Sintel

I haven't been doing a lot of Blender or animation lately, as I have discovered some very cool Blender work done by others. Watch this short movie called Sintel on Youtube, or download a hi-res version from the main Sintel site.

Apart from the technical excellence of the piece (cool hair effects, lighting, all sorts of stuff), it is a very moving story of a young girl and a wounded baby dragon.


Don't miss it! (Increase it to 720p and watch it full screen. And turn up the sound - the music is great, especially the Ziggurat scene, and the song during the credits at the end.)

PS Why is it taking me so long to watch a short movie? Because the whole thing is open source (from the Blender Foundation), free, and lots of material from the movie is available. Screenshots, the music, "making of" documentaries, even source 3D files I can load up and create my own scenes with. Its a real mother-load!

PSS The only bad side-effect is it makes my stumbling around in Blender look very poor in comparison. So don't compare, ok?

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.