Archive of articles classified as' "3d"
Back homeI wrote this about about 2 months ago after playing around with IPO’s combined with a lattice modifier. I thought it would be a good way to create an organic deformation and since you can easily make IPO curves cyclic it was an easy way to make this pumping animation.
I should really go write a whole load of mod_rewrite rules. For now, here’s a link to the tutorial itself in the original format.
Some time ago when I first started to play with blender, particles where about the only half decent thing I could manage. Whilst working with a little script to draw me some cubes at along a grid (yeah, think city generator), I added a particle system to each one and gave them a random color. When I rendered it I thought it made a pretty cool background and played about with adding more variation.
The key to nice particles in blender is often to have more of them and bump up the alpha. Then enable the mysterious “x-alpha” setting in the halo pipeline. To get that feeling of energy or glowing you normally want to have the alpha quite low and the add setting fairly high.
An example blend file is here: halos.
I’ve been playing with the amazing blender now for just over a year properly. Before that the most I could manage was a few default primitives with flat shading. Then last year I picked up the book Bounce, Tumble & Splash mainly because I wanted to learn a bit more about the particle effects. I was literally transfixed for several days just drawing cubes with particle systems spurting out of each vertex.
After I eventually got bored of the same old renders I thought I would spend some time actually trying to use the fucking program. One year later I’m pretty chuffed with how I’ve come along. Bear in mind I’m a coder all day but I’ve got exposure to some cool 3d guys at work. And I spend a lot of my day coding python so I’ve also started mucking about using Blender for generative art along with processing.
Here is some of my work over the past year. I often find I’ll start out modelling something simple and then it will take over and I’ll spend hours adding new objects, then texturing and adding a bit of animation before playing with the renderer. When you spend a lot of your day writing code and trying to work out whats broke this time I find blender pretty relaxing.
Pretty much all this is done in 2.49b. Now that 2.50 is out (well, a pretty stable alpha) I should really start getting into that. Team blender – I salute you!
Aside from learning how to actually texture things beyond plain grey I also learned the nuances of the animation and sequencing sytems. The IPO thing (how blender keys the animations) actually makes a lot of sense and combined with the physics engine for soft body simulations you can easily create some bouncy, hairy balls 
Of course, my learning of blender would be nothing if I did not reinvest the new found knowledge into making explosions… Only this time instead of looking like bits of glitter on a silent blue background its a bit more realistic. Creating these things is usually just a case of adding a few particle systems, one textured black and one yellow-ish. Then its a matter of not leaving the particle physics on all their defaults. Pro-tip – make sure you add some fucking rotation. Exploding shrapnel tends not to stay along one particular direction vector.