François Tarlier's Blog > CG Artist, Matchmover, VFX, Open Source topics, Computer Vision, and geek stuff !

Nice post about 25 Useful Blender tricks that aren’t so obvious | Blender Guru.

Summary :

1. Automatically add a number to the end of your .blend filename
2. Preview textures
3. Changing the camera
4. Copy any attribute of another object
5. Switch to the opposite side of the viewport
6. Loop select
7. Change brush size and strength on the fly
8. Camera Flytrough
9. Quickly compare changes by storing a render in the buffer
10. Render a small portion of your scene
11. Reset 3D cursor
12. Change the default blender scene
13. Merge vertices
14. “Beauty Fill” a hole in your mesh
15. Select an object behind another
16. Quick switch screen modes
17. Select all connecting vertices
18. Rotate object as trackball
19. Reveal alpha mask
20. Select vertices with Lasso Tool
21. Resize objects base on their texture dimensions
22. Scroll through frames
23. Select more than one editing mode (vertex/edge/face)
24. Subsurf objects on the fly
25. Move sliders in 0.1 increments

Those days I’m working on Reels, at least one for the moment, a matchmove one. So far I’m putting together some pieces I did at my Fxphd’s classes, and also some of my shoot.

This one I did with my Nikon D90 which is none for a rolling shutter issue (jelly video look) when shooting video.

so those were the challenge for this plate :

• shoot from the back of a car on small road
• hand held
• 24fps
• 1280×720
• 33mm

To be honest, the hardest part were dealing with the Rolling Shutter, this one is a real b**** ! it doesn’t show to much on the video, but when you look closer the image keep getting distort all the time which give a high error to the tracking data. Plus on top of that you have fast movements which give the “debug tracker” part a real nightmare. It’s not perfect, but I do think it’s looking very well.

you can watch the result in HD on the vimeo website

[MatchMove] : small road with Nikon D90 from François Tarlier on Vimeo.

Part of the shot I did track for my reel.
The particularity of this one, is the hand held kind of shot with the “Rolling shutter” issue of the D90.
It looks easy with all the features but it was a really informative one to track. I learned a lot with this shot, like do not try to get it perfect! at some point, I got a lower error (right now it’s 0.8hpix) about 0.4, but it wasn’t looking as good as this one. I guess it good be much better at some point but so far I think it works pretty well right now.
It has been track with Syntheyes, Blender for the 3d grid, and After FX for the compo/roto

This is the closest release to the 2.50. what I was waiting the most was teh Texture Node Editing for my part, but I must say that the Video Texture in BGE is really fun to play with . Have fun

• Video Textures in Game Engine
• Logic API cleanup for Game Engine
• Texture node editing
• Etch-a-ton, armature sketching preview
  
• Dome rendering for Game Engine
• Projection texture painting
• Jpeg2000 support in sequencer
• New GE actuators

http://www.blender.org/development/current-projects/changes-since-248/

this is one of my entries for Blender dev ideas @BlenderStorm. I had some hard time dealing with this, because the “Double Sided” button do not affect the renderer or even the 3d view in Blender. I lost so much time because this button is not working, so now I think I really wish it to do something now

Please if you feel the same way, add your vote !

Blenderstorm – Promote “”Double Sided” button affect Render engine”.

Celtx is the world’s first all-in-one media pre-production software. It has everything you need to take your story from concept to production. Celtx replaces ‘paper, pen & binder’ pre-production with a digital approach that’s more complete, simpler to work with, and easier to share.

I can’t remember if I did talk about Celtx before. It’s one of the open source software I’m using and highly recommending !

I’m not a writer at all, but I found celtx really nice to organize a projet or at least write it done, and keep all the pre-prod research together (sketch, reference, music, notes, … ) it could even be usefull for the elaboration of a demoreel. It’s free, cross-platform and it could even make it easier to work at manys on the same project with the “collaboration” part.

FilmmakerIQ did a new post about all the Celtx tutorials you can find on the web : 55 Celtx Tutorials | FilmmakerIQ.com.

