Blender 3D

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.

I have recently been enjoying working on modelling and rigging a cat in Blender. The challenges are manifold: from realistic fur to simulating quadruped movement to combining complex actions into a believable animal. The process has been very satisfying so far, as I am making good use of Blender’s non-linear action editor and learning a lot about character animation in the process. Here is an early, rough sample of a transition between walking (left two; right two) to trotting (front left, back right; back left, front right):

Thanks to Legaz’s great Blender/QTVR Tutorial, I was able to make my first QTVR movie using Blender. I wanted to create a useful reference for future QTVR movies in Blender, so I created a scene with a camera inside a cube and reference numbers in front of each wall. The camera rotates from frames 1-6 to face walls 1-6, thereby making it easy to render the necessary images for MakeCubic to create the VR movie. You can download the blender library file and reference movie here or here. Then simply import the Camera object from the .blend file (Objects->Camera) into your landscape or detailed interior scene, render frames 1-6, and feed them to MakeCubic. Works great!

Growing up, small electric motors held tremendous promise. Add a few plastic gears, axles, rubberband timing belts, and you could rig up your own invention. Out of reverence for this small token of possibility, I decided to model and render a somewhat glamorized shiny electric motor. I already have plans for building virtual gizmos with it which may or may not involve Stafano Saleri’s BMG. I used static particles for the copper wire inside the insulation as well as copper-and-green colorbands and colored clouds textures applied to the specularity color of the casing metal to give my best impersonation of what these little motors really look like. Enjoy!

I have recently become interested in atmospheric effects, perhaps partly due to the recent inclement weather. This animation demonstrates the use of rain effects similar to those in feeblemind’s tutorial, volumetric fog, rain dripping from rooftops, using the water plugin to simulate rain on an uneven surface (tile), rain in puddles versus rain in grass (generated using RipSting’s fiber generator), and stopping rain at a boundary to create a dry interior. All in all I am pleased with the “atmosphere” and look forward to detailing the inside of the building, adding trees and other landscape, and eventually using this scene as part of an animated story.

This is just a rough mock-up I did of some of the possibilities for integrating the great 2-D logo of the company I currently work for with a 3-D animation. At this point I was still fairly new to mesh modelling in blender, so getting the 3-D shot to line up just right with the 2-D logo really taught me a lot. I simulated the ripples using progressively enlarging reflective toroids—worked fine for this type of “water” which doesn’t need to be translucent. All in all, still a nice little piece. Music by my wife, Valerie.