This is my personal blog showcasing my digital creations. Most images created using Blender, an open-source and extremely versatile 3D creation package, available at: www.blender.org
From a tutorial on BlenderCookie by Stanislas Paillereau. The mechanics of the turing pages are amazing. The cover opens and flattens realistically, the spine deforms, the thickness of the mass of pages moves correctly as the pages flip. Expect any books included in my scenes from here in to look a lot like this.
Only at home for one day this week - just enough time to knock out a quick version of a character I saw in the September edition of 3D World. There is a series of tutorial videos that accompany the character in the mag, I have not been through them yet, I will catch up with that when I have more time.
I was quite exited last week to be asked by Differentia Design to do an illustration of a Birlinn (traditional Scottish ship) for an information panel to go on the Caledonian Way, near Castle Stalker.
The main image is done in Blender using the Birlinn model I made a while back. Castle Stalker is roughed out in the background along with an approximate skyline. Rendered in Cycles with postprocessing done in Photoshop, mainly for the foam on the sea.
This is one of several images that will form the information panel. I will update with a picture of the completed panel when that is available.
Not had much time of late. My earlier attempts at texturing my Blenderella model needed some love. Using the BProject addon (under the experimental add-ons), I was able to get a skin texture for the face and body I was happy with at last. Using a UV image texture plus a translucent material with fake skull added to the model to assist with proper subsurface scattering. Rendered in Cycles.
Back to basic drawing lessons, partly because I am really rusty and partly to get to grips with Photoshop Elements.
CG Cookie has a course on concept art that looks really difficult. Following the principle: try something you don't think you can do, I plugged in my Wacom and jumped straight in.
I am quite happy with the result. Although trying to measure up against Vonn on the CG Cookie site is a tall order.
Making the most of a bank holiday weekend, I managed to climb a hill, do some plumbing around the house and make a tornado using Blender's smoke simulator.
Inspiration and technical tips fron a tutorial by Thomas Piemontese on BlenderCookie.com
The most time consuming part was creating the house in a way that would disintegrate properly. If I had more time, I would like to re-work the way the building parts are caught-up in the vortex, some are moving way too fast for their mass. Edit: done
Edit 13th May: I re-did the physics for the disintegrating building and uploaded a new video.
It was thanks to a tutorial I came accross while browsing Andreu Cabré's site (original at BlenderDiplom) that helped most in figuring out how to control the particle distruction of the house.
My images have been a little still recently. I thought I should do some animation, mainly because I am not so good at it and I could use the practise. I based this on a tutorial by David Ward at CG Cookie but after watching it through, I did the modelling and smoke sim on my own without reference to the tutorial.
A couple of painful learning points during the making of this clip. 1) Don't change the size of the smoke domain in Blender in edit mode. There is some sort of bug and the domain MUST be a 2x2x2 cube, scaled in object mode. 2) Don't expect to save the file, reopen it and the smoke will play the same way twice. After a few hours rendering, I shut down my PC, to continue rendering next morning. Unless you have baked the smoke sim to a cache on disk, it will be slightly different each time you create it in memory after reloading Blender.
