Issue 25 | Dec 2009

Blender learning made easy

COVERART Little match girl -by Cristian Mihaescu (criss)

Tutorial - Christmas Ball

Tutorial - Making Santa

Making - Cyclone

Making of - Winter Scene

EDITORGaurav Nawani gaurav@blenderart.org

MANAGING EDITORSandra Gilbert sandra@blenderart.org

WEBSITENam Pham nam@blenderart.org

DESIGNERGaurav, Sandra, Alex

PROOFERSBrian C. TreacyBruce WestfallDaniel HandDaniel MateHenriël VeldtmannJoshua LeungJoshua ScottonKevin BraunMark WarrenNoah SummersPatrick ODonnellPhillipRonan PosnicScott HillWade BickValérie Hambert

WRITERSJohn BogranGard GoodwinThomas KoleBenjamin BailyDavid Ward

COVER ARTLittle match girl -by Cristian Mihaescu(criss)

CONTENTS

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2

Tutorial - Christmas Ball

Tutorial - Making Santa

Making of - Cyclone

Making of - Winter Scene

Johny Blender Training DVD

Interview: Jonathan Williamson

Book Review: Incredible Machines

9

15

18

21

31

32

35

I'll be the first to admit that winter is notmy favorite season, but there is somethingmesmerizing about watching snow gentlyfall. The soft fluffy look as it piles up hereand there. Then there are the lovely shadesof blue that seem to paint winter land-scapes in enchanting hues of winter chill.The almost magical look of icicles hangingin uneven rows along rooftops.

But all that aside, this particular winter hasbeen filled with some exciting activities onthe Blender front. We have seen the releaseof Blender 2.50 Alpha 0, an event that hasthe whole community buzzing in excite-ment of new discovery and learning. ProjectDurian is going full steam ahead and theupdates on their blog are full of new discov-eries and excitement as well.

Now if only it wasn't so cold and wet, itwould be a perfect season...

But even though winter is entirely too cold,it is filled with a number of fun activities aswell as some rather popular holidays. And

we have a couple of great tutorials to addto your holiday cheer and preparations, aswell as a beautiful winter scene that cap-tures the magic of winter chill.

So grab a cup of hot cocoa and a candycane or two and settle in for a good read.

sandra@blenderart.orgSandra Gilbert

Managing Editor

EDITORIAL 3

www.blenderart.org Issue 25 | Dec 2009 - "Winter Wonderland"

IntroductionDue to the nature of the internet, websites come andgo at a rather remarkable rate and all too often takeour favorite tutorials with them. Every so often, I gothrough my bookmarks and make sure that my fa-vorites are still there as well as any new ones that Imight have discovered since I last checked. So here ismy current list of great Blender Educational Resourc-es.

If a tutorial or resource is not listed here, it doesn'tmean that it has disappeared, these are just some ofmy latest favorites.

Get the latest documentation for Blender.

Blender Quick Start Guide

The Blender Quick Start guide provides you with abasic overview of blender functionality on a singleA4 page, ready to print. It is designed for beginnerswho don't want to read the whole documentation,and for experienced 3D artists who want to quicklylearn blender.

Blender User Manual

Blender's user manual is maintained by a dedicatedgroup of Blender users who work hard to keep it upto date with the frequent new releases of Blenderand it's features.

Download the Blender Wiki in PDF

Marco Ardito converted the blender wiki to pdf for-mat for those who need/want offline access to thelatest Blender documentation. He plans to update it

monthly. At this point it is a single pdf file, over 1700pages, about 52 MB.

Noob to Pro

This book is a series of tutorials ar-ranged in a sequence to help the newuser become a Blender expert. Thetutorials become increasingly moredifficult. As a result, intermediate us-ers may quickly advance to whatevertutorial is most suitable for their

knowledge and can continue along the sequence.Although there are many different learning paths auser could take, we've made a concerted effort toaccommodate everyone.

Essential Blender

Essential Blender will get you working with mode-ling, materials and texturing, lighting, particle sys-tems, several kinds of animation, and rendering. Inaddition, there are chapters on the new mesh sculpt-ing tools and the brilliant compositor.

You can download a free pdf version

You can still purchase a printed hard copy at:

Blender E-shop

Amazon

Cool Educational Sites

Over the years a variety of great sites have been cre-ated to educate the CG/Blender masses. Here are afew to get you started.

