Studio@jumpers-inn.de

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.

Since I’m a steady follower of the Durian blog, I was intrigued by the fact that the people there work exclusively in Linux. Up until now I only noticed Linux as a software developing OS but it seems the open source community has worked hard to make sure the art department in the software collection available has gotten a lot bigger and better. By investigating about this I stumbled upon a special flavour of the Ubuntu distribution aimed specifically at artists, named Ubuntu Studio.

So after shuffling around some partitions on my PC I installed Ubuntu Studio on my machine. Having experience with setting up Ubuntu everything went very smooth. After the first start up I was a bit disappointed though, since the login screen was probably the most ugly one I’ve ever seen and did look nothing like in the screenshots. The desktop also was not really what I was used to from regular Ubuntu as the starters in the panel have a strange placing and the panel at the bottom of the screen was missing entirely. This meant a little fudging with the settings but now everything seems ok. Now it was time to see what the software was capable of.

Since I’m a 3D and drawing guy I only tried Blender and Gimp at first. Those two run out of the box at very good speed. My Wacom Bamboo Fun was also recognized out of the box and works flawlessly. Next thing I did was trying to make my own SVN build of Blender 2.5. And this is where Ubunut really shines! Installing dependencies and building Blender is easy as pie.

Last thing I tested was building MyPaint. This did take a little longer as the dependencies are not well documented, but once everything was in place building went smoothly. And boy, MyPaint is really a cool tool! Super responsive to the tablet, a cool selection of pre-made brushes and good usablity. The other day I played around with the free trial of Autodesk Sketchbook Pro which is also a very cool program, but I think I’ll stick with MyPaint as it offers essentially the same and is open source.

Hopefully I will be able to post some first results using MyPaint with Ubuntu Studio. So if you have a bit of experience with Ubuntu or Linux and like to have the latest art applications built by yourself, I highly recommend Ubuntu Studio. Though you might as well use a regular Ubuntu version since Studio only differs in the bundled software and some eyecandy.

A lot of people are interested in learning Blender as it’s probably the most advanced and actively developed open source 3D package available. But after downloading and installing Blender the frustration quickly grows into desperation and many people finally give up because of the complexity of the program and the rather unusual user interface. To avoid this it is crucial to start with good learning material. While searching for tutorials for Blender the new user will experience a rather weird situation, he or she will find thousands of hits when using their search engine of choice. There are so many tutorials out there that finding the good ones that explain what you want to know is a difficult task in itself. I have gone through all this myself so I thought it would be good to give some recommendations in terms of learning material.

First of all, the basics:

• The official Blender UI tutorial (for reading): http://www.blender.org/education-help/tutorials/tutorial-folder/blender-user-interface-tutorial/
  This is a pretty complete description of the UI of Blender (up to version 2.49b, the interface changes in 2.5), good read for getting a basic understanding of the underlying ideas and principles.
• Blendercookie dedicated starter series: http://www.blendercookie.com/getting-started-with-blender/
  Blendercookie provides lots of very well done video tutorials. I have learned a lot from this site, so I highly recommend it.

For the advanced beginner that is not struggling with the interface anymore, advanced topics are of interest. This is the point where the Blender books and training DVDs get interesting and are a profitable investment. Two books that I own myself are “Bounce, tumble and splash” which covers physics simulation with Blender and Bullet and “Introducing character animation with Blender” which obviously covers character animation. If you’re interested in even more character animation and are more affiliated to moving pictures with sound than to books, I recommend the training DVD “DVD training 3: Character Animation” which comes with the character models and rigs from the short movie Big Buck Bunny.

I linked the books and DVD purposely to the Blender store as I think if you’re gonna by the books you can as well buy it from there as this ensures ongoing support for the Blender foundation that is behind this great open source project.

Today I found two nice links that might be of interest to game artists and creators:

• OpenGameArt.org
• Public Domain Textures

The first is a community site dedicated to collecting game models and textures licensed under creative commons. Some nice stuff can be found there so if you’re creating a open source game you may want to have a look.

The second is something linked at OpenGameArt.org which is a good set of tileable free textures for various materials. As a 3D modeler you can never have enough textures so this is also worth having a look. Especially nice for Picasa users is that you can download the textures directly from a Picasa web album to your disk