Scouting

Do you remember sitting around a campfire, poking marshmallows on the end of sticks into the fire, watching some of them come out totally burnt and charcoal, and the others perfectly brown on the outside and wonderfully gooey on the inside. Singing songs together and wondering if the birds in the trees are saying "Keep it down will you! We are trying to sleep up here!" Listening to scary stories, then going to bed and hearing strange noises outside the tent, imagining all sorts of creatures walking within fang distance. Waking up wondering where that stone came from that is digging into your back.

Blender has a particle system, and I am just starting to learn how to use it. The three logs in the following 8 second video are covered with a surface that emits random particles, colored red and yellow, that start off as nothing, flare into existence, then fade away. Its a very basic scene, with 5 rocky shapes surrounding the fire that you can imagine sitting on, a ground with bit of randomness to it, and a night sky with stars and comets drifting past. It took me a while to get even this far, and the whole effect looks very amateur, but its a start. Hopefully the next one will be better.

S'mores - they are about the same. One is never enough, and you usually think that each one will taste even better than the last. Until your stomach tells you that you had one s'more too many.

Click to see video

Liquid Glass

Did you ever see the movie The Abyss? It came out in 1989, was directed by James Cameron (of Avatar fame), and starred Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. It had a cool liquid effect of a creature that was pure water, and could form the water into any shape it desired, even mimicing Mary Elizabeth's face.

Blender has a very useful object called lattices. They are just a 3D array of points, in an empty cube. You can move any of the points around, which deforms the overall shape so its not a cube anymore. The tricky part is you can take any other object, and modify it with the lattice, which deforms the shape of that object in the same way the lattice is deformed. If you look at the animation below, you will see a sphere that changes shape, being deformed by the invisible lattice. The lattice is not actually changing shape, its just moving through and around the sphere.

Plus I was able to make the sphere semi-transparent. As it stretches, you can see the back of the sphere visible through the middle. It gives a really cool watery, glassy effect.

Click to see video

The animation took 37 minutes to render, but quite a bit longer to get just the right material. It has 3 textures on it, clouds, a blend, and marble. And of course I had to turn on ray-tracing to get the transparency. It can also be viewed as a looping video. James Cameron would be happy to see the progress I am making in my lessons.

Monkeying around

Blender comes with a built-in monkey. Well, just a head actually. Her name is Suzanne.

I finally made my first animation. Its a very short one, just 4 seconds. You take your fixed model, and move, rotate, and scale the objects in it at specific frames. You don't have to do every frame, just key frames, and Blender interpolates for you to do all the ones in between. You can have multiple objects moving simultaneously.

As the banana swings into view (on a very thin and invisible line), rotating as it does, Suzanne turns and moves towards it, and as she sees it, a smile breaks out on her face. The smile, and the crinkling of the eyes, is done with a different set of animations that involve deforming the original mesh.

All of this is controlled with a set of curves that define how the motion happens, how it speeds up and down, and even lets you create a special Time curve where you can make time itself speed up, slow down, even stop, and go in reverse. Which I use to make the banana swing away and Suzanne get sad again, without having to add specific animations to do that.

If you play this in a loop, it looks smoothly continuous, as if Suzanne has only a two second memory, and is repeatedly surprised and then saddened by the appearance and disappearance of her favorite food. Feeling sorry for her yet?

Animation is really cool. But of course it takes longer. Will be spacing my posts further apart as time goes on and my projects get more ambitious. The actual rendering of this animation only took a few minutes (which will grow as I add objects), but it takes longer to edit the animations themselves. Luckily Suzanne is a very patient monkey.

Click to see video

The quality of the video is not as good as I would like. The raw movie looks much better. Except for the banana - I didn't do a very good job on that.