OSCAR Character on Blendernation.com

Just checked Blnder.org and Blendernation websites today and spotted the free fully rigged character OSCAR I made available is featured on them.

You can visit the Blendernation website here http://www.blendernation.com/2008/04/17/oscar-free-rigged-character/

Go ahead and download OSCAR. He's free for both commercial and personal use.

Shane

Mr. Humpfninkel: New Bus Model

Here are some images from Mr. Humpfninkel's Sales Technique of the bus model.
The previous bus model I created was crap, to be honest!
This one is much better.
Modelled in Blender 3d.
The lighting in these mages is a bit rubbish and you can see the crappy approximate ambient occlusion artifacts. But these are just quick renders to check how the model was shaping up.

And it looks much better than the old version!

Shane

Mr Humpfninkel: Napoleon Costume Early Test

An image of Mr. Humpfninkel in a Napoleon Bonaparte-style costume!
The costume is un-textured so far - that's why it looks rough.
Rendered on a gradient background and with flat lighting.

Mr Humpfninkel: Wearing a gaz mask while vacuuming vomit!

The heading pretty much describes what's going on here, I suppose.
It's the lead character form our latest animated offering, "Mr. Humpfninkel's Sales Technique", displaying his vacuum cleaner product in all it's 'glory'.
Why is he wearing a gas mask, you ask?
Well, why not!!!

Bcakgrounds are being rendered seperately in multiple layers so this is just an animation still with an alpha channel.


More images to follow.

Mr Humpfninkel Short Film Update: Blender Fluid Sim

In our latest animated short Mr. Humpfninkel’s Sales Technique, the title character (an inept door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman) is required to get sick. Yep, that’s right – vomit!

We initially intended to achieve this using Metaballs but then changed our minds and went with Blender’s fluid simulation instead.

He reason for this was the quality and realism of the FX. Our initial scepticism was based on the sometimes fiddly and random nature of the fluid simulator when we’ve used it before (We used it for the liquid pouring from the Rurf bottle in To Shoot A Rurf, but used metaballs for blood, the ‘mirror snake’ and a plane multi-subdivided and with a wave modifier for the river in the ear canal sequence)

Here are some early tests.

The first shows some gloopy vomit (the render is ultra-lo resolution) lit using approximate ambient occlusion and a single lamp.

The second shows a quick and dirty test (using open GI renderer - taht's why it looks crappy) of Mr. Humpfninkel getting sick. I know the image is small and very lo-res, but you should be able to make out that the vomit follows the movement of his head and his body deflects the flow of the vomit also.

All this talk of vomit is making me queasy!

More images and updates to follow soon.

By the way, Blogger doesn't seem to like Animated gif's so instead I use http://tinypic.com
to host them and link them to Blogger so that they display correctly on the site.