Blender Buzz

I Started A YouTube Channel

2013-01-28T07:43:00.004-08:00

Hi everyone! I've started a YouTube channel where I post blender and programming videos, check it out!

I'll be posting tutorials on there from now on, so make sure to subscribe!

Design for Programmers | Part 1

2012-08-09T11:16:00.001-07:00

Ok, this is a sort of off topic post, but it is related to art - meh.

Graphic design:

The practice or profession of designing print or electronic forms of visual information, as for an advertisement, publication, or website

That means you can design anything that contains any kind of visual information: Websites, posters, logos, application UI, to name just a few. Design isn't very hard, but it does take some practice. This post will be focusing specifically on basic, general design, but I might do another post on a more specific subject...

The Basic Rules of Design

Contrast

Contrast is any kind of opposite or radical difference between two sections of a design. Contrast is used to bring attention to a certain point of the design, or to show hierarchy. For a simple example: I want to show that the header is a title. Instead of making it the same size of the rest of the text, I would make it bigger. A subtler example, is right aligning an image, while for the rest of the design, images are centered. You can also contrast color, font weight and size.

Repetition

Repetition is when parts of a design are repeated throughout the design itself. Yeah, that definition wasn't great, but you get the point - make it repetitive. When I say make it repetitive I don't me use complex, bright green, (trying to be organic) ugly tileable background:

Yuck! is it needed that much?

They look cool for the first ten seconds and then they become super distracting.
Sorry - got on a tangent there.

Good repetition in design, is using the same style over and over again. Not only does it save space and time, but it looks better and gives a sense of uniformity(is that a word?).

Headers should be the same size, font and color every time(unless it is supposed to contrast).
If an image has a border around it, all of them should(again unless it is supposed to contrast).
Headers should always have the same amount of spacing on the bottom(another reason not to use inline styles).

Alignment

Alignment is when an invisible line is made by making sections of a design line up. This also shows hierarchy, because the human mind groups things based upon there position. For instance: A header should line up with its body text, otherwise it will look disconnected and floating out on its own.

Proximity

Proximity is the distance between sections of a design. Proximity is one of the most commonly missed rule of design, but it is vitally important to hierarchy. Example:

Left or Right?

The sad thing, is that it's not even hard to fix. Just headers and content closer together and it will look so much better.

DOs and DON'Ts

Some things are technically good design, but visually, they don't look very good.

Don't

Please, please, please, I beg you - Don't use Times New Romans it is the ugliest font, simply because it is used on so many badly design sites. Really, do Apple or Smashing Magazine use Times New Romans?
Don't use Arial, it sucks just as much as Times New Romans.
Don't use center align - unless you want your design to look boring. Plus, it's hard to read center aligned body text.
Don't use more than two fonts, otherwise things get messy. (I tend to use Helvatica Neue for body text and another more obscure font for my header.)
Don't try to fit everything above the fold - I can grantee it will. Not. Work. It just looks bad, and you can't easily follow the basic rules of design.
Don't use that ugly off white color that's used in Windows XP Classic theme.
Don't use inset, outset, ridge, groove or double when adding borders. Please.
Don't use more than five(ish) colors. I say ish, because three of those colors are just shades of the other two. Normally you just want to use black(meaning dark dark grey), white, possibly grey, and any other color.
Don't use neon green text on black. I know it looks cool in your terminal, but it wouldn't look cool if you were trying to read Hacker News.
Don't use colored body text. Neutral colors are the best for body text.
Don't use a colored background for text. IT MAKES YOUR EYES HURT.
Don't use image buttons. That's old school. And more often then not, the image gets cropped off at the edge and just looks stupid. Plus it slows down load time. And it doesn't ever look as good as a CSS3 button.
Don't add extra crap you don't need. Less is More!
Don't use light grey text on a white background.
Don't add text shadow to body text.
Don't use red on blue.
DON'T DO FLASH

