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.

Some Terregen renders

Here are some renders done using TERRAGEN 1 that I thought I'd stick up on the site to show anyone unfamiliar with this great piece of software what it can do. These renders of landscapes were created entirely with Terragen and required very little effort to achieve some good looking results. Terragen 2 is in testing stage at the moment (as I've mentioned in a previous post on this site) and includes many more features such as 3D cloudscapes, .obj/.Lwo import options and more sahder tools to create even more realistic landscapes and even entire planets. But Terragen 1 is faster at rendering and to be honest Terragen 2 - at the moment - is a little glitchy and slow. For the moment I prefer Terragen 1!
Lets look at a few images I made with Terragen 1 (with no extra photoshop-like touches):

This is a weird looking landscape I made in Blender. It's deliberately strange looking, by the way! Check out the water. Looks good, eh.


Heres another landscape. Again some nice looking water. Remember Terragen can make animations so you can do flyovers and fly-pasts and the like....



Here's an image that reminds me of my home country Ireland. Gentle rolling hills, grass, ehm, that's pretty much it...


Heres a Himalaya type Everest view of a snow covered mountain. Terragen's sun settings and cloudscapes can all be animated so you can have the scene animate from day tyo dusk to night if you want!

Terragen is for "Non Commercial Use Only" and can be downloaded for free. Also check out Terragen 2, which is still in it's pre-release version.

Comments on the site please!

Lighting render comparison

The attached image shows a comparison of the same scene lit in two different ways.
The image on the left was rendered with a sky dome of hemisphere lights and an area light casting shadows only. The image on the right was rendered using a combination of a small sky dome and ambient occlusion.
The image on the left is better - despite faking global illumination. It also rendered much faster than the ambient occlusion render. The whole point goes to show that "cheating" during the rendering process is the way to go!
You can click on the images to view them full size and compare the important differences between them.

Email Dwarfed Films

Office Hours: ambient occlusion

Here are some images showing the power of Ambient Occlusion in Blender 3D.
In case you don't know, Ambient Occlusion is a global illumination feature that simulates realistic lighting in the 3D scene.
The top image shows the Ambient Occlusion settings used when rendering the attached stills. Click on it to view it full screen size.
the middel and bottom images show renders with and without Ambient Occlusion (AO). Both images were lit exactly the same with a single shadow-casting light but as you can see they look vastly different due to the effectiveness of the AO. Of course using AO results in much longer rendering times but it is well worth the extra effort and time.

Contact Dwarfed Films