IanHubert

Asset: Merchants!

Just a quick upload of the merchants from that shot I was posting the other day (Download Below)

They're maybe a bit specific to be particularly useful, but I know I'll be raiding it a bunch in the future for small little parts to put on shelves and such, even if not the merchants themselves.  They're a kind of interesting aesthetic. On one hand, I'm not the biggest fan of this sort of photoscan, since they're just kinda messy, but at the same time, when...

Robot Arm pt 1 - Basic Rigging

Alright! I'm going to be getting a little granular with these videos for a bit, because hopefully there's a lot of info in there that's useful in contexts outside of creating CG robot arm (let me know- would you rather have a lot of shorter videos, or fewer longer videos?)

Later bits will probably be, like, "Advanced Rigging (featuring special guest Nathan Vegdah!l)", "Modeling Die Cast/machined Parts" and "Modeling Stamped Steel" and maybe... animation? Oh and animating vegetables. B...

Talkin' TERD (Waterworks Breakdown/Ramblings)

Mostly I just made this video because I'm really jazzed about a new shot (just woke up and got to see it rendered!) and felt like talking about some stuff. Definitely things I could tweak, but I love how the photoscans integrate with the environment (if you feel like seeing it minus YouTube compression, you can here.)

Huge thanks again to Nate for spending a day ma...

Asset: Humanoid Robot Arm and Robot Pieces

Robot arm!! [download below] I learned so much doing this, both about rigging and anatomy. I loved the learning curve of getting started in rigging; it's really easy to get your feet wet, and just keep getting in deeper without even noticing. I still have a ton to learn but it feel good to know I could probably figure out most basic mechanic stuff that I might want to do.

2020-10-21 08:02:59 +0000 UTC View Post

Quickly Animating Complex Neon Signs

MOOOORE neon, seriously Ian? YES! So I have a bazillion other things I should wrap up (robot arms and merchants and HyperBoles), but I wanted to see if this would work and it did, so I made a video because I'm jazzed. 

Here's the flicker controller image, although it'd also be super easy to come up with your own on your end with custom animations, if you wanted. I can imagine, say, a flourescent light that flickers and turns off or- OH! If you animated a DIFFE...

Photoscanned Vendors [Re-working the WaterWorks]

Heeyyyy- want to know a secret technique to never finish a film? Take so long to finish it that eventually you begin looking at the first VFX shots you did a couple years before and start wanting to re-do them.

Cause that's a slippery slope.

It's full-blown BICMIB syndrome [But I Could Make It Better]. When you're trying to worldbuild with CG, there's always that question of when to model new assets, and when to just copy-and-paste an old one. Copying-and-pasting lets...

JELLYFISH! (asset, breakdown)

After years of tweaking, I finally made a jellyfish I'm happy with!* 

The above isn't really a full tutorial, because I haven't found a way to make them consistently good, but the technique is very straightforward (basically just: "wave modifier"), so feel free to check out the video above! 

Here's the blend file, if you want to use it for anything, or go poking around ...

Quickly Add Dust in Blender

It's a 7 minute video, but the basic node setup only takes a few seconds. Very simple, and a surprisingly effective way to add some cohesion/age to a scene! Personally I think it works best when you leave it subtle, but I cranked it pretty high for visibility purposes.

You COULD mix in a different texture into the mix factor, too, like fingerprints or whatnot, or into the color channel of the diffuse texture, with larger 'clumps"- but this'll work for me as-is in most cases.

N...

Making a Robot Theater (lasercutting pt. 2)

This isn't a tutorial because I don't really have any idea what I'm doing, and yet, I'm documenting it anyways.

This is just something I've wanted to do for a few years. I feel a little bad starting this project when I have so many others I need to wrap up (HyperBole, so I can wrap up Dynamo Dream), but alsoooo sometimes you gotta follow your interests. In my head, this is all going to go really quick, but I imagine there are a few parts that might become a bit of a ...

Gizmo Week - Lasercut Models with Blender and Inkscape - pt.1

Part 2 tomorrow! Or the day after!

So- as I mention in the video, I was going REALLY hard in the cg department for a bit there, and while I'm super amped to finish up the HyperBole sequence (and the Dynamo Dream episode!!!), I wanted to take a moment to stretch my legs with some other stuff, so I'm going to take a few days to try and refamiliarize myself with arduinos/electronics/projectors, and various things that might be useful to micro-budget filmmakers, and documenting it for anyo...

