The theme for this issue is “Odds n’ Ends: props and accessories”

Welcome back to a new year of Blenderart Magazine. We are going to kick off 2012 with a look at how to create all the Odds n’ Ends that make images and animations look great. No character is complete without their clothes, armor and all the various accessories that complete their look. And scenes are flat and lifeless without a variety of well placed props to add detail and depth to tell your story.

In addition, we want to take a look at how to use some of the fun new features of Blender 2.61 with all these needed props and accessories. So get to modeling, texturing and don’t forget to write about it and share your masterpieces with the rest of us.

Looking for tutorials or “making of” articles on:

• any props or accessories needed for any character or scene
• how to use new blender features

Articles

Send in your articles to sandra
Subject: “Article submission Issue # 36 [your article name]“

Gallery Images

As usual you can also submit your best renders based on the theme of the issue. The theme of this issue is “Odds n’ Ends: props and accessories”. Please note if the entry does not match with the theme it will not be published.

Send in your entries for gallery to gaurav
Subject: “Gallery submission Issue # 36″

Note: Image size should be of 1024x (width) at max.

Last date of submissions February 5, 2012.

Good luck!
Blenderart Team

This has been a lifelong trend that seems to only get worse as time goes on. And generally it happens when I am all caught up in a project and totally focused on it, thereby not noticing when I have done something that is bound to cause a problem later. And of course it generally takes me forever to discover just what I did to mess up my nice little project.

So just what did I do this time. Well sit on down and I will tell you all about it. (like you honestly thought I wouldn’t)

Okay so my favorite site (CGCookie) scheduled 3 different user activities all with the same deadline.

• Blendercookie announced a modeling exercise featuring the “Little Bot Bunny” concept art of David Revoy
• Conceptcookie announced their first drawing exercise: a female head shot
• Blendercookie announced their 2nd annual snowman modeling contest.

Oh my what to do… actually it wasn’t a hard choice.

Oddly enough I had already started trying to model Little bot bunny a few weeks earlier and had gotten stuck. I obviously am not good at modeling robots. So I was totally stoked about Blendercookie doing this one. And I was more than willing to wait until the exercise was over and Jonathan posted a tutorial on how to actually model the little guy.

As for the drawing exercise, well I downloaded the reference image and studied it for quite a bit.  I do not draw well to say the very least, so I ultimately decided that I would wait for Tim’s tutorial on this one as well.

That just leaves the snowman modeling contest. Now this I can do.

I came up with a concept rather quickly and got to work. Everything was going rather well. Modeling went smooth and I even figured out how to get my tablet to work in sculpt mode. Actually it worked before, but I still had to use the mouse for rotating, zoom etc because I still haven’t set up any of the buttons on the pen or tablet to actually be useful. I finally got annoyed and figured out how to set up my pen buttons and the buttons on the tablet so that I didn’t have to keep stopping just to turn my model. (whoot for me!)

At some point I did something and my snow bank behind the snowman started showing artifacts when rendered, and no I never did figure out what was causing it. Snow bank by itself rendered fine, snowmen rendered fine, snowmen in front of snow bank, not so fine.

But I am a creative problem solver, so since I couldn’t figure this one out, I decided to render it out in layers and put it back together in the compositor.

Hah! take that artifacts!

Since I don’t use the compositor very often, I did a quick look up on the blender wiki and figured out how to set up my layers. So far so good. I hit render and after a short wait had my layers. I checked both layers and they were good, no artifacts.

Okay then, time to switch to the Node editor for a bit of compositing. When I opened the node editor I promptly checked “Use Nodes” box at the bottom and looked up into the window to discover it had added material nodes, whoopsie, I need compositor not material. No biggie, I clicked the proper little icon on the bottom and was on my way.

I set up my alpha over, added a modest glow, a little RGB correction and I was ready to render out. Yeah I totally forgot to check “Auto render” when I checked “backdrop”. Rather silly of me considering they are right next to each other.

Anyhow, I got ready to render out my composited masterpiece. I double checked that composite was selected in the Render buttons options and made sure I had a composite node attached to node setup. I have forgotten that last step a time or two. Alrighty then, hit render and wait.

And when it was done, I had nicely rendered snowmen with slightly glowing Christmas lights… and absolutely no snow???!

WTH! yep here it is. My “WTH did I do” moment. I swear there is one in every project. Although normally they appear much sooner in the project, not as I am so close to being finished.

Okay, recheck settings…. re-render…. still no snow.

Do you know what the definition of crazy is? “Doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.” Yeah, I spent the next hour or so doing exactly that. Fast forward past that hour that was filled with variations on checking settings, render, wait, no snow. I even tried turning off compositing and just rendering the snow layer.

NO SNOW!

WTH, I had snow, it was really cool snow. It was there before I opened the Node editor.

