I've been wandering around town and keep finding ruined vehicles, so I made a scanning day of it! The burnt out RV in particular required a ton of cleanup, but I love it :D
Also included a few ground patches (one's just the inside of the burnt RV, but it still works really well.
DOWNLOAD:
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Covering some new stuff in this one!
Here's the holographic parallax shader breakdown from a while back
and the Holographic Parallax Shader Asset itself, if you want to use it for anything!
Just a quickie, cause I didn't know when else it'd come up! This is super handy for me; hopefully it's useful to some of you, too.
RELATED:
My first "Working with Steam" post (includes Free Steam Elements)
Full Steam Pack
2022-04-01 23:17:04 +0000 UTC
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[in which Ian googles pictures of alleys and then is upset that it's a bunch of pictures of alleys]
A few folks have asked me about cyberpunk lighting specifically, so I gave it my best shot!
Videos I think I referenced in this one?
Industrial Greeble of Love
The Making a Shot series
WOO! I'm nervous. This Sunday is my first shoot since the pandemic started! It's very exciting. This one's gonna be a big greenscreen shoot, and we're setting up some additional greenscreen cloth and softboxes to really give us some room to film; I really want to try to use everything I've learned over the last few years to make post for this scene go as quickly as possible, while letting us have some fun levels of cg/live action integration (anyone who's been asking for more greenscreen cont...
2022-03-19 10:47:50 +0000 UTC View Post
Not the video I thought I was going to make, but I'd already made the intro so just ran with it!
I'm going to be prepping for a few shoots here the next week or two, so I might be a bit busier than usual :D
First off- on the chance you've never seen the movie (or even if you have)- seriously, I love this friggin' scene from Rescuers Down Under. Just the amount of good decisions, mind boggling artistry, animati...
Another guest video by Nathan Vegdahl!
A continuation of part one, here, on a deep dive into light, cameras, rendering, and how computers handle color. If you've ever wanted to wrap your head around a proper color workflow, Nathan's videos are a fantastic way to start.
Also his visualizations in this one are fantastic.
Windows aren't always the most fun thing to model, but they're important! So let's do it! And some surprisingly decent curtains!
Here's the quilted fabric normal map, if anyone wants it for anything!
And the Seams Collection image, ass...
So- since doing these scans I've learned a ton (I've got a whole lighting/delighting/color-workflow setup going now, which ends up being really important); these are mostly just straight polycam scans, with all the weird iPhone-processing that entails- that said, I find myself reaching for ...
2022-02-28 10:47:45 +0000 UTC View Post
Sort of a tangent from the previous "Making an environment from scavenged elements" tutorial, but it's been so fun finally having a desert environment to play with that I keep running in random directions- also at this point so little of Dynamo is action stuff, but fast-paced action shots can be so much fun to work on it's nice to shake things up (the reason 2022-02-17 04:02:02 +0000 UTC View Post
First part of a series of making a shot from bits and pieces. As I say in the video, I don't go totally in depth about everything I've doing, but for a lot of it, I have in the past.
Here are a few particularly relevant links:
The first part of the first "Making a shot" series a couple years ago (greenscreen centric)
2022-02-11 23:44:40 +0000 UTC
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Everyone's always saying "Ian you better make a tutorial about modeling a bag of beans in Blender or I'll quit the patreon!" fiiiiine- I'll do it.
This was the final detail of the coffee robot I posted a while back- probably over-modeled, but I don't end up regretting that much (since any asset that holds up usually ends up featured in some other shot)
ALSO Jan made a fantastic 1-minute p...
2022-02-09 11:43:42 +0000 UTC View PostAlright!! So first the disclaimer: these aren't exactly "high quality scans"; I grabbed them inside dark airplanes (though I'm fairly happy with my lighting solution), and since modules were always mounted to a wall, I was never able to get a full 360 view (although again, I'm fairly happy with my reconstruction efforts). Add to that the fact that it's surprisingly hard to capture clean scans of angular hard-surface objects, and you have a recipe for fairly blobby scans.
That ...
Specifically some fun fisheye/timelapse stuff, along with some info of what's in-progress filmmaking-wise.
In theory, as time goes on I'm getting faster at working, and therefore hopefully
2022-01-26 04:10:11 +0000 UTC
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And here's the hologram shader asset!
I enjoy all the things that this shader can do, but I also think it could be potentially overkill if all you want is a little glowing thing in the background. If you ever feel like making your own version, you can always just raid this one for parts; append some of the node groups, like flicker or scanlines or whatnot, into another project and use them however.
Download:
2022-01-19 00:04:36 +0000 UTC
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I don't do too many holograms (I did them so much when I was a teenager I always felt I used up my quota :P), but I really enjoyed adding all the unnecessary little AR bits in Tears of Steel here, and thought it might be fun to have a similar treatment for some of the gauges and displays in the spaceship cockpit I've been working on; holograms "wrapped" over old B-29 bomber gauges and stuff?? That sounds cool....
