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Making of - Kaldewei
WEBSITE
Nam Pham nam@blenderart.org Tutorial - A quick little Whale 9
DESIGNER
Gaurav, Sandra, Alex
External Renderers might require more power so Are you mimicking a specific camera shot or
check their websites for system requirements. type?
Camera
What angle are you considering?
with Blender and SIO2 A material library will be added to Blender for 2.5, we
would like to invite the community to participate in this
Tony Mullen announced his upcoming book on iPhone by donating material settings. In order to facilitate this,
game development with Blender and the SIO2 game en- please provide a link to a blend file with a single material
gine. in it.
Tony Mullen wrote: Link - BlenderArtists thread
Hi Everybody,
I'm very pleased to announce that my latest book is avail-
able for pre-order at Amazon! The book is titled "3D for
iPhone Apps with Blender and SIO2: Your Guide to Creat-
ing 3D Games and More with Open-Source Software"
and you can pre-order it here.
As you can see from the title, the book deals with using
Blender and the powerful SIO2 Game Engine to create 3D
games and apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch. I can tell
you first hand that it's a blast! The book does not assume
any specific background knowledge, so in that sense it's
intended for "beginners". There's even an appendix giving
a quick and dirty basic introduction to Blender itself.
Draw mode: This activates the Grease pencil (it Subdivide Smooth).
toggles it on/off)
From the front view,
Sketch in 3D: This allows us to see our sketch delete half the cube.
even when rotating view We will add a mirror
modifier later.
Note: Because everyone will end up with a some-
what different sketch, the following steps are some
what general in nature and you may need to do
some adjusting of the instructions to match your
sketch.
the tail.
Note: It might be
easier to work on
the tail if you select
all the vertices of
the body and hide
them (H)
The textures should have useful names like “water” and down depending on how strong you want the ripples to
“water_n” for the texture explained bellow. be. Note that this is only for the ripple’s specularity.
The actual distortion comes later and is done by using
Now add the texture included called water_n.jpg. This nodes.
is the normal map. It is what provides the ripple ef-
fects. In the texture’s settings activate the “Normal Add a new texture to the water material. Browse for
Map” setting. OR Look online for a tutorial on how to radial_alpha.jpg (included with this tutorial). Give it the
name radial_a, and then delete it again.
This is just to get it registered as a them easily when adding that type ping setup and mirror it some more
proper texture. We will use it in the of node. You can look at the final or rotate it etc. Note that the water
nodes for the water fresnel. blend as a reference too if you get is still mostly very blue. We will
stuck. To link two nodes drag from soon fix this.
And speaking of nodes, I believe it’s one circle to the other. To delete a
time for the node part of the tutori- link between two nodes, click and I won’t tell you how to make a sky
al. This isn’t a section that I can de- drag across the link. To add a new dome or anything, or it will make
scribe in great detail, as there are so node click “Add” and select the this tutorial very long, but basically,
many steps to making it all work node type you think is appropriate. the water is blue because it has
and if one section isn’t done quite The explanations in the image nothing to reflect in the blue areas,
right, the whole thing won’t work should help you find the necessary so you need to make a skybox or sky
properly. node type. dome and give it a sky texture.
There is one in the final blend if you
So, in your water’s material settings Once this is done, press “P” and give want to use that.
click the nodes button. Once this is your water a test run. Hopefully you
done a little red selection box will will see animated ripples in the wa- Now would probably be a good time
appear further down. Instead of ter (don’t panic if you’re not, just to add a seabed. To do this just add
adding a new node, click the arrows continue), but what’s this? The wa- a plane under the water and give it
and select “water_surface”. Now ter appears completely blue! To fix any old sand texture. One is includ-
change the UV mapping window to this, press “TAB” while the water is ed. Now when you play the game,
a node window. This is the tricky selected and press “A” to select all you should be able to see the seabed
part. You will see two “windows” or faces. Change the node window to a underneath at close range, and
nodes so to speak. The one we want UV window again and you will see a when you play from further away
to keep is the one on the right. This plane with four vertices. Press “A” the water appears opaque. This
should always be to the right. The again in the UV window to select all means that the fresnel texture and
other one can be deleted for now the vertices and press “M” to mirror camera depth data is working.
