Studio@jumpers-inn.de

Very simple and easy setup for bright white flower macro shots. What you need:

• flower
• two speedlites
• white styrofoam plates

Place the styrofoam plates in a L-shape and point the speedlites at them. The flower is positioned in the middle of this setup with the camera on the same height as the blossom pointing towards the styrofoam plates. Now adjust the speedlites’ strengths as you see fit (I used 1/16 and 1/8). See this setup shot:

Setup for bright flower macro

And the result:

Resulting bright flower macro

Ever wondered why those product shots look that much better than the pictures you take of your grand-granddad’s heirloom watch? Most probably because of the light. As we all know, lighting is everything in photography. A lightbox is a neat little gadget that helps you light stuff you want to take a picture of. Well, it’s not suited for everything because of spacial restrictions, so people will most likely not fit in there. But everything else does, like watches, food or that amazing shell you found on the shore last vacation. This little article shows how I built myself a cheap lightbox, so maybe you can take inspiration from this. There’s of course countless other build instructions on the web on how to do this, so feel free to fire up Google and get creative!

Here are the first results I got from my lightbox. Not great, but ok I think. I need another flash light…

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.