Friday, March 16. 2007
2D Logos In Blender 3D
Warning: this entry has nothing to do with Poetry or PHP. It has to do with Blender 3D. What can I say? I have diverse interests. And this is my site.
3D Woman Rendered In Blender
My sister asked me to design the logo for her website. Her vision: a woman in warrior pose holding a lotus in her upturned palm. My immediate thought: why not use Blender? After all, I had some success playing with existing logos earlier.
An enduring logo has to work in print, be quickly recognizable, and turn out well in just two colors. That means anything done in 3D must translate well to 2D. But because Blender is such a great tool with so many useful plug-ins, it acutally turned out to be an ideal starting point for this rather complex design.
The combination of MakeHuman and auto-rigging gave me the ability to fine-tune a female humanoid form to my (and Lisa’s) liking, then quickly rig it with an armature and pose it into exactly the right position. There’s a great white-paper on makehuman and autorigging here. Finally, rendering the female as shadeless white on a white background with the render trace setting gives the figure you see in the video above.
For the lotus, I simply modeled two types of petals and used SpinDup to create the inner and outer rings of petals. I found that seeing the back layer of petals made the object a bit too complex so I simply sliced it in half with a plane before rendering. Then I played with the angle and positioning to get a shot that looked good when rendered as shadeless white with a trace outline.
Finally, I took both stills into Freehand MX and used the autotool to convert them to vector curves. I added the bottom leaves of the lotus manually and continued to tweak and simplify the bezier curves to taste. The end result is an object I can fill with any color or gradient, scale up for print runs without pixilation, and composite against still images to create the website banner. There’s no doubt that the flexibility of a 3D object and the ability to reposition both poses and camera angles at will came in extremely handy in designing this 2D logo.
Rigging
Posed
For the lotus, I simply modeled two types of petals and used SpinDup to create the inner and outer rings of petals. I found that seeing the back layer of petals made the object a bit too complex so I simply sliced it in half with a plane before rendering. Then I played with the angle and positioning to get a shot that looked good when rendered as shadeless white with a trace outline.
Bisected Lotus
Finally, I took both stills into Freehand MX and used the autotool to convert them to vector curves. I added the bottom leaves of the lotus manually and continued to tweak and simplify the bezier curves to taste. The end result is an object I can fill with any color or gradient, scale up for print runs without pixilation, and composite against still images to create the website banner. There’s no doubt that the flexibility of a 3D object and the ability to reposition both poses and camera angles at will came in extremely handy in designing this 2D logo.
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Hey, that looks great! I liked the leaf logo and animation as well.
Hi Kernon,
Thanks for stopping by. I’m glad you liked it. Thanks also for hosting a "Blender Newbies" site. As I said already, given how deep Blender is (with new features coming out in every release), I feel like I could be a "Blender Newbie" for the rest of my life. That such an incredible program exists as FOSS still blows my mind.
Cheers,
Robert
Thanks for stopping by. I’m glad you liked it. Thanks also for hosting a "Blender Newbies" site. As I said already, given how deep Blender is (with new features coming out in every release), I feel like I could be a "Blender Newbie" for the rest of my life. That such an incredible program exists as FOSS still blows my mind.
Cheers,
Robert
Nice work. This gives me some ideas for a logo I’m currently working on.
Is there a way to make the background separated from the model (not blurred with it on render) without clicking ‘key’ button (the background turns black)
I’m not totally sure what you are asking, Gradir. Do you mean you want to turn anti-aliasing off? Not sure what you mean by "separated" and "not blurred"…
He means rendering without premul. By default, blender multiplies the foreground with the background, using the alpha values as a mask (this is called premul, at one time done to speed things up, now only a gigantic pain. the opposite is key, which doesn’t do any of that).
Unfortunately you cannot render the sky background with key. By its very nature, rendering with key means that you’re only rendering the foreground, and not the background. If you did render the background with key, you’d get a black outline around your objects due to the antialiasing.
Joe
Unfortunately you cannot render the sky background with key. By its very nature, rendering with key means that you’re only rendering the foreground, and not the background. If you did render the background with key, you’d get a black outline around your objects due to the antialiasing.
Joe
