Firework final

low quality of final firework scene:



I love the final firework and how it shines against the black background. I think the way it disappears looks quite realistic, and this is a relevant corporate ident.

Firework-testing

I'm testing various values to see what sorts of effects I can get with the particles.



This one has too large an amount and looks like paint moving along the screen.



Here I increased the decreased the hard level and changed other things to give this bright white effect in the middle, it looks more like an explosive now.

The firework is too big so I'll scale it down and I need to sort out why the object stays after the explosion has ended. I think the curve has to many ups and downs in it as well, and should maybe be a curve that only bends once.

Spotlight Intro

I'm still not sure if the lights look good moving up and down. I also added a cube in the background to be the first firework, it follows a bezier curve.

Spotlights

I need something in the lead up to the firework display so I could do a sort of 20th century fox spot light show, this video did not work very well but you can see what I'm trying to do.

I think maybe the camera should be moving while the spotlights are rotating. (at a slow speed), and the spotlights are too jumpy. I must make sure not to make the animation too fast!!

Explosion test

I want to display some particle effects so what better way than making things explode!!!

I started with a uvsphere and gave it particle effects to leave a trail of 'dust', it followed a path, and then when it reached the top I added another sphere with an exploding particle effect and a flare and got it to explode on frame 100 until 140. I had to make sure not to render the object, and playing about with the colours was key. I love the way the sparks fade away like a real firework.

Final Sun scene

Sun test

Here I've made a UVsphere with a halo effect and a light inside it. It rises out from behind the hill and lights up the letters.

The next step would be to get the clouds to move, or maybe some sort of effect through the air. The sun doesn't move very smoothly but the test shows that it works.

collision tester

Here I tested how objects would react when hit by another object.

I had a few problems with this, because I hadn't set bounds on every object and the centre of the object was not in the centre, meaning it would get stuck inside the floor... I cured this by setting bounds and just playing around with settings. The letters pop out of the ground but this is just a placement issue.

This could be seen as a very simple version of my Hollywood idea.

Ball movement

For one of my scenes I want to have a ball rolling down a hill, perhaps the Hollywood hill, and then knocking over/destroying the Norfolk and Goode letters.

So I am experimenting with the physic values.

Here's a rough and ready clip of my first go:

Final Alien Scene

And here is my final final FINAL alien scene, using sci-fi(ish) music.



Here's my final alien video with sound I recorded myself.

---

Credit for image:

Hetlage, Chris, Stars Young and Old. [Image] Available at:
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0508/m46m47_hetlage_f.jpg
[Accessed 3 May 2009].

Credit for music:

Hawkwind - Silver Machine [Music] 1972. United Artists Records
(Calvert/Brock/Turner/Kilmister/Davies/Dettmar/King)

UFO lighting

I'm using a green spot to teleport up the alien.

The lamp starts off screen and then jumps into the stage on frame 241. This was the only way I could make the lamp appear from 241 onwards.

Alien Scene

I want one of my scenes representing the Sci-fi field that Norfolk and Goode work in, so what better way than an alien.

I want to have a dark mysterious scene with a figure sitting in a chair,
he is then disturbed by a bright light, sending him into panic.



Now I need to animate the alien and then convert the light into a UFO...

// the walls need to be softened down as they're too sharp, I'll make the outside into a dome shape.



I also made the light switch wobble to show it had been used.

Thanks for dropping in - cloth

Using more physics, with a solid cube (collision) and a cloth - which was created using a plane, subdividing several times, and giving it cloth physics, for this one I used the (silk) option.



This is using cloth (denim) and it looks much better as the pixels don't go through each other. I gave it slightly more thickness and feel it looks more like a table cloth.

Dya want Latice in your burger?

In this tutorial we learnt how to change shapes using a lattice, so here I've made a rectangle flatten out.

I also moved the camera using the "i" location key.

Water goes bouncy.

Another tutorial altering particles.

I made a box, and put a slightly smaller box in the middle of it, and gave it a "fluid" particle effect. I used the outside box as an "obstacle", and a much larger box around the entire scene as the "domain".

I tweaked some of the ray transparency values of the inner box and coloured it to make it look like water, and then "baked" the animation.

The final result was not bad, but the water looked slightly solidic, this could be improved by sub dividing the rectangle.

I am the god of hell fire and I bring you.....

It wasn't difficult to get some particles floating up, in red and yellow colours, but to get it to look like fire was the challenge. It was hard to make the flames move in the way I wanted, but by increasing the random the flame swayed to the sides.

