Studio@jumpers-inn.de

This is my personal short review of the Blender Institute training DVD  6:  Blenderella, Character Modeling in Blender 2.5.

Summary

What is it all about? Obviously character modeling. More specifically the DVD focuses on polygonal quad-based modeling using the latest Blender version. There are a lot of different ways one can go about character modeling, for example using a sculpting program like ZBrush or Scultpris and then at some point switching to a modeling application. This not the approach presented here, rather the other popular way is characterized, which is starting from reference images inside the modeler and then using polygonal modeling techniques like extruding and subdividing to form the mesh. While this approach is less intuitive it generates really nice geometry which is very suitable for animation later on. The DVD covers the complete workflow from adjusting and setting up the reference images to finishing up the model with intricate detail. Not covered are rigging, animation, texturing and rendering. (continue reading…)

Just stumbled upon this great collection of Blender tips from some of the best Blender artists. Some things I already knew, but others are really cool to know. Check them all out here!

For every beginner in character modeling, getting the shape is hard enough but getting a good poly flow for animation is even harder. Recently, I found a nice way to train your poly flow and getting good results at the same time. First of all you use MakeHuman to generate your training model. After adjusting the sliders in MakeHuman to your liking, export the result als .obj. Now you can import that into Blender and start making a lower poly version on top of it. Create a new cube/sphere/whatever and set the snapping tool like this:

This makes sure that when you drag vertices around it will get projected onto the nearest surface and in the end is similar to the old retopo tool in 2.49. You can play around with the settings and see what the different ones do. Maybe you’ll find something that suits your needs better. Now you can happily extrude edges or vertices and try to get the perfect edge flow with quads only without having to worry about the shape since that will be done by the projection.

In the above image you can see my first try on this. I did not use the MakeHuman model directly but imported it into Sculptris for some refinement. I really learned a lot on this and will definitely be doing this again.

Sometimes, it’s just cool to have access to expensive toys! Okay, let’s start at the beginning. My colleague Rainer is working in the field of programming by demonstration and therefore uses data gloves to monitor human hand movement. Unfortunately these gloves need a very good calibration to give good results and the mapping of the glove data to a model is useless if the hand model is not accurate. The problem now was to get an accurate model of a human hand, ideally from Rainer’s hand. Since we do have a 40,000 € 3D digitizer in our lab we obviously thought about scanning his hand. It turned out to be tricky because you need several scans from different viewpoints and a human can’t hold his fingers in the exact same position for that so results are not that great. Usually, if you want to scan a hand, you make a clay model of the hand and scan that. And that is pretty much what we did. We got ourselves some Creaform and Artestone and went to work. Surprisingly, the first try succeeded so well that we got this:

The finished hand model with a stand.

Now all left to do was take this and put it into the modeling center to process. Several minutes later (thanks to Rapidform!) the finished 3D model turned out to be really great. Below is a render of the high resolution scan version (right side, ~200,000 faces) and a automatically reduced version (left side, ~5000 faces).

Left: auto reduced version (5k tris) Right: scan version (200k tris)

Every once in a while things just go smooth and easy!

UPDATE: Spent some more time with the render settings

Spent some more time with the render and material settings

Time to try some new technology and get onto the app/extension bandwagon! So, this post is created with the ScribeFire extension and when you read this, it obviously worked out well

To make this post a bit more useful and Blender related, I’m pointing you to a cool tutorial demonstrating a nice feature in Blender: GLSL bump painting.

GLSL Bump Painting and baking from David Radford on Vimeo.