Do

Do start out with a minimal design in mind. You can add more later, but less is more.
Do use a color pallete (a good one is kuler.adobe.com).
Do use lots of white space. I use tons of it. Again - Less is More. It also looks cooler.
Do use a special font for headers. You can do that three ways(in order of looking/working best):
1) Use Google Web Fonts or something similar to it.
2) Get a custom font and use @font-face, but it doesn't work with all browsers(*ahem* Internet Explorer).
3) Use a "System Safe" font. This doesn't show up right if you don't have the font though.
Do use a boilerplate. Some people don't like boilerplates, but they speeds up development so much, and it solves most problems related to alignment.
Do use toned down colors. Using pure red(rgb(255,0,0)), will not look good.
Do look at other sites for inspiration.
Do left align for text body.
Do use whitespace instead of a line when you can. Less is More!
Do use CSS3 animations if it will enhance the site.

I hope you enjoyed the post. If you have any questions or comments ask them below. Happy Designing!

Natural Character Animation: Common Problems

2012-06-21T12:55:00.002-07:00

Most beginner 3D artists have a hard time with character animation. Animation in general is not a skill you pick up easily. The best thing to do? Practice, just like anything.

A few common mistakes that are seen among amateurs:

Timing
Flow
Natural poses
Sliding
Ambient motion

Timing

Many rookies make the accidental mistake of fast animation when rendered, caused by lagging 3D view animation. An easy fix for this is opening a timeline, and checking Playback > Frame Dropping. This will play frames at the frame-rate required skipping them when needed. If you do run into this problem, you can easily change the speed of an animation later, by scaling the curves in the Graph Editor.

The other problem is mixed speeds. Animating a walk cycle that is very fast, then animating the next section too slow, will make changing speeds later much harder. The only answer to this is a painstakingly slow process of selecting chunks of the animation and scaling them to match a natural speed. You can avoid this is if you make sure that the last section of animation matches the current section.

Timing also effects...

Flow

Flow is another important element in animation. Sections of an animation that do not flow into each other, will look choppy and unnatural. There is no easy fix for this, the best thing to do, is to watch the transition between the two motions and try to make it as clean as possible.

Natural Poses

Natural poses are important to animation, but it is more important to great poses when you are doing stills:

(It took 10 minutes to find this pose!)

Its not great, but its better than this:

(This pose took about 10 seconds to do)

One thing you can do that sometimes helps is to look at images and videos as pose references.

Sliding

A huge problem with most walk/run cycles is sliding. So many animations have walkers and runners that slide, and its not even hard to fix!!! As long as you are using a path(which makes animation easier anyway) you can easily prevent sliding by adjusting frames slider.

Ambient Motion

What I mean by ambient motion is subtle natural motion such as scratch, stretching, looking around, etc.

Good animation is full of ambient motion, and makes the character feel more real.

And that's it. If you have animating tips, post them in the comments below. Thanks!

10 Blender Tricks that Will Save You Time

2012-06-12T10:00:00.000-07:00

Blender has so many features that you probably don't know all of them. Some are hidden away in menus that you rarely click, and others you can only access by searching the commands.

The following are some useful things I've found:

Edit Mode

1) Remove Doubles
I'm sure you've used this before, but you probably never looked in the toolbar to see what settings there are. The default setting usually works for doubled up vertices, but you can also use it to merge vertices that are close together:

Before

(press F6) After

2) Separate
Most of us have separated object an single object into multiple objects by selection. Not many people use the other two options. Separate by material and separate by loose parts. Separate by material will split objects up based upon which material they have. Separate by loose parts will separate all parts that are not connected to anything into there own individual objects. For example:

A simple array

In edit mode after applying the modifier

After separation by loose parts

3) Select Nth
Select every nth number of (i.e every other). Useful for saving time when doing repetitive selecting.

4) Select loose Vertices/Edges
Selects vertices/edges that are not connected to anything. Good for deleting hard to find (and non-usable) geometry

5) Select More/Less
Shortcut key is CTRL-+(for selecting more) and CTRL-- (for selecting less).
Selecting more will grow the selection by one vertex. Likewise select less, will shrink the selection by one vertex.

