IZation Labs

Copperpot Munitions, supplying high quality cartridges since who knows when.

The render to the left is the original output of the scene that I only recently finished. Up late watching viral videos and playing video games one night with some friends I don’t get to spend enough time with, one of them showed interest in seeing what Blender is capable of, as he hasn’t been actively following the newest (earth shattering) updates. So, being on a video game kick, I modeled him some nine millimeter cartridges at about three that morning.

Never one to leave a sleeping model lie, I came back to the file about a month later while cleaning up my main Blender project directory and felt like the scene could be so much more, could be more full bodied and realistic. This lead me to create the Copperpot Munitions LLC  box of 9mm cartridges. Then I duplicated a single 9mm round 100 times or so and used the physics engine to drop them into the box and scatter them about the scene.

I’m very happy with the final product, my only regret is that the cartridges could look just a bit grungier in my opinion. To see the texture used for the box art, head over to my portfolio.

On a side note, here’s a shameless plug, just in case anyone isn’t already using the software package “Dropbox”. It completely replaced my flash drive for school and projects, and it keeps my data backed up and updated to the newest revisions on all my computers.

Dropbox is a program that creates a normal folder on your computer, conveniently called a “Dropbox”, that automatically and in real time backs up to a safe place on the internet, so no matter what happens to your computer, your files are always safe and accessible online. Plus, if you have multiple computers, or a work and a home computer, you can install Dropbox on both, and it automatically syncs the files between computers! Save that document you were working on at work to your Dropbox, and there it is in the same place when you get home!

If you haven’t yet, check it out! You get two free gigabytes of free storage, and it can be expanded for up to ten or twelve gigs for free by doing things like uploading your first files, installing it on more than one computer, etc. Click the link below if you want to know more.

http://db.tt/wfMuToi

-Lace

Sleep comes easier for me now that I’ve started up my most recent caffeine ban, but that won’t stop me from adding a few newish photos

I’m finally starting to generate some images and content that I feel I can be proud of. Things that aren’t exactly out of this world, but are also good enough to not get comments like ‘Dude. Is that supposed to be a car or a bird?”

I honestly believe in using whatever tools best suit you. Much of what you see here is generated in Blender, unless I mention otherwise. I’m just a Blenderhead, through and through. I’ve a professor who knowingly joked that if I thought I could get away with it, I would do all of my modeling in Blender and just import it as a .obj into 3ds Max for the 3ds based Studio 1 class in which I’m currently enrolled. The class erupted into laughter, myself included, mostly because we all know that he is perfectly correct.

The two new uploads for the evening have got a few weeks on them now, but they include a textured football and football helmet. These were given to us as models and we were to texture them in 3ds Max. Enjoy!

-Lace

Just a quick post today. It’s worth noting that Blender version 2.57 has been officially released!

Blender 2.57 is the first non-beta version of Blender’s newest incarnation. What does this mean to you? If you’ve already been using the 2.5 series beta versions, this means that a solid, stable version has released for you to play with, with a few new and changed features and far fewer bugs! If you’ve been holding off on the 2.5 series and are still working with a 2.4 Blender, you are in for a treat. Blender 2.5 has a fresh new code base, a reorganized and very intuitive and efficient GUI, tons of new features like volumetric smoke and flames, and overall just more powah!

If you haven’t even heard of Blender, well what are you waiting for! It’s a free (as in beer) 3D graphics package that can hold it’s own against the big boys. Sound too good to be true? I’m not exaggerating. It is an absolutely amazing package.

Head on over to Blender.org to check it out. You won’t regret it!

-Lace

This was an educational test in which I shot immobile tripod footage and tracked a number of points on my palm using Syntheyes.

Once the points were tracked in Syntheyes the data was imported into Blender, where the monkey head primitive built into Blender (Suzanne) was composited into the shot, seemingly resting on my hand. I had a few issues. I can’t seem to figure out how to get shadows working properly *an issue I solved after writing this article*.

You can see there is a bit of ghosting around the hand, due to the quick ‘mesh’ I made of the hand on which the shadows were placed. A little bit of editing would clean it up, but at this point this test as served its purpose. Onward to bigger and better things. There is a small amount of slippage / jitter between the 3D element and the video footage due to inexperience using Syntheyes on my part. Hey, that’s what these exercises are for!

I would be a bit more in depth with this post, but the wee hours of the morning are upon me and I need to get some sleep, so how about this. If you have any questions or comments, go ahead and leave me one right at the bottom of this page!

