I have been approached by no starch press to write a review about the new blender related book ‘Blender Master Class’ by Ben Simonds. I decided to give it a try and here we go.

The book is written by Ben Simonds, which is known in the Blender Community for some years now producing art and tutorials and is now co-heading his own Animation Studio Gecko Animation Ltd, which has already produced some impressive works.

Over time Ben released various tutorials on his site, which I always found to be of good quality and value. Now it seems he has made the next step and pouring all this knowledge into the making of a book.

Blender Master Class (BMC for short) comes as a paper edition with a DVD included as well as an ebook. The paper edition is 260 pages, with images and illustration in full color.

BMC is not a complete Blender Guide nor is it targeted at blender alone (as it also goes into texturing with the Gimp). It highlights the workflow techniques and production steps typically needed in creating still images or assets. And as the title implies, it is not a beginner book and you should be a least be a bit familiar with blender and/or CG.

The main topics covered are modelling, sculpting, retopology, UV unwrapping, texturing,  shading, lighting and rendering. This list, while still by far not covering all aspects of blender, still covers an immense and diverse area. The approach Ben Simonds uses, takes this into account. As he progresses through the workflow and production techniques, he uses 3 different real projects to demonstrate and highlight different aspects of the same base topic. There is the bat creature for organic model creation, the spider bot which targets the hard surface aspects and challenges and the temple ruins, covering the environmental aspects.

Lets go through the main topics and how they are presented

Books Content

Most books on blender start with a short introduction into blender itself and this book is no exception here. But for my taste this introduction does not really add value. As said before this book is not for the beginner and more advanced users (even intermediate ones) already know what is presented here. The same is true for the introduction to the gimp.

What I found very good and important was the chapter about preparation, planning and the use of  references. Ben first presents us with the basic concepts and workflows and then illustrates their practical implementation in blender and/or gimp. With the constant use and reference to the 3 projects this approach avoids the dry grey theory syndrome. There is also quite some space dedicated to some basic rules of composition. While I find this aspect very important, I am not quite sure if it really fits into the context of this book.

The modelling part covers the important role of topology and its use in blender. The 3 projects offer plenty demonstration for blender’s various modelling tools, which Ben Simonds presents in a very clear and understandable way. And again it is a healthy mixture of basic principles and practical hands on.

From observing Ben’s work over the last years, it was apparent that he takes a liking in sculpting, and so I was very interested in how he will present this topic in his own book. Adhering to his approach he gives a very good introduction to sculpting in blender. He highlights all the important techniques and workflows. The main project used here is of course the bat creature but the sculpting approaches used in the spider bot for hard surfaces expands the view on sculpting possibilities in a very informative way.

The only ‘gripe’ I have is that with blender 2.66 and the inclusion of dynamic topology sculpting and matcap 3D viewport, quite a bit of the presented workflow may not be the best for the new tools at hand. That’s not a fault of the author of course, it is just unfortunate timing.

Retopology and UV Unwrapping again gives you the basics of what you have to know about this topic. It is not overly expansive but presents the necessary information in a good and concise way.

Then there is the chapter about hair and particle systems. While an interesting topic I found it oddly out of place for this book. It is a crash course  through a lot of features blender has to offer in this regard and yet it only gives a small glimpse into this vast area. With this it is different to the other topics covered so far and therefore created the odd impression for me.

Texture baking and especially texturing is covered very thoroughly and it shows again the love Ben has for this topic. The texturing part is heavily focused on the gimp, which is no real surprise giving the texturing possibilities blender has (currently) to offer. Ben makes very good use of the tools at hand (be it blender or gimp) and presents them in a very understandable way. He even tries to establish a non destructive workflow where possible, which in my eyes is an essential part in an effective texturing workflow.

The Material chapter deals with the shading aspect and with this faces the dilemma of having 2 native render engines inside blender: internal and cycles. Ben Simonds does quite a good job explaining the two and their respective shader setups. Blender Internal is used  for the bat creature, since it makes use of SSS and strand rendering, which is not available in the blender version used in this book. The explanation and presentation for the bat creature is again very good and teaches you a lot of important background information and little tricks to be able to tame the internal render engine to your liking. The cycles engine is then used for the spider bot. This part is not as expansive but that is partly due to the simpler (shading) of the bot and also that cycles does not need that amount of tweaking.

