Sci-Fi Short - Location Design images

Here are some images of the location that the Sci-Fi 3D animated short is set in.

You can see that it's a grimy, dark spaceport room with a bizarre television set as the focal point!

All models were created using Blender 3D and all textures were made using The Gimp.

Click on the images to view full-sized.

More images to follow soon....

Link - Ohio Blender User

Here is a link to a filmmaker and special FX guy from Cleveland, Ohio who's been using Blender.

http://clevelandfx.blogspot.com/

I'm always interested in hearing from other Blender 3D users around the World and finding out what techniques and work they're doing with Blender.

So, if you have some tricks up your sleeve or are doing some interesting stuff with Bleneder feel fre to get in touch and i'll try and put up a link to your website/blog.


Shane
Dwarfed Films

Adding Camera Movement to Video Footage in Blender 3D

Adding Camera Movement to Video Footage in Blender 3D

For our latest short film I wanted to add very subtle camera movements to simulate a kind of hand-held feel to the action.
There are three ways I could go about this:

The first would be to animate the camera jittering about while doing the animation.
This would lead to longer rendering times of the backgrounds especially in scenes requiring lots of ray tracing and mirrored reflections.

The second way would be to render the scenes with a static camera and then import these sequences into Blender Sequence editor and apply the ‘Jitter’ plugin.
This would render faster but the jitter not very convincing.

The final way would be to render the scenes with a static camera and then import them back into Blender, project the images onto a 3D card which we can then add (limited) camera movement on the X and Y axis, as well as zoom.

SO this is the technique that I’m gonna use.

Ok, what’s the purpose/benefits of doing this?

Well, firstly, this method involves putting an image onto a plane (or any shape – but mostly a flat plane) and then using a 3D camera to perform simple pans, rotations and zooms on this image.
By doing this you can achieve some simple camera effects like handheld jitter.
Its not 100% accurate but it will suit some scenario’s and it is a great little way to do some useful cropping and post-processing on pre-recorded/animated footage.







It’s really easy to set up a 3D viewing plane:

All you need is a Camera and a Mesh Plane.
When inserting the Camera and the Plane, press ALT+R and then ALT+G to clear their rotation and location co-ordinates.

Then drag the Camera back on the Z-axis far enough so that you can see the Plane in the Camera View. Press CTRL+A to clear rotation/location/scale.

Now press the ‘0’ key on your keyboard to enter 3D view from the camera’s perspective.

Now, I’m working in this instance with footage that has dimensions of 720 X 300 pixels.
(For the actual film I will be using dimensions of 900 X 432 pixels but lets just use 720 X 300 for this example)

In the Render Buttons panel enter 720 X 300.

Now scale your mesh plane in Edit Mode so that it fits perfectly inside the camera view.

Fig 1: The image before being scaled to fit the camera view.


Fig 2: The image scaled to fit inside the Camera view accurately.


Enter UV edit mode and select all the vertices and Unwrap using “Project form View Bounds”. (It helps if you select a single still image from your image sequence and import it separately into the UV window so that it allows you to visually line up your plane to the correct scale)

Go to the Material buttons tab and add a new material to the plane.
Go to the Texture buttons and add a new texture to the plane – select an image sequence or movie. Enter the amount of frames you want to use in the box to shows up.


Go back to Material buttons and select Shadeless (and TEX FACE if you want).
In ‘MAP INPUT’ choose ‘UV’.

See the enclosed image for settings (you may note that I was using an image sequence with an Alpha channel).


Go to the render buttons panel and enter the output frame size you wanna use.
In this instance it’s 720 X 576 (PAL).
You will notice that the top and bottom of the 3D viewport fame has increased.
This is because the frame size I choose before (720 X 300) was intended to give a ‘letterboxed’ image.

Make sure Ambient Occlusion is turned off when rendering or else you will end up with the sky showing through in the background and increased render times.

Now that you are all set up, you can move the Camera about in 3D space and animate it using IPO’s.
You can zoom in on selected areas, or do pans and rotations.
Remember that when doing pans and rotations you need to be zoomed in slightly (or a lot!) or else you will end up with a strange looking cropped image.
This is why I rendered my initial sequences of the film as larger than my intended output size – 900 X 432 instead of 720 X 576.
This means that I can zoom in for camera movements without the image getting blocky or pixellated.
Add ‘jitter’ camera movements that zoom in and out and pan from side to side and up/down using IPO curves.
Be careful not to over do it or to add too much movement as it will become disorientating – and look a bit crap! Subtle moves will help add to the general feel of your movie.


Experiment with this technique and see what else you can come up with!


Shane Dwarfed Films

New Image from lender 3D animated Sci-Fi short

Here's another image showing the television from our latest short film.

Keep watching this site for further updates, images and news!

HP Printer will not install on Windows Vista? - Heres what to do

Having a problem trying to install a Hewlett Packard printer onto your Windows Vista PC/Laptop?

Does your install stall after failing to locate the drivers?

Well, I sympathize with you becasue the other night I nearly went crazy trying to get a damn printer to install on a Vista machine!

The computer would not recognize the new printer despite many, many attempts.
I tried re-installing the software multiple times to no avail.

I searched the Internet for solutions and went to the HP website for help.
I emailed HP for assistance - no reply yet.
I went to the HP website and downloaded the driver software again - even though I had the brand new install CD!

Well, it doesn't matter anymore because I found the solution myself!

Here was the problem (in case anyone else out there encounters similar):

After installing the software and drivers on the enclosed CD, the set-up screen then asked me
to connect the device to the machine using the USB cable. Then I was asked to search for the driver - the first option was to search the install CD for these drivers.
After a few moments the screen then said that the drivers could not be found.

Crap!

THE SOLUTION:

The solution was actually very easy!
I unplugged the USB cable and then replugged it again, prompting the set-up screen to ask me to locate the drivers for the printer.
Instead of selecting 'Search install CD', I choose to manually search for the drivers and redirected the computer to search the path: "c:\windows32\" or just "c:\windows\" - in other words, telling the computer to search your local hard drive for the files.

After a few moments the drivers were located and the machine installed correctly!
If you come across this problem, I hope this helps you out.

Now, how the hell did HP allow such a simple but annoying issue to crop up?
Surely they should've sorted a basic error like this before launhcing equipment and software.

I wish software/hardware manufacturers would get their act together and not release software until it has been properly screened, tested and checked.

Irritating nonsense like these install issues are the sort of thing that puts consumers off using certain manufacturers products in the future....