-Lace

‘roB’ is a robot character I made for a short film at Eastern Michigan University. He’s a spunky little bot with a get up and get it done kind of attitude, and he can often be seen hanging out on my desk.

Okay, so not really. This a special effects test involving matchmoving and compositing courtesy of Syntheyes and Blender. It is a shot I’m quite fond of, and it even has a special effects breakdown to show the ‘steps’ taken to go from raw footage to final composite. I think the visual effects breakdown took as much time as the tracking and compositing work itself.

The raw image sequence was processed using supervised tracking in Syntheyes, meaning that each bright green triangular point shown in the video I actually supervised the manual tracking of from frame to frame. Time consuming? Yes. But look at the results! How cool is that?

Of course, my trusty Blender came through for me on all of the 3D aspects. Modeling, lighting, rendering, and compositing were all handled by this powerful beast of a 3D package. If you haven’t looked into it yet, really, what are you waiting for?

-Lace

As a result of procrastinating all day (for those of you still in school, don’t try procrastination at home, I’m a trained professional) instead of getting to work on assignments, I decided to start work on a nice little robot character I found in one of my sketchbooks from a year or two ago. It’s too late to continue on him now, but here is an image of the work in progress with some random rust textures affixed. He has no legs, feet, or manipulators on his arms, and there’s still plenty to do, but he is shaping up to be a good looking little rust bucket.

Note, the trapezoid on his chest will eventually have button-like rivets along the outer edge, much like aviator jackets of old. He is to be a steampunk robot (one of the best kinds there is).

-Lace

While for the most part my colleagues and classmates in the field of what can be summed up as (and heavily understated by the words) ’3D Animation’ are supportive of new experiences, new software, etc, occasionally work that I have done is overshadowed for someone by the fact that I did not produce it using a ‘socially accepted’ software package such as 3DS Max or Maya. I am, of course, referring to my preferred package, my swiss army knife in a world of 3D, Blender.

The fact of the matter is, I have never seen any package commonly ‘recognized’ to be superior produce anything that Blender could not. In fact, I often see quite the opposite, in that few packages are as capable in reference to the multitude of features in which Blender dominates. What else can do particle simulation, volumetric smoke and fire, water, soft bodies, modeling, rigging, animating, texturing, and real world physics simulations all in the same package? Show me the money, folks.

I’m not necessarily saying that other packages are less capable, nor that Blender is the end all be all for every 3D user in the world. What I am saying is this; when you see a truly quality example of someone’s work, something they put a great deal of time and effort into perfecting to perfection, by all means ask how it was done and with what package. Compliment it if it truly shines, suggest better ways of doing things, compare pros and cons, and develop a unique and meaningful conversation or critique. What better way to learn?

But please. Please, refrain from changing your mind on the quality of craftsmanship just because it wasn’t made with an Autodesk product. It can leave a bad taste in both of your mouths, and may make you seem uninformed. By writing something off just because that high school computer science teacher you had said that it wasn’t worth a nickel of your time, you risk missing out on a tremendous number of opportunities! You might learn something new if you give yourself a chance to open up to it. Of course, that lesson can be applied to a lot of things in life, not just 3D modeling and animating application wars.

:p

Now that the render I’ve been waiting on is done, I can stop pseudo-ranting and get to the interesting part of the post. I spent all afternoon and evening today working in Syntheyes and Blender. The included short fifty frame video marks a number of firsts for me.

Into SynthEyes went the image sequence, (video footage broken into a separate image for each frame). SynthEyes is a software package that, to put it roughly, determines how cameras and objects move based on video footage so that we can further manipulate them in software like Blender. It’s one of the things that lets us add special effects. Then came an hour or two of supervised tracking, a first for me, as in the past I have used SynthEyes’ built in autotracking functions to automatically track my footage.

This time, not only did I track the movement of the camera using supervised tracking, but I also tracked a moving object in the footage, a vehicle driving down the road. After the tracking was done and the data was exported to Blender, I began playing with the idea of testing the footage by attached something to the side of the truck.

After a few hours of fiddling, the final product now arises. It’s a short (nearly two whole seconds) technical test slash learning experience comprised of a truck moving down the highway with an image of the TRON style spheres pasted realistically to its side. Not only is the truck moving, but the handheld camera is swiveling in a tripod like manner to track the truck as it moves along the road.

This may look pretty basic, and in some respects it is, but it is one of the most difficult hurdles in achieving realistic special effects and photoreal 3D additions to live action film. And jumping those hurdles can be a lot of fun.

-Lace

PS. Bonus points if you noticed Suzanne.