Interestingly in Lighting the typical approach used so far is reversed. Ben starts out with the specifics of blender’s render engines and then moves on to the general principles of lighting. Coming directly from the material chapter this might make sense but for my taste this could be reversed. This chapter delivers good basics for lighting and how to use blenders light types and tools to arrive at the best lighting for a scene.

Rendering and Compositing highlights the basics. Again it has to cover both render engines and their peculiarities. Especially compositing is a vast topic and the book just gives a very basic view on this topic, mainly to introduce the tools blender has to offer, demonstrated by simple workflows. What I found good about this chapter was that Ben shows that an image is not finished once it comes out of the renderer but you still can ( and should) retouch it in additional steps in the workflow (gimp in this case).

The book closes with some ideas on how to improve the overall impression of the used projects and even touches the aspects of rigging and animation which I personally found not really necessary.

Conclusion

Blender Master Class is a very fine book and it is delivered in a way that the knowledge it  tries to convey is not a short lived one. You get the ideas, motivation and theory behind the workflows in combination with their actual implementation in a workflow using blender and gimp. With this you are much better equipped at exploring new or changed software features or even deriving your own workflows. There are a lot of books out there acting as recipe collections, where you are just presented with how to do a specific thing using a software. BMC is definitely not one of them.

BMC is not an expert book, trying to teach you the latest and last tricks of the various areas of cg creation, but it lays the foundation to master the general workflow and understand the principles behind it. And it does this by using blender and gimp with a wealth of good advice and thorough and concise practical explanations. Thus the title is an adequate one, as it teaches you how to master these aspects using blender (and gimp).

A nice side effect is, that you can purchase the book via the blender store and by doing so  supporting blender.

I do not rate by stars, ribbons or even suzannes, but Ben Simonds has delivered a sound piece of teaching which should have a place in the aspiring 3D artist’s library. I can wholeheartedly recommend this book.

After a long pause a bit of a life sign, but not yet back to CG or blender.

I realize that it will take yet some time before I find myself the needed focus to tackle CG related projects again. There are so much other interesting things to do …, like a 4 week trip to New Zealand

While thoroughly exhausting it was a involving experience and while I was a bit handicapped ( I got sick during the trip) I managed to take some shots I am satisfied with.

I have put a small selection on display on my g+ account. Click the image below to see the images.

All the images were taken with a Canon 60D and the RAW files developed with darktable and organized using digikam. Having to wade through the 8000+ images my sister, my daughter and I have taken takes quite some patience and a good tool, which digikam happens to be.

Yesterday I got confirmation from Ton Roosendaal, that my proposed talk about the production of Ara’s Tale ( Challenges and Production Insights of Single-Handedly Making a Short) is accepted.

Yeah

I hope to be able to talk to some of  you fellow blenderheads there in person

And now I just hope that Ara’s Tale gets into the official selection for the suzanne film festival …

And I have again reason to open my celebration bottle of Ardbeg Single Malt. Now after almost 2 months of the release of Ara’s Tale, the movie and it’s production is again creating some fuzz.

Soon after the release of Ara’s Tale, I was approached by Ian Hall from the Foundry, who asked me, if I was interested to do a case study for Mari.

I was interested

Now, this week the article was first featured as production focus on the main site of cgsociety.org. This came as a very pleasant surprise to me.

And today the case study itself is published on Mari’s website. It is an incredible feeling to see one’s project listed on the same page with those huge blockbusters as Avatar, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Hugo …

The aftermath will last be a bit longer though, as I am submitting the movie to several film festivals and hope to get it accepted at at least a few ones. The first one will be the Suzanne Animation Festival at the Blender Conference 2012, where I plan to go there this year.

And there is still work to be done on the making-of , which will be shown together with the movie at a local cinema ( Leokino in Innsbruck) at 30th September.

These are still interesting times, but a lot quieter now than during production …

And then it will be time to let go and turn towards new projects.

After a lot of tinkering and various attempts, I am glad to be able to announce the availability of the production files for Ara’s Tale.