Ship-revisited

Just a simple example of getting the camera to follow something, it is too quick and would have been better if one could understand what was going on. But the technique is a useful one.



In this instance the camera was not following the ship but following the curve. It goes through the course at one point but gives me another option of filming what's being animated.

Exploding

^ exploding the top with the base staying intact.



^ exploding using split edges



^ exploding

Dominoes

This was an incredibly easy tutorial, with Blender's game engine doing most the work.

I just made a plane as the table and created a domino shape and duplicated it several times. Then I rotated the first domino slightly, and pressed

to initiate the game's engine.

Ship shape

In this tutorial we experimented with making the camera following the ship as it moves around a course.

It's a simple enough technique but for some reason the animation renders were masses of bright red etc. You can still make out some of the movement, but I will do this again, with well created models and textures too.

You always remember your first

Start of a new Semester: ANIMATION

We'll now focus on animation in Blender, which is what I am more interested in. I'm really looking forward to getting started and creating some unique animations and learning some fantastic techniques.

I looked at two Hirsig tutorials, one on how movement works using keyframes, and the other was all about the timeline. I also learnt to rotate and scale the objects and it was all as easy as a click of a button.

I then wanted to try something more complex, so here is my caterpillar animation.



The one thing I would say is that it is too quick and I should leave more than just 15 frames between each movement. But it is a nice little animation for my first try :)

Final Interior

Final Exterior

Tree Bien

Creating a tree with curves.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Scripts/Manual/Wizards/TreeFromCurves

This was a great tutorial that taught me a great skill; how to use a bezier curve as a shape and not just something to map onto a pipe...

If you set the width of the curve up a bit you can see it. I just duplicated and extruded, as well as altering the radius size with ALT-S. It looks great and was surprisingly simple to create.

Snow many puns I could do...

I created a snowman, made the ground bumpy and added world stars, as well as changing the background colour to make this festive scene.

Furst things furst.

I created this using the particle effect. I find it a really great tool so I decided to make some sort of furry animal.

I started with a UVsphere and cut parts of it down and did various other things to make a snout. Then I joined some cylinders to the snout and deleted the difference making nostrils.

I then created more shapes for a body and feet. And changed the levels of the particles. It was a great thing to make.

More landscape goats

I did the same technique though this time with a wood texture and by adding colour to it.

It almost looks like smooth chocolate!

Land"scape-goat"

This was a really easy way to create a landscape texture.

Start with a plane and subdivided it 6 or so times, then add a texture to it, I used clouds. Then you can change the noise levels, then go into the editing tab, select all vertices and click the noise button. This maps the texture onto the plane and it extrudes onto it.

I then added a checkerboard texture and did noise on the right side and the central left. You can see it just maps it on to the top of it.

They grassed me up, cakesniffers.

This was unbelievably easy to do and will prove to be such a useful technique.

You start with a plane, click particle buttons, and change various values and click some buttons and you have some hair strands. Then just adding green for the base and a grass texture.

The one on the right is with tangent shading off, and the left with it on. When this is on the lighting hits the back of each blade and transmits it through, making it darker.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Here we started with a cube and deleted most of the vertices, then added the usual subsurf modifier as well as a mirror modifier. This mirrored the semicircle shape across the X,Y and Z directions.

The next modifier we added was the array this duplicated the shape and by some slight tweaking it became a 10circle high pipe.
We then added a bezier curve to it and this was mapped onto the pipe. There were a lot of different shapes I could make by changing positions of the verts.

I changed the world background colours and pressed the blend button which gave a nice gradient. It's a lot more interesting than the simple bluey/green window we're always stuck with.

More Interior Ideas

Interior Ideas

"Glad to take the 3 points"

Lighting is so important in modelling because you want the user to be able to see the creation clearly.

I used this object to demonstrate 3 point lighting. I used a key light, (to the top right), fill light, which fills the key lights shadows (top left), and a back light (behind).

It works really well, and by adjusting the colours of the lighting you can adjust the mood. The keylight is a warm colour and the fill light a cool colour.

This will all be essential when showing my model.

Rose to the challenge

This was a nice little process, starting with a cube, adding a subsurf to make it a basic rose shape. We then extruded the rose face to make it go round into a pretzel shape, duplicated the face and did the same slightly more outward.

Finally we added length to it and made it look more rose like, then a stalk and colour and there ya go!

