Blender tips
by LiMuBei on Jul.12, 2011, under Blender Modeling, Tutorials
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!
Flickr is good!
by LiMuBei on Jun.29, 2011, under Internal, Photography
As you may have probably noticed, I have moved my digital photography efforts to Flickr. It’s just way more convenient to host and organize the pictures there, plus they get more exposure 
I found some nice plugins though for WordPress to link my Flickr account into the site. On the right you can see the latest pictures of my photo stream and on the photography page here there’s an up to date list of all my Flickr collections.
If you’re into digital photography you should definitely consider creating a Flickr account. For me, the switch was good as it motivates me more to post process my images and put them online. Otherwise they catch virtual dust on the hard drive and no one ever gets to see them.
Modelling training tip
by LiMuBei on May.07, 2011, under Blender Modeling, Refs, Tutorials
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.
Hand modeling
by LiMuBei on May.04, 2011, under Blender Modeling, Sculpting
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
Dustin Diaz shooting and Flickr
by LiMuBei on Apr.26, 2011, under Photography
Last Friday my old colleague Tilo paid me a visit and since he’s an ambitioned hobbyist when it comes to photography (check out his Flickr account: http://www.flickr.com/photos/galllo) we decided to do a little bit of that. We decided to do a tribute to the great Dustin Diaz and recreate his night shot portrait style as best as we could. Here’s one of the results:
- Recreating the Dustin Diaz style
You can see Tilo’s efforts in his photostream. The light setup consisted of three speedlights, one to the left through an umbrella using an orange gel, one from the right behind bare white and one behind the subject with a green gel. The last one is barley visible as it just pointed on the floor. Funny thing was, this was shot right in the middle of Karlsruhe with a lot of people passing by. I wonder how many of them were thinking we were doing some sort of professional shooting there …
When I found out that I could use my Google account to login in to Flickr I made an account there as well. I’m yet undecided where I will post pictures from now. I just know that I don’t want to keep two places up to date. We’ll see how Flickr does.
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