So, first the disclaimers: if I'd modeled these with the intention of sharing them, I'd probably have done things a little differently, and I think literally all of these are based on images from textures.com (I've gotten really into taking my own textures int he past year, since once you use a textures.com texture, you start seeing the same image everywhere, haha). These are the models where I first...
2020-03-30 22:21:08 +0000 UTC View Post
Just wanted to throw this info out there! Been seeing a few people struggling because they're effectively trying to get a 3d track out of 2d movement- it's a super easy fix, though!
ALSO- I suppose I ended this tutorial a bit prematurely, because while this all works in the viewport, if you actually want to export it out of blender, you'll run into some small problems- mostly just that it automatically applies an undistort node to the footage, which makes it not match the branche...
I think I already have these floating around somewhere (the robot at least), but these are even a bit more optimized.
Huge thanks to Nate Taylor for doing most of the crab modeling!!
Actually, Nate and I first worked together on a film ages ago- my first feature I shot when I was like 18 (and then spent like 6 years doing post on), and the whole final scene was a crab-vs-giant-mech battle, so it was kind of fun to revisit, hahaha
(right click, "save link as")
2020-03-27 22:30:03 +0000 UTC
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Somebody asked how to do this over in the YouTube comments, so here we go! Quick little intro to object tracking.
Being able to combine an object track with a camera track is seriously so cool. Although, object tracks can be particularly hard, especially if they're objects being held by humans (human movement can be so crazy quick/random), but if you understand the restrictions, you can do a bunch of cool stuff without too much effort!
Man I'm so glad I'm finally using the ble...
AHHH! Welcome, all you new folks!!! Very glad to have you here :D
While Kaitlin (the love of my life and gal in most of the stuff I've been posting lately) and I were out on the coast a few weeks back, we did one of her photoshoots: her as a flight attendant on a beach (I seriously don't know how she made the costume- all she had was, like, a scarf and a weird felt hat). We didn't 100% get the lighting we were looking for (we were both thinking super oppressive clouds/overcast), ...
Truth be told, I'm weirdly nervous about this one. Like, motion tracking is so dependent on the footage that it's hard to make a one-size-fits-all about it. I did a ton of tests though, so I'm pretty sure it's as good as I can make it.
Right now I'm trying to go through and do my series showing how I did the Dynamo Dream teaser. This one's the nitty gritty, but now that it's out of the way, hopefully the rest'll be a bit more fun :D.
Oh also, released 2020-03-24 08:10:36 +0000 UTC
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Beware all ye' who enter. This is just a messy folder of pictures I took on my phone over the past couple months, but I use them all the time, and sometimes it's nice to have additional resources that aren't textures.com.
Feel free to browse through the folder and do whatever you want with the pictures.
Some of them are big, and should probably be scaled down, some are sc...
Alright! Here are the vending machines I made in the previous post, plus a couple extra. I have a few more floating around I might add to this file over time, but most of them are pretty clunky, so... we'll see.
Huge thanks to Nate Taylor for taking these textures for me while on va...
35 minutes?? Wow how the time flies. As always, apologies if I'm a bit babbly!
I'll be uploading these (and a few other vending assets) in a bit here! Gotta go get a few minutes of non-computer time first, though!
ALSO- watch my apeshit shenanigans at 35 seconds in! I just randomly turn off screencasting the letters? I turn them back on soon after. But that's ridiculous.
2020-03-21 22:22:48 +0000 UTC
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Check out this shot animated by Dan Fox!! I'd done an initial pass, and it just looked super stiff and robotic- I'm really really happy with this. Thanks, Dan!! So much respect for good character animators.
I probably could have provided him with a better model, though; this is a quick photoscan, passed through Rigify, which gave surprisingly decent results! Only good for extreme wide shots, but that's still kinda cool! It was one of my first tests with photoscans, with rigify, and wi...
Video from.... 18 years ago? Music from 7 years ago, "edited" the other day- a collaboration across time!
Dunno if I'll ever release it (I like the song, but it could use some finishing/EQ), but it's some pretty dense backyard filmmaking nostalgia for me, so maybe some of you'll get a kick out of it too :P.
This is an explanation of the cans asset I just released at the "clearance 7" level, but it also has a breakdown of shenanigans you can do with the "Object Info" random input node, which as been a ridiculously fun thing to play with over the past few months.
If you actually know blender nodes, I suspect my workflow is pretty cringe inducing, but if not... it's hopefully useful??
This was fun :) I'll probably go in and create a new version of this at some point (I really want to add, like, a variety of 20 different soda names or something that could appear on the cans, too), but here's a auto-generating soda can! Every time you duplicate it you get a different one, good for populating vending machines, or being background trash.
There's a "Crumple" slider that ages the can a bit- works really well for background litter (as you can see in the above image, though...
300 OF YOU GUYS! We should make a movie about a bunch of barechested men with shields and testosterone- it'd be a hit.
Thank you all for being here! This has made the last couple weeks very exciting :D.
Definitely keep letting me know what you're curious about, or want me to post! I would have thought the above video was a bit too long/uncurated to post, normally, but a few of you have specifically said you enjoy seeing the troubleshooting process- so that makes it rea...
2020-03-15 22:18:37 +0000 UTC View Post
I wish I had a sexier title for this post, because from my personal point of view, this is crazy exciting stuff- like, this is the 25 minutes of info I most wish someone had told me a long time ago (although, like a lot of techniques, it didn't really become particularly viable (or at least enjoyable) until you had a fun real-time environment to play in (thanks, eevee!)).
