Still image: Glossy Sci-fi hallway 4

Today was ivy day :-).
Tutorial is from BlenderGuru's Nature academy, the "Ivy Generator can be downloaded here: http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/

For the ivy generation I modeled a simple, low-poly version of the clone tube of same size as the high-poly version.

Inspiration for you I

Well, this is actually my first non-Blender post, but I think it suits perfectly within my glossy sci-fi design language. Yesterday I bought my usual German car magazin and found great car concept designs I would like to share with you, the new BMW i3 and i8 car concepts.





Official BMW homepage and youtube channel with enough image reference to model one: http://www.bmw-i.com/ (multilanguage), http://www.youtube.com/user/BMWi

In the first video you see a suspension brige, Blenderguru does feature a great tutorial to model one: http://www.blenderguru.com/create-a-suspension-bridge/.

Creating my first grass meadow

Today I created my first grass meadow. Tutorial is from Blendergur's "Nature Academy". Actually I did not do the compositing.

Still image: Glossy Sci-fi hallway 3

Today I finished my first tutorials from Blenderguru's "Nature Academy", the tree and the grass tutorial. Well, actually I have my own way of shading my first tree...

BlenderCookie Tutorial "Creating a Sci-Fi Panel"

One of my favorite Blender tutorial websites just published a great tutorial for sci-fi panels. Actually I did know most of the techniques, but still learned some new ones:

Part 1:
http://www.blendercookie.com/2011/07/22/creating-a-sci-fi-panel-part-1/

Part 2:
http://www.blendercookie.com/2011/07/27/creating-a-sci-fi-panel-part-2/

Still image: Glossy Sci-fi hallway 2

Actually I created this image for the Splashscreen 2.59 contest, but mostly all details were lost in the downsizing process, so I decided to not submit it.

BTW, the backdrop incl. materials, lightning and camera setup can be downloaded on Blendswap now: http://www.blendswap.com/3D-models/blender-3d/simple-glossy-sci-fi-hallway-v1-0/
Render times may be high, I do have 3min on a first gen. i3 core.

For all other objects I placed in the backdrop I used the same white and black materials as provided in the blend file.

Still image: Glossy Sci-fi hallway I

The last days I tried several methods to get a nice glossy sci-fi hallway in Blender. Here's one of the best Blender internal renders:

Getting started with Octane Render 2

I have made some progress with basic material nodes. There are other brick octane renders from other octane users, just search google for "lego" and "octane render".

Getting started with Octane Render

Well actually the post title says it all: after evaluating different external renderers I have decided to use Octane Render for still images. It's like exploring a whole new world like adding a graphic tablet to your toolset (both keep my currently busy).

Here's a first try on Octane's materials and sun setup:

Taking a seat in the nature academy

Unbelievable but true - I just took a seat in the Nature Academy from Andrew Price. So over the next weeks you will find here some of my progress.

Actually the vast amount of textures, reference images and mostly the ready to use models made it an easy decision.

Preparing my demo reel 3

Today I finished my first animation (620 frames) for my demo reel. As you already might have guessed it is my assemly line robot clip - but as stylish as you never haven seen one:



As the quality on youtube is a bit reduced here are some renders directly from Blender:

As usual I share here some useful tips from the production:

- before doublicating the model, key poses in the pose library, every doublicate will then have the same pose library
- for robot animation linear interpolation curves work best - or do you need slow in slow out?
- typically industrial robots hold a pose before changing to the next pose, and they do change quickly to new poses as you might see in reference videos from youtube. I used 20 frames for holding a pose and 30 frames for a quick pose change
- you would never guessed it but there is no subdivision surface used in this render. Smooth shading in combination with the right topology does have nearly the same effect as subsurf level 1
- a view port render is fast and you see animation mistakes easily esp. if the frame rate within the viewport is too slow

Model update: welding robot

I just updated my hi-poly welding robot to version 1.1 on Blendswap. In short model has been tweaked for animation and rendering.

Here are the details:

- Rig uses weight painting for better model doublication
- Improved rig with locked track control bones.
- Custom python properties panel to control rig and bone layers
- Included welding guns. Welding guns are on layer 2 and already
parented to specific bone. Key the layer to move them between
layer 1 and 2. Spot welding has 3 parts and uses an additional
control bone which can be enabled/disabled wthin the python panel
- Reduced subdivion surface modifier.
- Heavily reduced model scale
- Removed double materials
- Blender 2.58 compatibility