Organic Extrusion

Here we are experimenting with organic extrusion (extended faces ourselves.) So I started with a UV sphere (18segs,18rings) and extended some faces on the left to make leg like shapes. Then I did it on the right. I extruded parts at the top to make eye like shapes, and then added fangs.

Before you say anything, it's not a spider. Eight legs wouldn't have fit in as well, so it is a 6 legged insect. Yeah.

D-I-S-C-O......

Again experimenting with light, I also added a person in the middle to boogie away.

I experimented with the overall lamp too and feel the darker image gives off more of the "right mood".

Come on baby light my fire.

Experimenting with spot lighting and colours.

Eggcelent...

I am actually appalled at what I've written, I think I've put egg on my face.
Going forward from the mountain tutorial I made this egg box and added a texture to make it a more realistic eggsample.
Seriously I am eggstremely sorry. I'm amazed no one has poached me yet, and sent all the kings horses and all the kings men after me. Or even buttered soldiers.

I better stop this before you boil over.
Anyway yeah I added some eggs, hence the puns...
Is it nice that I did this on Frieday.

Someone egged me on... maybe.

Hillsinki?

I flattened out the mountainside to make it more like a countryside. I imported some textures from google, using a flat plane for the sky.

There is an unusual shine coming from the lighting that makes it look less real... if you ever thought it looked real.

Mount me

Experimenting with proportional editing and increasing radius.

Started with a flat plane and just with a few tweaks I made some mountains. I added a subdivide and made them smoother. Perhaps they're too smooth for mountains.

What the fork!?

The fork tutorial was going great with the lattice deformation, but as soon as I added a subsurf it suddenly went like this! I think it may be down to the way I created the fork shape, but I understand the technique and will find it very useful, as long as I use it properly...

More Ideas

I am set on this idea of tube shapes making up objects, I will make a simple tree with sharp objects overlapping man made with natural.

I am undecided on the overall center piece but am considering creating a hut or perhaps a large tower. I think it may be amusing for the home to be smaller on the outside than on the inside, just like the Doctor Who tardis.

Mood Board...

With the assignment coming over the horizon it was important to get some ideas flowing so I gathered various imagery and colours that were to do with Sci-fi (the brief set) and things that I enjoyed.

WK 6 - Extrude Dup

Here I've created a tube like shape by extruding an original circle and gradually making it longer and adding directions to it.

I was really pleased with it and feel it would not look out of place in our sci fi assignment...

Here I've been experimenting with the "Extrude Dup" tool, which lengthens various vertices or shapes. I created a tower of cubes and then a grid like shape. But here I've extruded 1 vertice to make it into a fan like shape (top half) and then the bottom line of that into the shape on the left. It is an unusual but quite attractive little shape.

WK 6 - Multiple Textures

I experimented adding new textures to an object. It is also possible to add textures individually.

WK 5 - Marble

I created a marble by adding a texture to the previous ball.

It was originally blue and pink so I changed the colour to blue and white (more marble like) and chose the option EMIT to emphasise the texture.

WK 5 - Balls

We experimented with textures. On the first ball (yellow) I tried to make it look plastic by making the hardness and specularity the maximum levels.
For the blue ball I made it partially transparent by making the alpha level 0.5. However this did not make it look very different from it's normal transparancy, so I hit 'ZTransp' and it did the trick.

Fruit

The next piece of fruit I created was a banana.

I was very pleased with it, and learnt some new techniques.

To create the bananas surface I imported a texture and edited it slightly to make the stalk black and the end of the banana.







I began with the apples, using 'subsurf' to smooth the apple down to make it look more realistic.
I thought the colours I chose really made the shapes look like apples.

WK 4 - Chair

Weeks 4 tutorial was to create a chair. I did this using bezier curves and converting the shapes to mesh. It took a while to get the shapes in the right places but overall the image was worth it.

This is the best thing I've created... thus far. ;)

WK 3 - Salt Shaker

I attempted to make a salt shaker, as it was similar to making the pill. I was pleased with the overall shape, but I tried to include slight holes in the top. They didn't work very well and I'll need to work on this technique in the future.

WK 3 - Pill

Here I made a pill, with the red part scaled slightly larger than the white. I am starting to get to grips with how to use blender.

WK 2 - Castle Revisited

I did this castle in a different way, only using the keyboard, and found it to be much easier. The final display is also neater.

WK 1 - Castle

The first tutorial was to create a house, I then duplicated this shape four times and created this castle. I was not very pleased with it as the roofs of the building could have been sharper, but you have to start somewhere.