Birlinn

A birlinn is a type of ship used in Scotland from the 14th to 17th centuries.  It is similar to a Norse longship with a square sail, but is steeper at the bow and often with a rudder at the stern.  The larger birlinns reportedly had over forty oarsmen and must have been a considerable size.

Although it was widely used for over 400 years, apparently, no originals have been found.  The basic shape is taken from old diagrams and photos of modern reconstructions.

Birlinn

The image above is the completed version,  some of the work-in-progress updates below...

WIP - Sea Texture and spray still to be added

Modelled and rendered in Blender v2.61.  Crew created in MakeHuman.  Rendered with Cycles.

Some notes on the modelling. I am using the Ocean simulator in Blender 2.61,  to that I have added dynamic pain effects to displace the ship's hull, create a bow wave and wave effects for a wake,  although these are not so obvious in the renders.  I tried to get some foam effects on the bow wave and wake, but have not figured that out as yet.  I am starting to suspect I am trying to use a Cycles feature that has not yet been enabled.


While searching for reference material for birlinns,  came across some beautiful illustations on the website for Portencross Castle.  The artist is not named.  This is the sort of standard I would love to attain.

UPDATE:  I finally  managed to get a particle system working alongside the dynamic paint effects.  (below).    For some reason, re-baking particles requires that you exit and restart Blender before they show up.  I also ran into trouble with the scaling combined with the physics.   On my initial attempts, the speed of the ship scaled up to 20m/s,  no wonder is was leavng the water after hitting a big wave.  Unfortunately, at 7 minutes a frame, it is not practical to run a full animation from my workstation (it works out at an estimated 28 hours render time for 10 seconds of animated output).  Perhaps time to get a server running on AWS for this?

Also posted on BlenderArtists.org

Ghost in the Church

For Christmas, I received a new graphics card.  NVIDIA GeForce GTX508,  with 3Gb RAM and 512 CUDA cores!  Blender can offload the rendering to the GPU.  A test render that took over 9 minutes using my Intel Core 2 Quad CPU, takes only 51 seconds on the new GPU.  This makes an amazing difference with real-time feedback when tweaking textures.

Here is a test scene that I was not able to make look good using CPU only rendering,  I couldn't get the ghost texture right using trial and error and having to wait for feedback.

And another super-fast render.  This time of a midge, I previously gave up tweaking the textures on this one as it took several minutes to see the effect of any changes.  Not now :)

Blenderella - Walk Cycle

First test of a walk cycle with Blenderella.

Blenderella - making progress with rigging and texturing

An update on my Blenderella model.  As previously posted, I followed the excellent Blenderella follow-along DVD from Angela Guenette.  I am happy with the model but have had some abortive attempts at rigging her for animation.

Using the rigify script. I finally completed the rigging.  I am now tweaking the weight painting at different poses.   The body is fully rigged but I now need to find a good face rig also.

I also made a start on UV Unwrapping and texturing, and converting my placeholder textures to Cycles.

Blenderella, taking shape.

For comparison,  here is the previous post.

Wireframe

A Wee Dram

Another tutorial on using the Blender Cycles render engine.  I am really amazed at how well glass and liquid's turn out using near default settings.

This image created following Andrew Price's tutorial on BlenderGuru.com.

A Wee Dram anyone?

Barrels of fun

The great thing about using an open source application for creating 3d content is that updates get released frequently, and I get to play with them even before fully released.    But also the worst thing is that updates get released frequently, and I need to learn how to use them all over again!

There has just been some major updates to Blender, available from GraphicAll.org,  materials work in a completely different way,  the render engine has been revolutionised, camera tracking and dynamic paint plus other goodies from the summer coding efforts.

This is my first serious attempt to re-learn how materials work.

Following a tutorial on BlenderCookie.com by Jonathan Williamson. 

Barrels

Wireframe of the layout

New Material Node set-up for the Cycles Render Engine

CyberNat

Scottish Politics is an interesting place these days with an ongoing battle for the minds of the population between the mainstream media and bloggers.   The phrase CyberNats (Cyber Nationalists) was coined to refer to online bloggers who challenge the storyline being pumped through the established news channels. 

Without going too political on here, I liked the imagery of a CyberNat, here is my interpretation based on the dreaded highland midge.

CyberNat

CyberNat fuel