Sigh, grumble, grumble.

So there is obviously a problem with the snow. I have already checked all possible settings concerning rendering and the compositor. Time to check the material itself.

When I clicked on my snow bank and switched to the material settings, imagine my surprise and confusion to see that the little material preview window showed, yeah wait for it…. a black sphere. WTH! why is it black, snow is white. My snow was white.

Looking at it closer showed me the cause of all my problems.

Have you figured it out yet?

I had my snow bank set to use nodes, specifically Material Nodes and there was no material applied in the Nodes, hence the black sphere.

Remember right after I rendered my render layers and opened the Node editor, then clicked “Use Nodes” and material nodes were auto added to the Node editor window?

Yeah that!

I unchecked “Use Nodes”, deleted the material nodes that had been added, and amazing a re-render showed my snowmen in front of a SNOW BANK!

Victory!, Whoot!

Okay, moral of this story, keep track of what you check, add etc. And if you accidentally enable something that you weren’t trying to do, UNDO IT immediately before you forget all about it. Otherwise, you might just end up with something very odd happening that just confuses the living bejeebers out of you.

And to put a happy ending on this little story, here is my snowman entry:

Happy holidays everyone, May your new year be filled with blender fun and joy!

It LOOKS like a flashlight. Which I think was only part of the objective. I think it is also supposed to display good topology as well. And I think I got most of it okay.

I did have a few problems with the switch and the bottom end cap. They look reasonable, but I am fully convinced that there is a better method than what I came up with. So of course I am eager to see how Jonathan does it.

Luckily, the assignment wasn’t about lighting or I would have received a massive fail.

Yeah, not so much. Apparently I still manage to make him question my mental stability.

I was quietly sitting at my computer working on modeling the high poly flashlight, for BlenderCookie’s first modeling exercise. And doing really well, I might add

When my husband looks over and says “Why are YOU modeling a flashlight?”

And of course my answer was, “because I was assigned to.”

He gives me a really dumb look and just stares at me like I have lost my mind.

Now honestly, my answer wasn’t as strange as he seemed to think it was, I WAS assigned to model a high poly flashlight as part of BlenderCookie’s modeling exercises, which I decided was too much fun to pass up.

But there is the fact that I somehow forgot to tell him about BenderCookie’s new modeling exercises or that I was planning on participating in them. And since I have never shown any interest in modeling tools of any sort, I suppose he could be excused for thinking I was nuts.

And then again, seriously hon, after all this time, why would anything I do surprise you? This is me after all.

We do know that right?

But as artists it is equally important to take time to play in our chosen art medium as well. All too often we get locked into the mentality that we must be either involved in a project or working on improving skills and techniques and we forget to just play.

This is something that I am very guilty of and I’m sure a good many of you are as well.

Sadly enough, it took watching my five year old to remind me how important it was to play.

I recently received a graphic tablet for my birthday. Now mommy got to use her graphic tablet all by herself for about two weeks before the ever curious five year old noticed that mommy could use it to draw on the computer.

Yep, you guessed it, she has been hooked on it ever since and every time mommy tries to use it, she is in my lap demanding “draw time”.

First thing, it was amazing how quickly she grasped the concept of the tablet and how easily she uses it to draw and paint. Yep, mommy is still occasionally struggles to get it to do what she wants. (Yes I am blaming the tablet, not my completely pathetic skills )

Okay, on to the play part. While eventually she ends up drawing “something”, she actually spends far more time simply playing with the different brushes. Moving them randomly about to see what effect they have and changing colors often to see how they blend together.

If I would let her, she would probably spend the better part of the day just swirling colors around and changing brushes.

It is absolutely amazing watching the different combinations she comes up with, something I probably wouldn’t have known about if I hadn’t been watching her just “play”. Some of those brushes are just fun.

We have even done some tag team drawing time, which results in lots of giggles and drawing over each others scribbles.

It is relaxing and rather liberating, so the million dollar question for today is;

“When is the last time you just sat down and played?”

for wondering minds, my daughter’s favorite program is MyPaint, and her favorite brush collection is Deevad4.

There is a link provided to download the reference images from CGTextures.com.

from BlenderCookie:

This exercise assignment is to model a high poly flashlight based on the references provided. The exercise is focused exclusively on modeling and so there is no need to texture the model, the goal is to create a highly-detailed model with clean topology. During the instructor review process, your model will be judged on accuracy and topology.

You have until next Wednesday to finish your model, at which time you can submit a render, wireframe and .blend file to BlenderCookie for review.

After reviewing all the submitted models, they will be producing a tutorial showcasing how they would have done it and highlighting some of the better models submitted.

Now the only question left is, do I need a model of a flashlight?

Does “need” even have anything to do with it? Because of course I had already downloaded the reference images before I sat down to write this post.

Why are you still sitting here? you only have a week, get moving!