(select it and press delete). This next the mapping on the X axis. Once
part I can’t explain, so I have in- Add four more planes around the
this is done, you may need to rotate water for walls. Once they are posi-
cluded a large picture of just how the mapping too so press “R” and
all the nodes should be set out tioned around the water, and look
type “180”. This will rotate the map- like walls select them all and press
(node image is included in the blend ping 180 degrees.
file download). “J” to join them all together. Then
press “U” when all faces are se-
by SpewBoy
Now when you press “P” you tion (downwards) and a sensor that sensors are done, open up the file
should see the walls being reflected points in the +Z direction called “blur_radial.txt” and copy and
too. This is basically where the out- (upwards). Make both the ranges as paste the contents into Blender’s
side work stops and the underwater high as they will go and enable the text window. Name the new script
work begins. x-ray option. In the property area, as blur_radial. Do the same with the
type “water”. file called “fog_underwater.txt”, ex-
Select the camera and press “Shift” cept call it fog_underwater. In the
+ “S” and select “Curser -> selec- Add two controllers and two actua- first actuator, set it as a custom 2d
tion”. This will snap the curser to tors. The first actuator should be a filter and type blur_radial. For the
the camera. Now press “Space” and property actuator that changes the second do the same with
add a cube. Scale the cube by underwater property to true, and fog_underwater and make the pass,
around 0.1. Parent the cube to the the second should change the prop- pass 1 instead of pass 0 (as 0 is
camera (select cube, then camera erty to false. Link them up accord- taken by blur_radial). Now for the
and press “Ctrl” + “P”. Now create ingly. All this means that when the other two actuators, make them
an empty in the same way, but in- empty detects the water under- remove 2d filter actuators and set
stead of parenting it to the cube or neath it, it sets the underwater the first one to remove pass 0 and
camera, we are going to parent it to property to false. If it detects the the second to remove pass 1.
one of the cube’s vertices. To do water is above it, it will set the un-
this, select the empty, then the derwater prop-
cube, press “TAB” and select a ver- erty to true.
tex and press “Ctrl” + “P”. We need
to parent the empty to a vertex so Now add two
that it follows the camera but does property sensors,
not rotate with the camera. Normal two controllers
parenting affects rotation, but ver- and four actua-
tex parenting doesn’t for some rea- tors. The first two
son. We need to keep the rotation actuators will ac-
even because the empty must al- tivate the under-
ways be facing the same way, as it water effects; the
is measuring where it is in relation second two will
to the water’s surface. deactivate the
effects. So the
by SpewBoy
This plate is the base for all others in the model. I had
made the plate-armor in strips. I used a plate, a “curve,"
the array modifier, the curve modifier and some lattices.
I placed the curve on the coarse model at the place
where the strip has to be.
2 Many textures make mistakes news. And thank you for all your submissions and your
good advice
the base of the stalk. This will ensure that the base
Introduction of the “hair” particles we create will be at the base
of the stalk. Don’t worry if your rotation is off. You
Thanks goes out to the guys at can still edit the base object after using it in the par-
cgcookie.com for their video tutorial ticle system.
on “Painting” with Instanced Particles,
from which this tutorial drew its inspi- So let’s get to the fun part, painting the particles.
ration. First we need to apply a particle system to our sea
floor. Use a hair type system with the amount set to
Object instancing using particles can 0 as well as a Normal and Random of 1.0. Also set
Cricket and Friends See a Comet! be a powerful feature in Blender that the visualization mode to object and put the name
is often overlooked. While not as of your particle in the OB field. I just left the default
strong as something like Maya’s paint name of cube for mine.
effects, you can still quickly accom-
plish things that would take many
Sea Anemone hours of tedious hand placement.
For this scene we
are creating a sea
anemone growing
on the ocean floor.
Lets start by creat-
ing a basic plane
By Arland B. Woodham III
and subdividing or Now switch from object mode to particle mode and
use multi-res. Then press the “N” key - this will bring up the tool box for
use Blender’s sculpt- particle editing. Select the Add button and set
mode to build up a Strength to 1, then you can paint your particles onto
very simple sea floor. the surface of your object. To delete particles simply
switch to the Cut button.
Now we need a stalk of the anemone to duplicate.
This is a simple box
that has been ex-
truded and twisted
a few times with
sub-surf thrown on
top. The important
item to ensure here
is that the origin
point is located at
Just have fun here and is now set to group mode and the GR field has the name
create what you want of the first object in the set “fish”.
your image to look like.
The final result here The lighting con-
includes a second sists of a hemi
plane in the back- light situated
ground to remove the behind the cam-
open feeling of the era which gives
camera shot. the underwater
camera light ef-
fect. Basic ambi-
ent occlusion
If you want more vari- and mist to en-
ety of shapes, then you hance the shad-
can apply what we are ows with the AO
going to do now with set to a blue
the fish. Here we have clouds, give the
a relatively simple underwater feel.
model of a fish which Then two spot
has been given the lamps with a
name of fish. caustic texture
map to create the feeling of light coming through the
by Arland B. Woodham III
Finally the image is rendered out using nodes to en- Hopefully this gives a bit of an insight into my process
hance the edges, create a slight depth of field effect, and for creating this scene and motivates you to try out the
some tint adjustment. particle instancing in Blender. I think it is an overlooked
feature that allows you to create scenes that would take
hours in much less time
Website: http://www.cartoon-combat.com
The image was then rendered twice, once with the fish
and once without. This was done so that the fish could
be easily masked out in photoshop, because some will
end up overlapping or looking too similar. The only
by Arland B. Woodham III
Introduction
Ever thought of how nice it would be
to have a render farm for processing
your animations? Or maybe you tried
to set up your own small render farm?