IZZY SPEAKS : My Favorite Blender Educational Resource Links 4

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So here is my current list ofgreat Blender Educational

Resources

CG Cookie

CG Cookie is an online educa-tional resource for cg artists

working with various popular applications. Current-ly, we are offering education on 3D Studio Max,Blender, Maya, ZBrush, and Cheetah3D. Our educa-tional materials are presented either in a written textformat, or streaming video.

BlenderCookie

Blender Cookie is a site dedicated to supplying con-sistent, high quality, blender education materialsproduced by certified trainers from around theglobe. By offering high resolution streaming videos,written education, developer interviews and featuredresources, we aim to be the central hub for blendereducation.

Blender 3D Architect

Allan Brito provides valuable tips and tutorials aboutusing Blender 3D for Architectural Visualization.

blenderguru

He provides various tips and tutorials to get themost out of blender.

3d Synthesis

A wonderful collection of tutorials showing how tocreate rather unusual effects.

KatsBits

Making 3D content for games & interactive media

Low poly 3D models, meshes, level editing and tex-tures making

Hints, tips, tutorials & resources for 3D modeling &content creation

Blender Courses

All of the following courses are free.

Blender 3D: Product Rendering

Video tutorials: Product Rendering with Blender uti-lizing traditional 3 key light rigs, fake global illumi-nation and external GI render engines. Also coveredare materials and lamp definitions.

Blender 3D: Digital Modeling of Organic Sur-faces

Video tutorials: Digital Organic Product Modelingwith Blender 3D using Polygon Subdivision SurfaceModeling. Also covers steps to several modelingprojects with tips and techniques.

Blenducation

Blenducation seeks to provide a live, high qualitylearning experience for anyone interested 3D designand animation. They have a mix of both free andsmall fee classes.

Blender Basics- 3rd Edition

Classroom Tutorial Book: The manual addresses skillsin a sequential order so skipping around may leaveout important skill descriptions addressed in earlierchapters.

IZZY SPEAKS : My Favorite Blender Educational Resource Links 5

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Blender 3D Design Course

The Blender 3D Design course is intended to offerstudents an introduction to the world of computergenerated 3-D modeling and animation. As an intro-ductory course, it provides a basic understanding ofthe skills and techniques employed by 3-D designersin a wide range of applications. In this online coursewe will explore basic mesh modeling, applying tex-tures and materials to 3-D objects, lighting, anima-tion and rendering. This course should provide agood basis for further independent study in architec-tural, engineering and theatrical modeling and gamedesign.

BlenderCourse.com

This projects goal is to develop free lessons and/ortutorials in PDF format for the 3D modeling toolBlender 3D. The idea is to write step-by-step courseswhich cover various Blender related topics in peoplesnative languages. All the BlenderCourses are writtenin the same style and layout in order to make con-sistent and recognisable ebooks.

Video Tutorial Series

I really love these kind of series, the author takesone project from start to finish and covers all thetechniques and tools needed.

Blender Tutorial Series - Creation of Johnny Blender

A twenty-eight part series on the complete creationof a character in Blender, from a single polygon to afully-rigged and textured character.

Model, UV, and Texture a Complete Manga Characterin Blender

In this 7 video long, intermediate to advanced leveltutorial series, professional Blender artist, KaranShah, will walk you through the complete creationprocess of a ready to animate video game character.From modeling to UVs and texturing, to adding thefinal mesh topology for deformation.

Blender Tutorials etc. (Disneyland)

These videos mostly feature a 3D model of Disney-land, but the focus is on educating about Blender(and occasionally Photoshop), not educating aboutDisneyland

IZZY SPEAKS : My Favorite Blender Educational Resource Links 6

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Blender 2.5 Alpha 0The releaseof Blender2.5 alpha 0has broughta lot of ex-citementand morethan a fewchanges. Asa first test-ing release,it already has quite a bit of familiar functionalityadded back in to the new code and interface. Forthose of you that haven't tested the pre-builds, theremight be a little confusion as you try to find familiarfeatures and options. Not to worry, new tutorialsthat ease you through the changes are already ap-pearing, with more bound to be arriving as more us-ers get comfortable with the new interface. And ofcourse, don't forget to check the release logs to seethe current features.

