Blender Minutes

I started a project which I had in my mind for quite some time now. Triggered by an article about product visualization, which uses fake lighting, I decided to finally give it a try myself.

I created a thread in blenderartists to show the various stages of my progress and will probably post a tutorial, if anything useful come out of this.

Right now this technique seems only applicable for studio setups and animations, where no camera movement is involved, but maybe I can come up with extended applications.

Here is a quick animation to show the technique

Fake Lighting Test from loramel on Vimeo.

Tags: Blender, Compositing, luxrender by loramel
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While working on my current project to explore the differences between luxrender and blender I came in touch with setting up a linear workflow.

Until now I knew what it was and never found it necessary to test or use it in one of my projects. The steps involved using it in blender especially under linux seemed too tedious.

As this project was aiming at photorealism, it was a good opportunity to actually try a linear workflow.

And I have to say I am a convert now. There won’t be any serious projects done without applying a linear workflow.

[Read more →]

Tags: Blender, Compositing, Linux, tutorial by loramel
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I decided to give luxrender a try and get accustomed with its material setup. For those who have not yet came across this new renderer see here for more info.

I find it a highly promising project with after one year of healthy development showing quite an impressive functionality already.

As with all unbiased renderer out there, you pay a high price in terms of render times and turn around cycles. I just recently upgraded to a AMD Phenom quad core system, running about 20 times faster than my old one. This finally gave me the basis to dare to tackle luxrender.

Getting all the material settings right was quite a tedious experience. For the poppy flower i.e. I realize after 2 hours of rendering, that the material was not quite right, so I had to restart again. I think one will have to gather quite some experience until the material

setup get more straight forward and thus faster.

The image you see here is a theme I wanted to do for quite some time, but was not really satisfied with the blenders internal renderer and knew this would be an ideal candidate for an unbiased renderer.

The image is titled ‘The Other Side’. The blend file is available from my Showroom.

Its actually a composite ( done in blender of course ) of the two following separately rendered images.

Render time for each of the images was around 6 hours, with about 3000 samples/pixel.

You will never want to do an animation with luxrender, but for certain setups this is a very good tool to have.

Tags: Blender, Compositing, luxrender by loramel
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I started to put together a (video) tutorial for a complete lightsaber rotoscoping session. The basics – blend file with node setup for the lightsaber effect and a lightsaber mask – are ready, but right now my priority lies with my BWC entry (see wip thread at blenderartists).

Nonetheless, I decided to make the parts public, which I already have.

Download links:

• lightsaber node setup
• manual describing the usage and workings of the lightsaber node

As the BWC 2008 lasts until start of September don’t expect the complete tutorial before October 2008.

Tags: Blender, Compositing, tutorial by loramel
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I think I managed to create a generic and versatile setup for lightsaber rotoscoping and applying the actual effect. I created a Nodegroup where you can just feed in the image of the lightsaber and the desired color.

I experimeted a lot with the best techniques for the actual rotoscoping work. But I always arived at the same conclusion: to really get satisfying results you have to rotoscope each frame.

Here is a still with a crab sith lord sitting on my staircase

The original footage from the video below was taken during a hiking trip not far fro were I live. My daughter and her friend is acting as jedi padawans in a rather dramatic environment. Pity was they just had wodden sticks as lightsabers, which was a really tedious work to rotosopce correctly. Any way this is my first attempt. I will  improve the flashes ro be more dynamic. A completely new area will be the sound fx, which I will add later on.

Lightsaber rotoscoping using blender from Martin Lubich on Vimeo.

I will submit these entries to the actual lightsaber rotoscoping challenge at blenderartists, and after that I will upload the blend files and a description on how to use the lightsaber node setup.

Tags: Blender, Compositing, Video by loramel
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