To be able to host those files, I had to make some restrictions, which I think will have very little impact for the interested.

I have split the project into several parts:

• base production files (1GB): everything but the textures and simulation cache files.
• texture files (1GB): all textures but reduced to half the resolution of the real production  textures.
• Simulation cache files: One zipped simulation cache directory for each shot, typically ~140MB per file (total 6GB). With this it is easy to recreate a render and further compositing for a single shot.

No render outputs are packed into these files, you have to recreate them yourselves . In case there is real interest into the full resolution textures I will gladly try to find a way to host these additional 5GB.

All these files are hosted on goggle drive. This has proved to be a working solution for the movie files themselves, so I hope this holds true for the production files as well . If you encounter any problems please tell me.

Here is the link to the shared folders for the production files and be sure to read the _README_ first:

Base production Files

Simulation Files Part 1

Simulation Files Part 2

As I have mentioned on other occasions, having only these files at hand will not help you very much. That was my experience with all the assets from the Open Movies so far. I am willing to do a series of in depth explanations/making of’s/howto’s to bring to you the ideas behind all these setups. Some are just crude workarounds, some may be usable for your own projects.

But to be able to do this in a sensible way, I would first ask you to provide me with wishes/suggestions, what topics you would like to have covered. It can be very specific like ‘How did you do the disintegration of the dragon’ to more broad topics like ‘How is the whole project organized’.

I really hope to have your feedback on this. After 3 years of me working on this project it is now time for a little of your time

After 3 years in the making, finally is the moment of truth:

I proudly present the release of Ara’s Tale !

Writer/Director: Martin Lubich
Music: Philippe Rey
Sound: Mikkel Nielsen

Watch the movie online on

Youtube
Vimeo

or directly download the movie files from the following links. I have provided links to google drive and dropbox. (note for the links into google drive: to download it, you have to open the menu and select ‘download’ or just hit ctrl-S)

!! The alternate links (dropbox) are all down at the moment. Dropbox has dicontinued serving these files due to excessive traffic. I am really sorry for this !!

• 1080p, h264, 5.1 Sound (968MB; alternate link):
  This is the highest quality visuals with the ultimate 5.1 sound. Use this if you have a 5.1 equipment at hand. The movie deserves it.
•  1080p, h264, stereo Sound (960MB; alternate link):
  This is the highest quality visuals with a stereo downmix from the 5.1 sound.
• 720p, h264, stereo Sound (300MB, alternate link)
• 480p, h264, Stereo (59 MB, alternate link):
  This one is intended for mobile devices with reduced resolution and lower bitrate.

I developed this short over the course of the last 3 years in my spare time. Which started as a simple naive idea, soon grew into something hugely complex, but in the end utterly rewarding.

Without the work done by Phil Rey (Music) and Mikkel Nielsen (Sound) this movie wouldn’t be what it is today.

Without  the work done by Phil Rey (Music) and Mikkel Nielsen (Sound) this movie  wouldn’t be what it is today. I want to express my deepest gratitude for their work and dedication throughout the project.

Thank you Mikkel and Phil !

This short is intended to be seen and heard. So turn on the volume when watching this short.

I also want to thank all who have given feedback and have shown their interest in this project. This gave motivation in times when everything seemed hopeless . Thank you!

The full movie is licensed under a Creative Commons license (CC-BY-NC-ND). The movie was created in the spirit of an Open Movie, thus I am in the process of preparing all the production material for release under a CC-BY license as well. With this a visuals only version of the movie with a CC-BY license will be released as well.

Enjoy the movie. Any comments and/or critique are highly appreciated and encouraged.

If you like the movie, please spread the word. If you don’t, spread it nonetheless

After 3 years of writing alone on this blog, it is now time to let the other team members have their voice and thoughts heard.

And it also helps a bit to shorten the waiting time until the final release …

Philippe Rey (www.phreymusic.com) was so kind to write a bit of his experience with working on the score for this project.

Thank you Phil for taking your time and a thousand thanks for enriching this movie with your wonderful music !