Object Mode

1) ALT-RIGHTCLICK
Few people know of this hidden tool. When you press ALT-RIGHTCLICK, a menu will pop up naming all the objects near the cursor.

This tool is immensely useful in highly populated scenes or scenes with tiny objects.

2) Randomize Transform
This one is in the menu (Object > Transform > Randomize Transform), it's the next best thing after the grease scatter. As it's name suggests, it randomly places the selected objects throughout the scene.

You have to set the (location/rotation/scale) limits using F6, otherwise nothing will change.

3) Select Random
Another great randomization tool. It's position is Select > Random.

4) Zoom Border
Helpful when you run out of zooming with your scroll wheel. Shift-B.

5) Quad View
Pressing CTRL-ALT-Q will toggle quad view:

Notice that quid view will lock all of its views, except for the camera view. This is sometimes useful if you find yourself setting up side and front views, and continually changing them the angle views, out of habit.

Quad view also helps save space, you only need one toolbar or properties bar, instead of one per view.

Do you know of any good hidden shortcuts? Post them in the comments below!

6 Blender Terminal One Liners That Will Save You a Lot of Time

2011-09-01T07:43:00.000-07:00

I've been messing around with the command line recently and I've figured out a few cool terminal commands for Blender. Using the command line can save you hours of work (seriously!). But before we start let me show you some basic terminal commands. By the way I'm using ubuntu 11.04 but this will work on all linux versions.
Note: Do not type the $ in front of the commands I am showing you( i.e. $ blah blah blah) this is only to show you that you are logged in as a normal user and not the as root user.
First of all you'll have to find the terminal, its located in Applications > Accessories > Terminal

So once you have started up your terminal you'll see something like this(I customized mine):

You will notice that to the in front of your typing cursor it will say "(your user name)@(your computer name) ~" This is saying that you are currently logged in (as your user name)and you are at your home folder(~).
To start you will need to know how to navigate to a folder(aka. a directory)
The basic idea of the cd (call directory) command, is:

$ cd directory name

So to navigate to your Desktop, type:

$ cd Desktop

To go up a directory, type:

$ cd ..

Note: Linux is case sensitive so make sure you capitalize the "D" in Desktop.
The other command I will teach you today, is the ls command. Again the basic syntax:

$ ls

(Not to complicated :) )
To also view the size of the files and folders, type:

$ ls -l

There are many more commands, but here is a link to get you started with the basics: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UsingTheTerminal
Now for the blender stuff.
If you want to open a blender file that is your current directory, or you don't want to go through the trouble of finding it, navigate to the folder using cd(if you are not already in it). Then type:

$ blender file name.blend

This will open blender with your file automatically loaded.
If you want to open blender without borders(which means full screen):

$ blender -W

If you have a specific size and/or location:

blender -p 40 40 800 600

This will set the lower left corner at 40(along the x axis), 40 (along the y axis), width to 800 and height to 600(Respectively as stated in the code above).
And now for a whopper(but a goodie):

$ for f in *.blend ; do blender -b "$f" -o //render/`echo "$f" | cut -d'.' -f1`-###.png -t 64 -a; done

Here's whats going on:
for every file in the current directory:
load the the blender file (whatever f is)in the background - without the UI(-b)
now set the output of the file to /whatever directory we are in/render/ and sets the name of each frame to the name of blender file + the frame number(those pound signs: ###)
next it sets the number of threads to 64(maximum)(to speed up the render)(-t)
and finally renders an animation(from the start of the file to the end of the file)(-a)
then loops through for the next file until the end

I run this one every night before bed and in the morning Abracadabra Alakazam *** Applause ***, its rendered all my blender files.