Welcome to Issue #35, “Character Building”

“Almost anything can be animated to give the appearance of life and possibly intelligence. But just because it moves, does that make it a character? ” That is the question that we are exploring in this issue of Blenderart Magazine. Just what makes a great character. And just to add a little fun, we not only have articles and tutorials, but some great character models for you to play with as well as a bonus surprise.

So grab your copy today.
Also be sure to check out our gallery of wonderful images submitted by very talented members of our community.

Table of Contents:

• TIK / FK switch
• The Locust Swarm
• Making of: Wouldo
• Making of: Ruby
• Making of: Rihanna
• Dr. Madblood 35th Anniversary Halloween Special
• Shape key and shape breakdown

And Lot More…

Blenderart Magazine Mirrors, Torrents and Online links can be found at:
www.blenderart.org

Last night I decided to start watching the Citizen Exclusive: Mechanic modeling series that BlenderCookie released the first part of 2010.

Not that old really, only a year or so. Just old enough for me to have forgotten that 2.50 wasn’t being used yet. So I got a big kick out of seeing an old familiar friend. Blender 2.49, which still sported the classic look that I had been used to for some ten odd years or so.

Don’t get me wrong, I do love the new look of blender and the increased functionality, but I spent a lot ( and I mean A LOT) of time with the old look. And oddly enough, there are some parts I miss, like the yellow vertices and pink selection colors. I had forgotten about them until last night.

So anyhow, after I got all misty eyed about seeing my old familiar blender, I actually soon forgot all about the interface and look. Some things never really change, so if you can get past seeing it done in 2.49, you can still learn quite a bit about modeling. And I did. So far I have only watched the first episode of the series, where Jonathan blocks in the main forms of the Mechanic model. I learned some great tips about topology and blocking out figures. Tonight I plan on continuing with part two.

Even more fun, the Mechanic is not what you would call a typical character model, he is not a lean muscular guy to say the least. It is very interesting to get to see how to model a body shape that isn’t the usual CG norm.

Fun stuff to be sure and another good reason to become a Citizen at BlenderCookie, as if we really need more reasons

I started this blog in 2007, yeah I know surprised me too. And over the years I have gained more visitors. Odd enough in itself considering that I don’t advertize or really push it in any productive way.

So I have gotten used to a steady flow of visitors, granted not a huge flow. General average over the last year or so has been between 50-100 visitors a day. Not fantastic, but not really bad either. Of course there are periodic spikes in visits if I post something really cool.

So imagine my surprise when I checked my stats about a week ago and saw 1274. WTH! What did I post that was that interesting. A quick check showed that I hadn’t posted anything remarkable.

hmmmm….. probably a glitch in the stats system then. No biggie.

Except the next day there were even more and it continued to grow over the next week, reaching a peak of 3,354.

That is some glitch!

Sigh, and obviously only a temporary one, because here we are back at my normal stats.

Snap!, and here I thought I had finally gone viral

Oh well, back to normal. Which means playing in blender, reading and chasing my 5 year around the house.

bye now!

If you’re not a Citizen, no worries and no need throw the desk out the window… This isn’t affecting the amount of free tutorials/content to hit the site on a weekly basis. or of course welcome to sign-up today to get access to this exclusive and many more

So this morning I downloaded it, it is beautiful by the way, and went to tuck it into my Material/Texture folder. When I looked in the folder I decided I might want to clean it up and organize it a little. Mainly because I have a habit of just throwing files in there willy nilly.

First thought, holy cow! where did I get all those files?

Second thought, ummm, just what are all those files?

LOL, I have been using blender for over ten years and obviously collecting material libraries and texture images the whole time. After a bit of organization and cleanup I discovered quite a few things I had completely forgotten about.

Like an entire folder of concrete images. Concrete? Why do I have an entire folder of just concrete? And that isn’t including all the concrete images that are part of other collections, of which I have a sizable number of texture collections as well. I must have a thing for concrete and yet I don’t overly remember needing concrete for any projects I have done.

My favorite folder contains all the blend file material libraries that floated about the community years ago. Most likely the materials won’t work quite as originally intended since blender has changed so much since then. But it is fun to poke at them and remember how things were done back in the day.

LOL, I even discovered a folder of alpha textures (some 80 odd files ) that would make great sculpt brushes, that I seriously don’t remember downloading. But I must of, because they are sitting there all nice and neat, ready to use.

I think I should probably look in there more often, just to remind myself what is in there. It just might save a bit of time searching the internet for the perfect texture, because at this point there is a pretty good chance I already have one sitting happily in my Material folder.

Well that was my productive task for today. Time to go play, Tim released a robot painting tutorial on Concept Cookie and Jonathan released a pumpkin patch tutorial on Blender Cookie. I have cookies to play with!!!!!!!!

bye now…