And now I step back and let Phil tell his tale …

_________________________________________________________

If one word can summarize my experience as a composer with Ara’s Tale, it would be : “Magical” ! (and also maybe “Nutella”…)

I met “by chance” Martin’s project in May 2010. I was immediately seduced by the magic  (and rigor) which was already emerging from his work at this moment.

I was so impressed that I fastly composed 2 minutes of music for one of his ”raw” video of Ara’s Tale, for fun, but with the slim hope of seduce him ! I wanted to be a part of the adventure !

I think he liked the music at this time, but unfortunately (for me) he was already working with another composer. (That day I sacrificed an entire jar of Nutella to comfort me – let’s call it jar number 1)

I continued to follow his project as a fan, and 7 months later, I was very surprised to receive an email from him asking me to finally work with him! I could not believe it ! (this day i had to murder a second jar of Nutella - jar number 2)

Inspiration has never missed me during these months of work, I think Ara has a powerful magic that infuses a breath of love and creativity. I think the problem was even the overflow of ideas !

The first step was the teaser for Ara, where we tried several approaches, then the work on the film finally began. Again, after several very interesting and very different attempts, we have finally understood how to approach the film. The rest of the score was easier to realize, I just had to follow the thread, to let me be guided.  Magical !

At half of the film we took a break. It was time to compose the song of Ara. I knew Martin expected much from the film score, and had a particular attention to this passage. In other words, I was under pressure! (jar number 3)

Like him I wanted a simple but captivating melody. I was initially afraid to
spend weeks on this song, and finally (again), the notes came very quickly, almost from the first attempt. Magical !

I provided the score to Martin, who later worked with Julia (the wonderful voice of Ara) to record the song. The result went beyond our expectations.

We also had to make some adjustments to allow the score and sound design to work perfectly together. Mikkel, our Master of Sound, did a fantastic job. We all had fears that the score and the sounds cannot coexist in harmony sometimes, and finally, again, it worked perfectly well. Magical !

After another break for a few weeks, I came back to work. As in the beginning of the adventure, the end of the score took place on its own without a lot of corrections either.

In conclusion I confess I’ve rarely seen a filmmaker putting as much passion, sincerity, and love in his project. It is primarily these feelings which have guided me. So I think it’s fair to say that a big part of the music was primarily written by Ara, and Martin.

Magical !

Thank you to them, a thousand times thank you.

Today I managed to get a very generous offer from a local cinema. With the idea of  supporting the local movie making community, I was offered to rent a full cinema hall for a local premiere of Ara’s Tale. The price is such, that I feel able to raise enough donations to get this actually financed.

This all comes with a catch, .. of course

To ensure the best picture and audio I have to deliver the movie as DCP – Digital Image Package, the actual world wide standard for distributing digital cinema content.

Fortunately there are free possibilities to be able to produce these type of digital media. But looking at the whole specifications behind this, I guess that there is a whole new world of things which needs to be handled correctly to get a working DCP movie.

What I would like to ask the community: Is there any knowledge out there, that could give me a good starting point and tips to start into the right direction ?

If you happen to have some experience with this, I am glad for any input you can provide.

Phil has delivered the final score for Ara’s Tale.

Over 8 minutes of original soundtrack, fitting perfectly to, and enhancing the visuals by a huge amount.

For me the score is fantastic. Phil and I have both a very similar emotional response to the images and the whole mood. That means working with Phil on the score was a perfect match, sometimes even eerie.

There is one part especially, complimenting the climax of the movie, where when I received the first proposal, I just sat there, totally stunned. It was like watching a completely new movie.

My deepest respect and gratitude goes to Phil for enriching the movie with such a beautiful score.

Now, that only leaves the sound fx to be finished, which Mikkel is very hard working on. And looking at the work he has already done for the movie, I am very excited to hear the remaining bits. This will take yet some more weeks though.

That also means, that the long waiting will be over comparably soon …

What white pixels ?

These, there, flickering at the cliff wall !

Ummhh …

… I do not know why this has slipped through my countless screenings, but here they were. Full bright white, sometimes colorful, single hot pixels.

