Blender/Mari Diary #2

Posted on June 10, 2011 by loramel

A bit late, but here it is. My second installment of the Blender/Mari diary, this time done as a screencast.

This video highlights the workflow I was using to enhance and repaint the texture for part of the main set ( the platform where Ara stands ). The used texture resolution/UV Layout was not high enough for a closeup shot of the cage, where the floor occupies a significant amount of screen space, resulting in a blurred render. The approach used here is to rebake the texture to a new UV layout and fill in the details inside Mari.

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Posted in Ara's Tale, Blender, Mari, Projects | 2 Comments

Light and Shadow

Posted on May 30, 2011 by loramel

This post should have been my first screencast doing some texturing work, but alas as live plays, things have gone a bit different.
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Posted in Ara's Tale, Blender, Compositing, Projects | 4 Comments

The Road Goes Ever On …

Posted on May 23, 2011 by loramel

The last weeks saw me busy on various production aspects for Ara’s Tale.

I finished ( meaning make it production ready ) 6 more shots and in doing so, I had two aspects which I had to tackle, with one being quite a time consuming beast.

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Posted in Ara's Tale, Blender, Projects | 3 Comments

Wacom, Mari and recent linux distributions

Posted on May 9, 2011 by loramel

[Update: June 14 2011]
This is no longer needed starting with Mari 1.3v1, where the wacom detection was fixed. In fact using the here described workaround with Mari 1.3v1 and up breaks the wacom functionality.

So if you are using mari 1.3v1 and up do not follow these instructions !

[End of Update: June 14 2011]

If you are running Mari under a recent linux distribution and happen to have a wacom tablet, you certainly run into the problem, that pressure sensitivity does not work in Mari.

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Posted in Linux, Mari | 10 Comments

Blender/Mari diary #1

Posted on May 6, 2011 by loramel

I want to use this post to highlight the workflow I am using when working with blender and Mari.

To get an overall view of the features and capabilities of Mari, I advise to go to the Mari website and read through the material presented there.

I will concentrate here more on the differences between blender and Mari and how to set things up to straighten these out.

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Posted in Ara's Tale, Blender, Mari, Projects | 4 Comments

Miracles sometimes happen …

Posted on May 5, 2011 by loramel

… even to me :)

I mentioned in one of my last posts that sometime ago I was contacted by Jack Greasley, Mari product manager, who offered me the possibility to use Mari for Ara’s Tale. It seemed then that somehow this didn’t work out, and I called it then a dream, but admittedly a nice dream.

Now either I am still dreaming, or miracles do happen. I got contacted today by The Foundry and received an extended trial license, with enough time to use it seriously in Ara’s Tale. The license expires at the end of 2011, which should give me plenty of time, and an additional incentive to actually finish the project :)

What I promised to do, and what I definitely will do, is to document my workflow in using blender with Mari in this project.

I plan to revisit the texturing of Ara (which has some smaller issues which I plan to solve with Mari)  and the main set, which already was partly done with a normal trial license.

An extensive series should be the texturing of the dragon, which I plan to document in some detail here.

So these are very exciting times, I am looking forward to deeply dig into Mari and see what I can do with it.

With this goes a big Thank You to Jack Greasley and The Foundry !

 

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More shots done

Posted on April 28, 2011 by loramel

Progress is quite good so far. Since my last post, I managed to finish 5 more shots. If I can keep this pace, 2011 might actually be a realistic goal.

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Posted in Ara's Tale, Blender, Projects | 8 Comments

Lets start finalizing …

Posted on April 17, 2011 by loramel

Now its finally time to make the first shots of the main set a reality. After a lot of fiddling with the scultping and texturing of the canyon rock walls I have now decided to continue work on the actual shots.

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Posted in Ara's Tale, Blender, Projects | 4 Comments

If at first you don’t succeed …

Posted on March 9, 2011 by loramel

… try, try and try again. Thats especially true for this project of mine.

The last post showed my progress on texturing the main set cliffs and while the basics were ok the whole setup didn’t fully work out.

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Texture work on the main set

Posted on February 24, 2011 by loramel

The texturing process benefits now from the experience gained during the work on the entry set. Laying out the workflow and making decisions is a bit easier now.

As already mentioned in my previous post, I use a different approach for the main set regarding the layout of the objects and materials/textures. I have one huge mesh and use several materials/textures to cover its surface. With this I hoped to get better results with seams and evade the struggle of managing different objects with one seamless texture surface.

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Posted in Ara's Tale, Blender, Projects | 3 Comments