Animating a Chase Camera

I've been slow to make this video 1.) because I'm not a particularly great animator and 2.) because anything regarding animation is mostly just going to devolve into a bunch of graph editor tweaking (cause that's how you do it).

Final animation at 25:30. I'm reasonably happy with it, but what would REALLY make it work is secondary motion- wheels/suspension bouncing, the driver looking around, leaning into the turns (and, honestly, a little more camera shake wouldn't hurt). It...

Asset: Neon Sign elements (every letter)

WHEW! This took significantly longer than I expected. Higher detail neon signs (64 total), every letter, upper/lower case and the numbers. 

I know I made a tutorial about this, but now youuuu don't have to spend a day doing it!

HERE'S AN EXPLANATORY VIDEO2020-09-29 11:01:41 +0000 UTC View Post

oh also- I'm Engaged!

Love-Of-My-Life-Kaitlin and I went on a last-bit-of-summer trip around the Gifford Pinchot forest the past few days, and I snuck in a little Bower-Bird-esque proposal- she said yes! :D 

We're really excited to have the wedding with all of our friends, but given the current state of things, we'll probably be waiting a while until it's safe. Gives us more time to plan! 

2020-09-24 10:22:17 +0000 UTC View Post

Designing a Beefy Iris Door

Whew!! Inadvertently signed myself up for way too many projects the past couple weeks, and while it's been fun, I'm really excited to get back to business as usual- but in the meantime, here's a video about making a big ol' Beefy Mechanical Iris Door™! 

Actually, the last couple weeks taught me a lot of little lessons. I keep taking on small gigs that I think I can blast out in an afternoon, and they keep on taking days, and at this point I don't really have an excuse to not know...

LightBox Game Day Presentation (Continued Virtual Production Schemes)

This post is a continuation of this post here

SO! I did a presentation for Kitbash3d's "Game Day" for LightBox- feel free to watch it here! It's mostly stuff you've seen before if you've watched a lot of these patreon videos- but always fun to try to assemble a scene on a deadline :D. Honestly, the entire p...

HyperBole Update 9_5

Been letting myself enjoy the last few weeks of summer (I feel like Winter's going to be a tough one), but I've still been working hard on the HyperBole scene!

Just finished the scene below. I was imagining compositing one of the HyperBole contestants into some sped-up drone footage, skimming over beaches and deserts, and it got me thinking about the old salt flats and other Prime Racing Landscapes , and how it'd pro...

More Advanced Neon Signs

H'OKAY SO yes, it's fairly easy to make a text outline glow and call it a day. But what if you want to make something that holds up to some sort of scrutiny?? I wanted to make a HyperBole neon sign with a few more polygons, so if you're interested in that, here's a video!

Also, I was fairly proud of my "linear-gradient-to-separate-the-front-bits-from-the-back" solution, but on a dark whim I just decided to check out how Andrew Price did it and he tackled that specific issue the EXACT ...

Getting Into Some Mechanical Rigging

I suppose this one's a little more oriented for beginners (since I'm fairly beginner in this area), and I figure anybody who knows constraints is probably already familiar with most all of this, but it's been really fun playing around with this stuff the past few weeks, and wanted to share the experiments! 

Making Mocap Data Flexible

Proooobably should have held off on this video, and I suspect it's of limited use to anyone with even the most basic rigging knowledge, BUT, I've been having so much friggin' fun with this technique that I wanted to post a quick video about it! Oh and here's where I got with the shot as the video was uploading to youtube. Is it just a shot to show off these gauge...

Tutorial: Modeling Little Tech Greebles from Images

A quick rundown of a bunch of the techniques I've been using lately for all these greebly (nonsense detail) bits! There's almost always a more efficient way to do what I'm doing at any given moment, but that's part of the fun of it :)

Also, spent some time today and made this little control panel (with HEFTY ol' tubes coming off the back, haha)! I think it's going to work well for a few HyperBole POV/Helmet Cam shots. Actually- I want to model some motorcycle handlebars to add on ther...

HyperBole Update 8_15

Halfway through August!! wooo! Finally getting a 95 degree day tomorrow, I'm ready for it.

It's wild to me that August is the cold month for you folks in the southern hemisphere. August=Heat is just burned into my head.

You know what else is wild? MAGELLANIC CLOUDS! Two dwarf galaxies orbiting the milky way that folks in the southern hemisphere CAN ...