2022-01-18 23:13:52 +0000 UTC View Post
Guest video by Nathan! :D
Color is a confusing thing. As I said in the color tools video, basically everything I know about light and rendering (color/eyesight/bit-depth/transfer functions/path tracers/etc) comes from Nathan sitting down with a sketchbook and explaining it to me.
Which is why I'm really excited to post this video- the first in a series as he goes through how computers represent light/color, and how that affects you as an artist.
And having t...
Hey everyone!! Thanks for being here this past year! Next year looks to be shaping up to be pretty exciting, filmmaking wise- and since you're the ones making most of it possible, I wanted to give you all an update!
First off, I got to scan a couple old bombers! hohoho!!
2022-01-01 00:59:59 +0000 UTC
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Your camera and Blender are buds, now (or your camera and basically any 3d software).
LUDICROUSLY excited to share this! Thanks to you folks here on the patreon Nathan's been able to hyperfocus on building these tools over the past 3 months- trying to make studio-type worldflow tools for the open source community (we'll release it to the "general public" later but you folks are, as always, our beloved guinea pigs :P)
Get the tools here:
2021-12-31 06:49:17 +0000 UTC
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Kind of an aesthetic sequel to Getting Neoclassical from last year! We don't get *too* wild with it (some day I've love to tackle those wild rococo greeblies), but there's lots of extruding, insetting, and beveling, if that's what you're into.
Also features an appearance of the photoscanned statue asset from a while back- here's a 2021-12-13 04:38:50 +0000 UTC
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I've talked a lot about ways to process scans in blender, but I've tended to avoid the actual scanning process, because by-and-large it's fairly self-evident- but folks have asked, and with Polycam's new browser-based functionality opening up the Object Capture system to folks without iPhones, it seems like a good time to talk about everything I can think of regarding capturing good photoscans.
Oh except for: "get nice, clean, high-res pictures". I forgot to say that b...
3 Astronaut Models engaged in every possible Astronaut activity (chilling, steering, and dead).
The chilling one has a half-minute of idling animation, the steering one has a basic rig I'm fairly pleased with (two bones- one to steer, and one to look around), and the dead one isn't rigged (but perhaps...
So- I've touched on a few of these techniques in the past, but this goes more in depth, and a few techniques are significantly more straightforward (and *powerful*!?) My previous method is frankly a tad embarrassing in retrospect (as will be all future previous methods!)
Below's the cheat-sheet for how to set up a "randomized selection from a grid of something". In the Math node...
2021-11-16 08:46:29 +0000 UTC View Post
A quick jump into exploring some techniques with volumetrics; a really great way to add atmosphere to a scene. They render a lot faster these days than they did in 2012 and I suspect it's time to give them another look!
2021-11-07 00:30:13 +0000 UTC View Post
Video of him animated.
Just something to go along with the graffiti! A further experiment with the custom-rest-pose method, and my first to attempt anything besides idling; it's a spray painting guy with about 20 seconds of Rokoko suit mocap data.
There are definite benefits- the whole thing feels a lot more naturalistic ...
Graffiti's a great way to add a layer of humanity on top of something- in this video we talk about how to set up a custom brush and paint your own, and also use pre-made alpha-channeled stuff!
-Cause you remember how Teague Chrystie made the Huberfish font last month? WELL WELL WELL, I mentioned how much I was enjoying the spray-paint font for adding graffiti, and he just sent me a ludicrous...
Hey! I'm not sure how useful this'll be to other folks, but for my specific workflow it's pretty nice, and wanted to share just in case!
It's idling (standing/sitting around bored) motion capture data where the rest poses have been normalized (no T-poses), so you can immediately use automatic weights to slap your photoscan directly onto one of a few idling animations to bring it to life. I'm planning on using it quite a bit for crowd shots.
I'm still loving the Rokoko su...
Hey! I've had an unexpected number of people ask about the Salad Mug music, which I can't deny makes me pretty happy (I threw everything I had at it). It was my first time ever trying to work with a lot of those tools, and figuring out halfway-decent MIDI orchestration and all that.
Good chunk of folks saying the music didn't really fit at all, and recommended Dark Synthwave and such, which- maybe?? The music's a bit over-the-top happy-go-lucky but I was kinda intentionally trying to ...
I'd avoided working with refraction for so long because I thought it was computationally prohibitive, but it's not at all, and it's crazy useful! This is a deeper dive than usual into path tracers and shading nodes and all that. Thanks as usual to Nathan Vegdahl, who's willingness to share his path tracing wisdom has given me a much better understanding of how computers go about rendering light.
Tier 3 Steam Elements:
2021-10-05 00:21:09 +0000 UTC
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Old Concrete Stuff
Weird Fort Structures
WHEW! These were a lot of work. As I've mentioned before, I spent the last month (2?) in a photoscanning frenzy at some local forts and waterfronts, and the intervening time trying to figure out how to optimize the results...
2021-09-30 11:00:43 +0000 UTC View Post