Say you have a folder full of blender files, but there are a bunch of .blend1 files that you don't want distracting you(so you are going to delete them):

find . -name "*.blend1" -exec rm "{}" \;

So it finds all the .blend1(-name "*.blend") files in the current directory(.), and removes them(rm).

And now last but not least, say you rendered a string of images that were too large, but you didn't want to have to go in gimp and resize each one by hand:

mogrify -resize 300x300\> *.jpg

Which will resize every JPG file in the current directory to a height of 300px.
Note: This command uses Image Magick

There are more blender commands that you can learn by typing:

$ info blender

I hope you learned something from this tutorial. If you have any problems or ideas please comment below and I will respond as quickly as I can.

A 3D Tomahawk Missile for Animations and Games

2011-05-31T07:51:00.000-07:00

Today I added another object to Turbosquid. It is a Tomahawk Block IV Cruise Missile. Included objects and textures in downloaded file are:

Two Missiles, 1 Low Poly and 1 High Poly in the same file

UV unwrapped Label texture

Modeling a Car Grill

2011-05-02T17:11:00.000-07:00

Making a car grill is not as scary as you think. It consists of circle, 2 array modifiers and a solidify modifier - that's it! Here's the video:

Hope it was helpful. If you have any questions or thoughts; please comment below.

Holograph VFX Tutorial

2011-04-30T14:29:00.000-07:00

This tutorial is way overdue, sorry :( The recording software I was using is not very good so halfway through the tutorial, the screen went black. I had to rerecord four times! I figured out that you have to make separate sections. Sorry again. Here's the tutorial:

I hope it was worth the wait!

10 Ways to Make Your Render Look More Realistic

2011-04-04T09:59:00.000-07:00

"Drat, that just looks incorrect. But the model is right! Whats wrong?"
Have you ever found you self saying this? I have it happen all the time. Its really hurts when you look at it and it just doesn't feel right. Well here are a list of things that I do that sometimes help make your model better.

Bevel all sharp edges in your model.
Make sure your model or scene is well lit and turn on ambient occlusion(In the world panel).
Don't make colors pure white or pure black(I know I mention this a lot but its very true and adds a small touch of realism).
If something is reflective don't make it completely reflective(add a slight blur or fuzziness to it - turn down the gloss)
If you need to light all sides of an object, use indirect light and/or environment lighting.
If the model doesn't look right just check it against a reference image.
For interior renders use an external render engine or watch a tutorial(Greg Zaal has a very good one at blender nerd)
Make blurry shadows and turn up samples(Soft Size in Lamp settings)
For human skin turn on SSS(Sub Surf Scattering)
Add textures for everything(If its one plain color add a texture for the Specular intensity)

Hope it helps!

A Homemade Holograph

2011-04-02T07:10:00.000-07:00

We recently figured out how to make a holograph that works with Blender 3D.

Happy April Fools Day!!! :)

A Free 3D iPhone

2011-03-03T09:49:00.000-08:00

This week I started modeling a lot of apple stuff. I modeled an iPhone 4 firstRead More...

Happy New Year!

2011-01-01T10:16:00.000-08:00

Happy new year! In this tutorial you will make the text, the champagne and the flares.

Read More...

How to Make A Fire Texture

2010-11-20T07:28:00.000-08:00

When I was making the Electric Guitar DTT, I decided to make a fire texture on it. I'm going to show you how to make this texture. Its very easy to make and change.

Read More...

Learn the Basics of Blender's Game Engine

2010-11-15T16:57:00.000-08:00

I like video games a lot. But Making them is almost as fun! In this tutorial, I'm going to teach you how to do some basic things with Blenders Bullet Game Engine(The Bullet Game Engine is just the physics of a game).

A $5 Electric Guitar

2010-11-15T12:57:00.000-08:00

This is my latest TurboSquid Project. I made it in two days and textured it on the third day. It was based on this image:

A Free Electric Guitar!

2010-11-08T09:43:00.000-08:00

This is my latest model on TurboSquid. It took me a day to model and texture this guitar. I based it on this image:

And best of all this guitar model is free! Please download it and share your thoughts.

