation is, of course, drawn in 2D, even if representing 3D objects. Therefore pencil colouring artefacts (lines) will always face the 'camera'. So as you can map textures to work just like that in Cycles I gave it a try and Blender is busily rendering a short test now.

Long day tomorrow with work followed by teaching.

Have another picture :)

Procrastination

Just taking a moment to procrastinate in the middle of editing the Autumn Mist tutorial.

It turned out to be a longer tutorial than I planned. The raw recordings amounted to almost 2 hours. Hopefully I'll get that down to 30 or 40 minutes after editing. There will be some retakes with phones bleeping and a certain cat meowing.

I often find I need to take brief brakes from longer edits, I guess it helps to let the concentration go occasionally.

In other news, I was up a long ladder (in the cold and wind) daubing mortar to repair some patches just beneath the tiles of my roof. I've never done that before and not really what I'd call fun. I'll be full of aches and pains tomorrow. And now it's raining... hope it doesn't wash my new work away.

I've shared a couple of shader setups recently on my Facebook Group. They came out of me thinking about something someone asked, regarding shaders to simulate the hand drawn pencil colouring effect of The Snowman animation, which I've loved for years. Watching some of it again the other night, I was struck with how impressive some of the 3D camera movement is, as the camera flies around buildings for example. This was all done without the aid of CG. Computers were used to add certain effects such as the snow in some of the scenes but the majority was all done by hand. Very impressive indeed, especially given it was made in 1982.

I'm still working on a competition so watch this space, and now my internet is working properly again (took 3 weeks of wrangling with my ISP, British Telecom) I'm hoping to do some live streams soon.

Have another picture just for fun -

Oh well, back to work :)

Sardi

Sardi's First Blog Post

Hi, it's Saturday 5th November (Guy Fawkes night in the UK) 2016 and this is my first Sardi Pax blog post. I'm not completely sure what I'm going to do with this blog yet. Mostly it will be about Blender but my initial thoughts are to post in-progress and complete works, ideas for Blender tutorials etc.

Here's an image to which the tutorial I'm working on will relate :

Oh, and I'm just off to see a local firework display in the next hour. Usually quite spectacular.

Sardi.