New blog series: basic blender character animation

I have decided to finally improve my character animation skills. The main low-poly and fast rendering characters will be up to date "pendel" and "botty".


Download the updated version of botty at blendswap: http://www.blendswap.com/3D-models/characters/botty-rig/

Inspiration for you III

Today's inspiration for you is Blender's iTaSC IK Solver. I haven't found any tutorial on Blender's main tutorial sites, but there are some interesting demo videos out there:

Official Blender description:

Algorithm description: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Source/GameEngine/RobotIKSolver/Algorithm
Usage:http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Source/GameEngine/RobotIKSolver



iTaSC tracking 2 targets on the same bone from ben2610 on Vimeo.


Blender iTaSC IK solver realtime action in the GameEngine from ben2610 on Vimeo.

Blender: Justin robot controlled by iTaSC - 3 targets from ben2610 on Vimeo.

New blender add-ons: Ivygen and Sapling

With blender 2.59 there are two new interesting add-ons included related to nature.

The first one is the Ivygen add-on to create Ivy:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.5/Py/Scripts/Curve/Ivy_Gen

Blendernerd tutorial: http://blendernerd.com/ivy-generator/

The second one is the sapling add-on to create trees in blender:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.5/Py/Scripts/Curve/Sapling_Tree
Blendernerd tutorial: http://blendernerd.com/making-trees-in-2-59/

Advanced industrial robot rigging 3

Today I finally got my complete 6-axis industrial robot rig (without cables) working like I wanted: one empty, which follows a path, to control mostly all robot axis. I got some wired flippings on the tool bone, so I decided to keep it in FK. Further I noticed that sometimes the robot pose looks a bit strange, but this can be fixed by either placing the root bone newly or by rotating and keying manually the IK bones esp. the arm1 bone. The last method to rotate and key manually the IK bones comes in handy to change the angle of the tool tip.

Rig setup can be downloaded here: http://www.blendswap.com/3D-models/animation/advanced-industrial-robot-rig-v1/

Example of manully rotating and keying the IK bones (here arm1 bone by ca. -50°) to change the tool angle:

before, no manual rotation of arm1 bone



















after, with manual rotation of arm1 bone 

Inspiration for you II

Today's inspiration post are the Blender (!) works from Jiro Sugiyama. I am not sure if he's the only blenderhead doing glossy sci-fi with white panels.

Jiro Sugiyama's profile and art gallery at CGsociety:
http://aquasky.cgsociety.org/gallery/

(image linked from Jiro Sugiyama's cgsociety gallery)

Creating my first holo projector 1

Today I started to create my first holo handheld projector. The design and the modeling of the projector has been finished, texturing and compositing still needs improvements. I actually preordered Blendtuts' holoprojector tutorial but it hasn't been released yet.