But yeah, copying motion from AE to blender, and (the exciting bit) normalizing/placing the footage in 3d space and...
I apologize that it's not more polished (and that the final result looks like a horrid marshmallow train), but I wanted to show the techniques I used to model the train asset I just uploaded, in case folks were interested in the process. The entire train was made using the same few techniques over and over- this iterative process of modeling/texturing/modeling off of that.
I'm really pleased with how this model turned out, and it was surprisingly straightforward! I didn't do a screen capture or anything, but if anyone's curious I could do a quick breakdown video.
The one thing that bugs me; I really should have given it a door :P
But the rest of it I'm pretty pleased with. It's a bit of a combination of a bullet train and, like, a bus or something. And even if you're not into the train, the wheels could be useful! Not rigged, but a lot o...
2020-03-13 20:52:51 +0000 UTC View PostHELLO TO ALL YOU NEW FOLKS FROM TWITTER! (it was twitter, right?) Thank you so much! I'm very glad you guys are here!
Sorry to those of you who reached out over the past couple days; Kaitlin and I spent the last couple exploring the Olympic Peninsula a bit (single-night trips are excellent for a go! go! go! freelance life because you can send work emails on both days, but still feel as if you finally got a weekend)- we found a bunch of bonkers gorgeous locations! A lot of upcoming...
2020-03-12 07:40:30 +0000 UTC View Post
And because I know the TV noise isn't all that useful to a lot of you- here are some newspaper boxes! They're pretty darn low poly, but still hold up pretty good :D
Download Here!
So! We ended up not filming last night (though hopefully tonight!)
BUT! Filmed a TV turning on and off at 120fps- turned out kinda fun! Also got some random subtle noise in varying levels of focus.
You can download these if you have any use for them- I like having random analogue assets around sometimes.
I set one up as a transparent texture in the viewport and had some fun getting that analogue no...
So this evening the plan is to film the final shots of episode 1 of Dynamo Dream- we'll see how it goes. We've already filmed this scene, actually, but it just didn't work particularly well, so I'm hoping I can nail it a bit better this time.
Below you can see a few stills from the last time we shot it- it was good, but dynamics wise it was a little weird.
I think I'm going to try to storyboard the entire thing real quick to wrap my head around it a bit better.
And if you wanted the door for anything, here it is!
2020-03-08 04:35:42 +0000 UTC View Post
Totally unedited, so... if you value your time, maybe just scrub around?
That said, if you happen to be a person who was curious about my modeling workflow, this is pretty demonstrative of it. But yeah! Just some fun and modeled a door. I was very sleepy, so I have no idea how well my stream of consciousness is (I know I kept thinking, "well that's not the right word"). We'll see! Let me know if this stuff is useful.
2020-03-08 04:25:11 +0000 UTC View Post
For anyone curious! There's a lot more I'd love to talk about with this shot (I kind of used it as an experiment zone), but for anyone curious about what I started with, but shows it pretty well.
One of the things I'm most excited about is that we weren't totally constrained to the original camera's movement- obviously that's true during the first 30 seconds; they're just greenscreened cards in the environment, but even after that, the blender camera was able to move independently...
2020-03-07 00:53:28 +0000 UTC View Post
Flying tow truck!
Mostly just a lot of kitbashing, but there could be couple fun kits to bash in it!
I built it to match a real truck I have in my driveway. We actually filmed an entire little episode of a night in the life of a flying tow-truck driver, but it's on the back burner till I finish some more immediate episodes. I've filmed way too many episodes.
Ideally I ...
2020-03-06 22:06:06 +0000 UTC View Post
So this is crazy cool- Rokoko gave me a motion capture suit a few months ago (with the caveat that I make fun stuff with it), and they just released an update that lets me stream the motion straight into blender, which... I don't know how useful it's going to be compared to recording the motion in the Rokoko Studio software natively, but it sure is fun being able to directly control the models (and it's great for brainstorming).
While it's not particularly expensive for what it is, $2...
So this was just me being delighted by the "random" input- but here's a shipping container that you can just keep duplicating, and you'll never get the same one twice (I mean- technically. It's just toggling between a few different logo options (with different wear patterns) and shifts in hue and such.)
CC0, use it for whatever you want!
Works in Blender 2.82 and above (because it ...
2020-03-05 22:58:57 +0000 UTC View Post
Alright! If you've already seen the other post with the breakdown, here's the actual assets if you want to use them for anything!
In the video I had the rigged photoscan of Kaitlin in there- I want to upload that soon, but it made the .blend file pretty unnecessarily large, so I nixed it in this...
2020-03-03 22:45:42 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey! So- fairly basic stuff, but for anyone who's curious, here's a way to make a video wall in blender!
I love having the different panels- it's fun to make them different sizes, too, or scatter them all
ALSO! Let me know if you guys have preferences for how I do these things. I can turn on keystroke visualizations, and get a bit more specific (or less specific). I'm making em for you ...
HELLO ALL YOU LOVELY FOLKS!!
First things first: basically since the day I started the Patreon, I've had my friend Nate over, and we've been working on stuff basically all day every day, meaning I'm really behind on messaging a bunch of you back (and figuring out why the Discord doesn't seem to be working!) I'm back at a computer for a bit, so hopefully going to be getting caught up on all that sort of stuff.
But!
The shoot went well!
The staff tur...
2020-03-03 00:15:32 +0000 UTC View Post