Blender Boids Demo.

I have been experimenting(playing) with Blender's boid particles. Boids are particles that have a low level intelligence or rule following behavior. The best known example is the armies in Lord of the Rings movie were boids. A soldier model could be given a rule such as charge the castle or a flock of birds could fly through a scene. It is a powerful feature but is not well documented or used. So of course I had the urge to explore it. No keyframes were used to create animations, they are completely boid particle effects.

Some of the uses that I want to explore are creating realistic looking traffic that reacts to the environment, creating realistic pedestrians, and using RGB textures to control boid movement.

I am back. I have been enjoying the last of the summer and also learning to use the Blender 3d modelling software. There are so many good video tutorials on Blender that learing the software is relatively easy. I have managed to get up to level of confidence where I can produce a reasonable model and render it. Now the challenge of practice, practice and practice begins. So the focus of this blog may shift in that direction.

This is a render of a 3d model of a wall fountain that I created. At first glance it is photo-realistic, but it still could use some improvements. I am pleased with the result however.

One of the nice things about open-source software is the level of support available in various forumns. Model files are freely shared and improved on. The level of ingenuity and creativity displayed in the way Blender is used is truly impressive.

Robots and more.

I have been neglecting my digital art lately due to the purchase of an 89 Bronco that has turned into yet another project (in a good way). Anyway in order to get back in the swing of things here is my latest entry to the Worth 1000 photoshop contest. The site is a great way to force yourself to create an image within 48 hours for a specific theme. It also provides good feedback to new users and can push you out of your comfort zone into new techniques that you normally wouldn't try. Also the inspiration provided by seeing just how others interpret the same idea is invaluable.

Oh what a tangled web.

To create this semi-realistic spider web I used Inkscape. First I created a background layer consisting of a radial gradient from green to black and a few blurred green elipses to create the effect of some out of focus greenery. The next layer was the main spiderweb. I started by using the Bezier draw tool to spell out the text. This was made twice as thick as the rest for emphasis. Then the rest of the web was drawn. All the paths had Add Nodes and Jitter Nodes applied. The raindrops were created by following this screencast at screencasters.heathenx.org. The raindrops were added only to the text portion of the web. Finally the web opacity was reduced to 50 percent.

Be Alert.

Here I am fooling around with warning signs. I created a custom pattern of hexagons for the sign to create the reflective coating effect seen on modern road signs. I just created the pattern as black with no fill, a slight blur and 25% opacity. The other detail I added is a sign number in small text at the bottom of the sign. This detail is also often seen on modern road signs.

The rest of the sign follows the common techniques for creating a realistic looking sign. Tutorials for this are all over the web. The text of course is the common alert pun, because of course the world needs more Lerts.

Rotoscope.

I have been trying a rotoscope test over the last few days. For those who don't know rotoscoping is tracing frames from a film to create an animation. I downloaded an avi from the Internet Archive Prelinger Archive. It is a good source of movies that can be used without copyright issues. After I got a source movie I exported a clip as jpg images. The process I used was to take each jpg and open it as a layer, create a new layer with 45% opacity, then traced the main lines of the image. It is a slow process but the result was interesting. The next step is to test other open source programs to find the easiest and quickest workflow for rotoscope animation.

Back to Basics.

Today I spent some time getting back to basics. I spent an hour outside in the garden pencil sketching. It was an enjoyable change of pace from digital art.