Download Celtx here : http://celtx.com/download.html

Interview with Nathan Letwory (Blender) by Geert Lovink from network cultures on Vimeo.

Name: Nathan Letwory
Network: Blender
Interview by: Geert Lovink
Date: 3 – 7 March, 2009
Location: Winter Camp 09, Amsterdam
URL: http://networkcultures.org/wintercamp

Nathan Letwory is software developer at the Blender Foundation, the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems. In this interview Nathan tells about the governance structure of this worldwide, collaborative software effort. How are decision made? What’s the role of meeting in real life? The Dutch-Finnish Nathan Letwory is also the founder and maintainer of Planet Blender.

Read the blogpost of the final presentation of Blender here:

http://networkcultures.org/wintercamp/2009/03/08/blender-the-final-presentation/

Really interesting interview of Ton Roosendaal, who elaborates on the history of the organization, the product and the community of Blender.

Interview with Ton Roosendaal (Blender) by Sabine Niederer from network cultures on Vimeo.

Name: Ton Roosendaal

Network: Blender

Interview by: Sabine Niederer

Location: Winter Camp 09, Amsterdam

Date: 3 – 7 March, 2009

URL: networkcultures.org/wintercamp

Blender is an open source software package for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, and gaming. Initially developed by Ton Roosendaal’s company NaN in the Netherlands, its popularity and capabilities have grown over the years. The large and active user base contains dedicated hackers who continuously work on improving and further developing Blender software. Blender thrived during the Dotcom bubble, and had to reinvent its organizational model after the dotcom crash. To survive, Blender developed an innovative business model whereby they raised 150.000 euros within 7 weeks, in small donations from the community. In this interview, Ton Roosendaal elaborates on the history of the organization, the product and the community of Blender.

Read the blogpost of the final presentation of Blender here:

http://networkcultures.org/wintercamp/2009/03/08/blender-the-final-presentation/

Rainbow @Mauriac (2), originally uploaded by François Tarlier.

rainbow after a storm @Mauriac.
The light was really strange, it was really looking like on the picture. so weird, so pretty. The sky was grey, just a small amout of light colored the scene and this green just popup like that !

555 Blender Tutorials | FilmmakerIQ.com.

Fake Running Crowd from François Tarlier on Vimeo.

This class (which was teach by Gareth Edwards)was really amazing, I highly recommend it !! I didn’t learn so much about AfterFX but mostly about how to get the job done in a small amount of time, and this goes through “organization” !! Keeping your workflow as clean as possible, taking time to renaming everything (cuz god it could get really messy in AE),…

My result is far from being perfect, I can see so many things I could change (the way they are running, the dust, the lighting, the shadows, … ). but so far, I think it’s quite good and I have so much other things to do that I cannot work any more on this piece! I’ll probably make a small “making of” video later on, just to show all the passes (shadows, AO, Dust, lighting,..) were done in After Effects, only the 3D tracking was done with Syntheyes, but so far it was a super easy one !

What I learned with this project :

• Many AE tricks : can’t tell all of them, but I definitely think I’m more efficient now with AE. I’ve done many mistake and encounter many problems that did teach me a lot
• Organization : I won’t say it enough, it might sounds silly but when you look at all the job that Gareth has done on “Heroes and Villains: Attila the Hun” (VFX breakdown here) in such a small amount of time, you have to say he had a pretty good workflow. So far that’s the reason I took this class and I don’t regret it
• Faking : That’s mostly what I like in compositing, is that you can fake so many thing which usually with a good amout of blur you won’t see the trick . But even with that, we usually go for the hard way (3d, particle system, IA, ..). As I said, the result is far to be perfect, but I guess you have to keep in mind that the quality of your work could depends of the target you have and of course the budget (cf the production triangle). In this case the target is TV Shows, so I guess it should be “Fast” and probably “Cheap”, which leave “Good” a bit behind. Of course it should be as good as possible and that’s why I think knowing how far you can go with faking is a really good thing, and so far that’s also something I did understand more in this class.