Technology is opening up ways of communication that we couldn’t imagine before. The 360° view gives us control to look over our shoulder and immerse ourselves in the story, and virtual reality offers the next level in delivering the message and making the experience more powerful.
Chris McFall is one of the pioneers who uses Blender to create virtual environments. He now reveals the detailed making-of of the first 360° message for a political party in Wales.
I first met Sean a couple of years ago and I remember that I enjoyed listening to him telling stories from the VFX world on the other side of the ocean. He’s a good storyteller too, so pretty quickly he had a captive audience around the table.
The story he is telling today is about his career so far, and I’m really glad he agreed to do it on our blog. If you are working in the VFX industry or are considering a job in this field, read on, I believe you’ll find it interesting.
Sean Kennedy (middle) with Bill Westenhofer, Erik-Jan De Boer, & the visual effects Oscar for “Life of Pi”
There are no limits to what you can achieve in Blender. In this next post, you will learn how to design a book cover in 7 guided steps with the author of Blender for Dummies.
Designers, you now have the tools to kick (some more) ass using free software. Show us your first Blender cover in the comments!
Definitely True, by M. J. Guns
Say you’re approached with a request to produce the artwork and design for the cover of a book. The book’s author says, “I want an image of a pair of disembodied pants running around… and on fire.” That same author, for some reason, also requests that you not not pour gasoline on an actual pair of pants (or the person wearing them) and set it ablaze for a photo shoot. Something about the sanctity of human life or somesuch.
What do you do when you dream of something but you don’t have the ready-made tools for building it? You take things in your own hands and build your own tools.
We continue our guest post series with an exciting story, coming from Radu, the man who built up a 3D scanner from scratch.
Radu’s kid getting 3D scanned by Tulemod’s built 3D scanner
If you haven’t heard about my city, you certainly heard about Trrransylvania! Well, that’s were Cluj is. Nope, I haven’t met any vampires (yet!) but I surely met lots of IT guys around here. With more than 10.000 people working in tech companies, Cluj is also arguably called the Sillicon Valley of Eastern Europe… Funny enough, the startup that I am working on right now was born in the real Silicon Valley. More exactly, in Palo Alto.
Tulemod is the typical tech startup, built by technology enthusiasts, trying to change the world by developing a disruptive technology. Our vertical is the fashion industry and we’re working on a solution for digitizing apparel and enabling users to mix and match looks online with the maximum realism. It might seem an utopia but it’s actually a challenging problem that can be solved using a mixture of computer vision, 3D modelling, 3D graphics and enough programming.
In the quest to make the process of rendering more appealing and help artists get better, faster renders, we are launching the guest post series on the RenderStreet blog.
NPR (Freestyle) is a feature that gets more and more attention from the Blender users. We invited Bong Wee Kwong aka Light BWK – who is a NPR pro – to write about optimising Freestyle and explain it all to pieces.
Overview
Freestyle is an awesome post process line art renderer. With Freestyle lines drawing alone, you can make a lot of cool artworks. If you have been following the twitter tag #b3d the past few months, you’ll notice many cool artworks are done with it. Freestyle is available for Blender Internal and (good news) will be available in Cycles for the next release, Blender 2.72. In essence, Freestyle is its own renderer, meaning it has its own way of handling line rendering.
Here is the overview of what Freestyle does when you press F12. First, Freestyle loads the mesh in view into RAM (each frame), creates a view map from selected edge types, then stylize the selected lines. In reality the processes for Freestyle to render lines is more than that, but for this article I think it is best to just show the simplified version.