A Basic Air Plane Mesh Ready for a Game

2010-11-04T13:54:00.000-07:00

My latest object on TurboSquid. It is a low poly mesh but it is ready for a video game. I made the missiles first. To make the airplane I duplicated a missile and deleted the lower fin, added two more fins that where longer and bigger and added the cockpit.

Please share your comments.

A Car Wheel

2010-11-04T12:43:00.000-07:00

I made this car wheel a few weeks ago when I was making a Ford Mustang. I thought this wheel would be nice to sell.

As you can see I hard modeld in the tire tread.

Please share your thoughts.

A Free Pick!

2010-11-02T17:17:00.000-07:00

I made a free pick in Blender. I decided to put a little joke on it. Please download. Enjoy!!!

In case you download this file you can import it to Blender by clicking File>Import>3D Studio(.3ds)
Please comment on my model.

A $5 Cartoon Car

2010-11-02T16:26:00.000-07:00

This is my latest 3D model that I am selling on TurboSquid. I made it a couple months ago as a test... it is one of the first cars I have made on Blender.
Read More...

Rules of Thumb For 3D Work

2010-11-01T13:26:00.000-07:00

Here are a couple of rules that you should usually follow, not in just Blender, but in any 3d program.

Modeling:

Make all of the polygons roughly the same shape and size.
Make sure that you do not have doubled up verticies or polygons.
Try not to make a triangles(This applies to Blender - I'm not sure if this applies to other programs. Please comment if I am wrong).
Keep good topography.
USE A REFERENCE IMAGE!!! This is a must!

Texture:

If you are using an image, make sure you are not stretching it. If if is stretching try to UV unwrap it.
DO NOT MAKE ANYTHING BLACK!!! This one isn't very obvious but its one that a lot of people mess up on.
Don't allow specularity if you have a shiny material.
Don't make a busy texture.
Look at a reference image.

3 Ways to Make An Object Smooth Out in Blender

2010-11-01T11:14:00.000-07:00

In this quick tutorial I will teach you how to make an object smooth out. I would recommend the last one.
First Way:
1.Subdivide your object a couple times.
2.Press W on the keyboard to bring up the Specials Menu and click Smooth.

3.Repeat step 2 until it is smooth enough.
4.(optional)Scale your object up by pressing S.

Second Way:

1.In the Edit buttons press Add Multires.

2.Click Add Level until you are happy with the results.

Third Way:

1.In the Modifiers Panel press Add Modifier and then click Subsurf

2.Bump up the levels until you are happy.

A Photorealistic Door

2010-11-01T09:55:00.000-07:00

I am selling A Photorealistic Door on TurboSquid. I made this file a couple weeks before I joined TurboSquid. I modeled the door by using a mirror for the X and Y axis.

To make the doorknob I modeled it using the X, Y and Z axis. Then I applied the mirror modifiers for the door and made a hole on the left side where you see the doorknob.

Last I textured everything using Ray settings to make the transparency and shiny doorknob.

Here are a few other renders:

Please share your thoughts.

An Office Thumbtack

2010-10-30T15:49:00.000-07:00

Yet another Turbosquid file I made. This one was pretty simple - all I did was make a thumbtack mesh. Then I made the handle clear with the Ray Transparent setting. And made the part on the end shiny with the Ray Mirror setting.

The reason you see the white and blue stuff in the handle is because I rendered the World with a picture texture.

It's pretty simple and very nice looking in the end.

Let me know what you think.

A Crazy Bookshelf

2010-10-30T09:33:00.000-07:00

My latest Turbosquid model is an odd bookshelf. You probably won't see one of these very soon... The only hard part of this model is the texture. It looks pretty good, but it took me about ten minutes to make it. The problem I had with the texture was it was way too dark. The trick to fix it was lightening it so that it was just barely a different color than the main material.

I am selling it on Turbosquid for $10.

Check it out and let me know what you think!