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

I just found those 2 videos on vimeo (hopefully there will be some more soon) talking and helping Autodesk Maya Artist willing to use Blender.
I like the idea behind this kind of videos, and since Blender 2.5 will be more customizable with multi-windows, Hot-keys, … it will make it easier to switch from one software to another.

Those videos, especially the first one is for Blender beginners

Blender tutorial for Maya users

Blender tutorial for Maya users from Shananra on Vimeo.

Blender tutorial for Maya Animators

Blender tutorial for Maya Animators from Shananra on Vimeo.

Introduction

I received a mail the other day from Martins Upitis, who asked me really nicely if he could use my Cubic Lens Distortion Shader code into one of his GLSL shader. He was asking me if he could copy & tweak it a little bit. That was really funny to me since Martins is probably the guy who made me wants to learn shader in the first place after seeing one of his first shader he posted on blenderArtist, and also because he didn’t figure I was the same person asking him thousand of noobs questions on that same forum :p .
Of course I was so proud that I said yes, and he made it look so coooolll !!!

Source

Anyway I encourage you to go check out his post on BlenderArstists.org here : http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=175155&highlight=lens+distortion

His shader create vignetting, chromatic aberration, cubic distortion, depth of field, and a really smart animation texture based on 1bit alpha store in each RGBA channels (which gives a lot of frames – so smart)… it looks really great !

Blender File : http://www.pasteall.org/blend/1425 or mirror on this blog

controls:
buttons 1 and 2 enables post-process effects (vignetting, noise, edge-blur, and a new and awesome lens distortion filter, made by Francois Tarlier, and slightly modified by me).

Up/Down – shrink/grow the snowflake
mouse wheel up/down – chromatic dispersion amount

numpad:
7/4 – lens distortion coefficient
8/5 – cubic distortion amount
9/6 – image scaling amount

I’ve been waiting for this since ever ! Blender 2.5 is managing linear workflow (gamma correction, … ).
Matt Ebb just did a great update where the UI (color picker, …) give you feedback of linear color and present the linear workflow.

Here is the comment of the SVN update (revision 25065) :

Changes to Color Management

After testing and feedback, I’ve decided to slightly modify the way color
management works internally. While the previous method worked well for
rendering, was a smaller transition and had some advantages over this
new method, it was a bit more ambiguous, and was making things difficult
for other areas such as compositing.

This implementation now considers all color data (with only a couple of
exceptions such as brush colors) to be stored in linear RGB color space,
rather than sRGB as previously. This brings it in line with Nuke, which also
operates this way, quite successfully. Color swatches, pickers, color ramp
display are now gamma corrected to display gamma so you can see what
you’re doing, but the numbers themselves are considered linear. This
makes understanding blending modes more clear (a 0.5 value on overlay
will not change the result now) as well as making color swatches act more
predictably in the compositor, however bringing over color values from
applications like photoshop or gimp, that operate in a gamma space,
will give identical results.

This commit will convert over existing files saved by earlier 2.5 versions to
work generally the same, though there may be some slight differences with
things like textures. Now that we’re set on changing other areas of shading,
this won’t be too disruptive overall.

Check out the documentation on the wiki here : http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-250/color-management