We did. But the farm was too small
and too slow, upgrading it was too ex-
pensive and managing it was too time
consuming, so we thought about a
better solution and finally came up
with a virtual render farm as a com-
munity project.
Sea Anemone
After some months of development we finally Users sharing their CPU will receive priority points.
launched vSwarm - a community-based distributed The priority influences the number of CPUs available
rendering project. It's free and all of you are invited to a member when submitting a job to the vSwarm
to participate. community.
Back to the beginning of the story: Why did we start Right now, the project is still in an early stage, but
vSwarm? To solve a problem many of you might growing and developing fast. We just included Lux-
have. The need to handle capacity peaks while ren- Render into the client. And the next steps will be to
dering Blender animations. As we are two guys build a Linux and a Mac version of the client.
working a lot with Blender doing animations, it hap-
pens regularly that we need a lot of computing One other goal for us in the near future is to gener-
power all at once. But the rest of the time our CPUs ate some cash from the project ,as we are almost
by Thomas Schlüter
are just twiddling thumbs (you know that, don't working full-time on the development of the project.
you). To secure future development we have to find a way
to cover the expenses of the project otherwise we
Looking at the problem in detail, we realized that the cannot dedicate our resources almost full-time to it.
root cause for it was our inability to handle capacity
fluctuations. The first proposal for financing the project we would
like to discuss with the community, is that compa-
vSwarm solves this problem as follows: As a member nies, freelancers and everybody else who wants, can
of the vSwarm community you can give spare capac- buy priority credits to get their jobs done faster. Af-
ity to the community (i. e. share our CPU power ter paying for infrastructure and development, the
while it is idle) and ramp up our CPU capacity (i.e. rest of the money will be given to users running the
use other client's CPUs) when you need to by sub- client and to selected Open Source projects. But we
mitting your jobs to the community. won't stop the free part of the project.
If you have any other ideas or comments about the fi- The client in detail
nancing of the project feel free to contact us. As this is a
community project we invite you to influence the The client is based on a Java GUI which controls the ren-
project by commenting on all aspects of the develop- dering. The rendering is done in a Linux environment
ment of vSwarm. running in VMware Player. Within this virtual machine
we are running version 2.49a of Blender at the moment.
The client also handles the up- and download of files to
and from our servers.
Pack all your textures and other stuff into the file. 6 File Format: Select the output format you would like
to get your results in. If the format has any options
Select "compress" from the file menu. these are read from the blend file.
Save the file to your HDD. Wait for your job to finish.
Upload your file to the vSwarm Server by using one of If any frames have errors you can inspect the
by Thomas Schlüter
these methods: Blender output in the work units view and restart
them.
FTP: This is the best choice. It allows you to resume
interrupted uploads and does not have a file size Download your result data.
limit. You can find your login data for FTP at the
bottom of the Manage files page. If you have rendered more than a few frames you
must use FTP to download your files. Memorize the
For small files it is possible to use the web upload. job id from the Web Control Center and login to the
The size limit is 10MB per file and if anything goes FTP server. Change to the directory "results" and
wrong you have to start this again. then download all files in the directory of your job.
After you have uploaded your file create the job in Combine all frames to a movie with the application
the vSwarm by submitting the following fields: of your choice. I use Virtual Dub for this step.
Links:
by Thomas Schlüter
www.vswarm.com the
vSwarm Website.
Control.vswarm.com
the Web Control Cent-
er.
Support.vswarm.com/
wiki the on-line docu-
mentation
At some 1) Blender Open Material Repository fuzzy light beams and some pretty
point we light patterns. It can't be that hard.