What follows now is an anecdote, highlighting the various adventures you sometimes face, when dealing with problems which seem so trivial at first sight. It is almost nostalgic, as these problem patterns tended to appear throughout the whole production and they persist right to the end

The Discovery

In 3 shots I discovered hot pixels (predominantly white, but at closer inspection also pure black and sometimes colored) in about 20 percent of the frames from 3 distinctive shots. Not many pixels, between 1 to 6, but quite detectable. It needed someone from the outside to point at these and then they were quite obvious and – even more importantly – very distracting.

A thorough search on all the other shots didn’t show any of these problems.

The pixels looks like bugs in the rendering or compositing. They were not associated to a fixed location of the texture or model, but the general area was always the same. So my idea was to pin down the source of the problem and fix it or at least work around it.

Trying to Fix the Compositing

I loaded a raw frame of one of the faulty shots into the compositor blend file and did a compositing run and searched for the hot pixels.

There were none.

This puzzled me. I tried different frames, all with the same result – no hot pixels. I did another test, this time using my render machine and compositing the same frames as on my workstation. To my utter astonishment, some of the frames showed the hot pixels. BUT, other hot pixels then on the picture locked footage.

Each time I ran a compositing run on my render machine, I got different results, but always around 20% faulty frames.The hot pixels always changed specific location, but never the general one. Sometimes a frame was rendered clean, another time it had the pixels.

I know, that my render machine has pre release versions of the Intel Xeon Hexacore processors but I have never seen anything like this. The circumstances which lead to this behavior are rather strange and my be fun to investigate, but not this time. I wanted a true picture locked and error free footage.

The First Workaround

So quite an easy task to fix the problem. Just use the workstation to do the compositing.

That would have been the best option, but alas, I needed ~70GB of extra disk space for the raw frames and my workstation was already full. And no other spare disk space available. All disks at my place are already packed full with the production files, so no way to free some space.

The Next Idea

Well, all in all there were about 90 frames, which showed the hot pixels. So I just could cope with manually painting the errors out. A very tedious type of work but manageable. The first idea was to paint directly over the DPX files, which are fed into the final mix. And here comes the point, were I sometimes hate to work under linux (but only sometimes ). This is when I ave to deal with doing image processing for higher than 24bit/pixel formats.

DPX files have 10 bit per color channel per pixel, so using the Gimp is out of the question.

No problem I thought. There’s Krita, much talked about recently, so this should do the trick. My previous experiences with Krita were rather bad, but I thought after 1 year of Krita development I should give it a try for this simple task.

Well, as it turned out, Krita does not support DPX files.

OK, but Krita does support OpenEXR files, which is even better, as I have no loss in color information then.

OK, it turned out that Krita is not able to handle the OpenEXR files generated by blender. It just shows an empty canvas, thats all.

Next Try

Next I tried to convert the DPX files to TIFF files using the imagemagick toolchain. As it turned out, the generated TIFFs did display completely wrong. False colors, wrong gamma, absolute unusable.

It was then, that I remembered, that blender has it own image editor, quite basic but enough for the task at hand. Another extremely nice feature is to load an image as image sequence, and with this it is quite easy to do the correction painting. Using this workflow I was almost glad that Krita had failed.

So I painted over the 3 shots and it tuned out to be a very tedious work. Also very eye tiring. But after an 1.5 hrs work it was done.

So I went to the color correction program I run under Windows to produce the final DPX files.

What a nice surprise: all the painted DPX files turned out pure black. I almost cried …

The Final Resolution

I just couldn’t believe this. I seemed that up until now everything had conspired to prevent me from fixing these hot pixels.

So I went back to blender and this time I loaded in the EXR files and did a paint over of one of the faulty frames. A test with this single frame showed no problems further down the pipeline and I was good to go. The difference in the painting experience of working on float color images compared to the 30bit DPX files is striking. Doing a single stroke on the EXR image takes about 2-3 seconds until you see the result, whereas working on the DPX file, you have immediate feedback. That meant, where I had worked 1.5 hrs on the DPX files, I now had to work for 2.5 hrs.

Did I already mention that this is tedious work ?

In the end, I got all the frames cleaned up and now I have an error free footage, ready to get mixed with the music and sound.

I just hope that these corrected shots never have to be rerendered …