Now where's the "Under have all 2) Blender 3d: Noob to Pro
Now I know that fuzzy soft lights
wanted
Water Lighting" button? just such So now we have realistic wa- can be created with spotlights and
halo options. But here I always run
a button, ter, right? into problems. I don't know about
but just you, but whenever I attempt to use
like the Nope, not yet. halos, I end up with a huge fuzzy
fabled "Make my Render Beautiful" cone of light that completely blows
button, it's just not possible. There Now we have to tackle the whole out my image. Not a good underwa-
are way too many variables. But just lighting issue. Water has this annoy- ter look, and we haven't even ad-
because there isn't a pre-built ing habit of reflecting, bouncing and dressed the caustic part of the
button/option, doesn't mean you diffusing light, producing of course, problem. This just might be harder
can't create some beautiful under- caustics and volumetric light. In a than I thought.
nutshell, volumetric light is pro-
water scenes. Like most things in duced by the light rays bouncing off
life, it just takes a little work. I may not have a lot of luck with ha-
all the microscopic debris floating in
los, but I am Queen of Google
First let's discuss water itself. You the water. The patterns of light searches. There is a wealth of
would think it would be as easy as (caustics) are created when that Blender information online, but
just building the scene itself, water bounced, diffused light falls on ob-
oddly enough it took quite a while to
is after all clear. Yeah, you guessed jects in the water, such as rocks, fish
find just what I needed. Eventually I
it, its not that easy at all. The thing or the sea floor, riverbed etc. found my solution in the form of an
about water is that it is usually not excellent, in depth tutorial at
Now of course, we could export our www.dnapixels.com, the tutorial not
clear at all. It often appears to have scene to an external render engine,
a slight color, and depending on the that handles volumetric light and only covered underwater volumetric
water in question, can appear murky caustics. The results would be as you lighting but the underwater caustics
due to sediment, plankton, algae as well.
expect and as a bonus, you would
and other microscopic debris. There have plenty of time to go find some-
may also be bubbles present depend- thing else to do while you waited for Well there you go, step by step in-
by Sandra Gilbert
ing on what else is floating about in it to render. :P structions on how to achieve that
the water. Luckily, most of this can magical underwater lighting. Using
be easily created in the material set- a rather ingenious combination of
tings themselves. And any number of But where is the fun is in special rotating discs and procedur-
interesting bubble effects can be cre- that? als, the tutorial covers how to go
ated with a creative combination of about setting everything up, and as a
particles and soft bodies. bonus even covers the trickier sub-
Instead, we are going to fake it. ject of animating those light beams
There is always a way to fake an ef- and patterns dancing on the sea
Note: A number of great material fect. First we have to decide just
shaders can be found at: floor
what we are trying to fake. So what
are we going for? Well, we need soft,
30
www.blenderart.org Issue 24 | Oct 2009 - "From Out of the deep"
Hays - by Jeepster
GALLERIA
31
www.blenderart.org Issue 24 | Oct 2009 - "From Out of the deep"
Butterflyfish - by Davide Maimone
GALLERIA
32
www.blenderart.org Issue 24 | Oct 2009 - "From Out of the deep"
MonsterFish - by Jeremy Cox
GALLERIA
33
www.blenderart.org Issue 24 | Oct 2009 - "From Out of the deep"
Pirana - by Davide Maimone
GALLERIA
34
www.blenderart.org Issue 24 | Oct 2009 - "From Out of the deep"
Wreck - by JG Loquet
GALLERIA
35
www.blenderart.org Issue 24 | Oct 2009 - "From Out of the deep"
Helicoprion - by Osman Acasio
GALLERIA
36
www.blenderart.org Issue 24 | Oct 2009 - "From Out of the deep"
Ichthyosaur - by Alfie Urencio
GALLERIA
37
www.blenderart.org Issue 24 | Oct 2009 - "From Out of the deep"
Cooss - Lubomir Lopusek
GALLERIA
38
www.blenderart.org Issue 24 | Oct 2009 - "From Out of the deep"
Cracken - Tenchiken
GALLERIA
39
www.blenderart.org Issue 24 | Oct 2009 - "From Out of the deep"
Donkey Kong - by André Rubio
GALLERIA
40
www.blenderart.org Issue 24 | Oct 2009 - "From Out of the deep"
Want to write for BlenderArt Magazine? 41
Here is how!
1. We accept the following:
Tutorials explaining new Blender features, 3dconcepts, techniques or articles based on current
theme of the magazine.
Reports on useful Blender events throughout the world.
Cartoons related to blender world.
Note: All the approved submissions can be placed in the final issue or subsequent issue if
deemed fit. All submissions will be cropped/modified if necessary. For more details see the blend-
erart website.
Issue 25
"Winter Wonderland"
Winter characters and scenes.
Winter sports and activities (**scenes, images, animations, games*).
Winter holidays (scenes, images, animations, games).
Disclaimer
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COPYRIGHT© 2005-2009 ‘BlenderArt Magazine’, ‘blenderart’ and BlenderArt logo are copyright
of Gaurav Nawani. ‘Izzy’ and ‘Izzy logo’ are copyright Sandra Gilbert. All products and com-
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spective owners.