BlenderCookie:

Overview of Blender 2.5

Modeling a set of Christmas Lights in Blender 2.5

Box Modeling an Alien Character in Blender 2.5 Alpha0

Blender Guru:

Where'd that button go?

Totally Blended:

Surviving Blender 2.5 Alpha

Observations and workarounds for the beta release.

BlenderNewbies:

Blender 2.5.0 Tutorial: Changing the Keystroke forthe Add Menu from Shift-A to Spacebar

Ira Krakow: irakrakow's Channel:

Blender 2.5 Sneak Preview

Blender 2.50 Alpha 0 Tools Menu

Blender 2.5 Camera Controls

Blender 2.5 Array Modifier

Blender 2.5 Ambient Occlusion

Blender 2.5 Pivot Points

Blender 2.5 User Preferences

CGCookies.com

Blender 2.5 Training Series

Notice: All of the material within this training seriesis subject to change based on the development ofBlender 2.5

Just a few short weeks after Release Candidate 1 ispublished to the public. We will begin to release ourtraining series one by one. You can expect to see arelease of a new series every 1-2 weeks, but we willbe working hard to make this happen sooner.

BLENDER NEWS 7

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New book: 3D for iPhone Appswith Blender and SIO2

Tony Mullen announcedhis upcoming book oniPhone game develop-ment with Blender andthe SIO2 game engine.

Tony Mullen wrote:

Hi Everybody,

I'm very pleased to an-nounce that my latestbook is available for pre-order at Amazon! Thebook is titled "3D foriPhone Apps withBlender and SIO2: YourGuide to Creating 3DGames and More withOpen-Source Software" and you can pre-order it here.

As you can see from the title, the book deals with usingBlender and the powerful SIO2 Game Engine to create 3Dgames and apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch. I can tellyou first hand that it's a blast! The book does not assumeany specific background knowledge, so in that sense it'sintended for "beginners". There's even an appendix givinga quick and dirty basic introduction to Blender itself.However, you should be aware that the material is chal-lenging and the pace is pretty brisk, so any backgroundyou do have in Blender or graphics programming will bevery helpful for you. It does assume some basic under-standing of programming, so if you're new to program-ming in general, then you should be prepared to turn to

supplemental resources to get you through any difficultpatches.

Blender 2.50 material libraryMany users have wanted a material library to ship withBlender and it looks like Blender 2.50 will contain one. Acall for materials has been posted on the forums.

LetterRip writes:

A material library will be added to Blender for 2.5, wewould like to invite the community to participate in thisby donating material settings. In order to facilitate this,please provide a link to a blend file with a single materialin it.

Link - BlenderArtists thread

BLENDER NEWS 8

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Christmas Ball

IntroductionIn this tutorial I will try to teach youhow you can make a simple yet fairlygood looking Christmas tree ball inBlender. I won't explain any super-ad-vanced functions but yet some thingsthat are good to know. I've chosen tosplit it up in three parts, the model-ling, the render setup and the materi-als. If you choose to follow thetutorial through, your final result willhopefully look somewhat like the pic-ture now left of the text.

Otherwise, you can skip to the part you want tolearn more about. I've tried to write the tutorial on avery basic level so that even beginners can follow itthrough, though the last two parts might be a bitdifficult.

First up: The Modelling

Begin with deleting the default cube and instead adda UV Sphere (Add>> Mesh >> UVsphere). Set both therings and rows to the default 32 and click OK. Afteradding the Sphere press “S”. While you are in this"scale-mode" you can either drag with the mouseuntil you've got the size you want or you can writein your own number to set the exact number oftimes you want the object scaled.

For this press 2 and thenEnter. Next look fromthe front-view (numpad1) and enter edit-mode(tab) for the Sphere. Use

the box select tool (B), select the top three ringswith it.

Then press “G” to movethem all, also press “Z”to only move them onthe z-axis and pull themup about 0.07 units (youcan type this in as well).Press “A” to deselect allvertices and now selectonly the top two rings.These are to be movedalong the z-axis ca 0.2units and then scaledwith “S” a factor of ca1.4 units.

With thesame verti-ces se-lectedpress “E ->region” toextrude theselection,right-clickor press“esc” to getout of the“drag-mode” and instead scale it down about 0.8.Extrude again and drag the extrusion down a bit. Allthat's left now for the main ball is to make itsmooth. To do this, exit edit-mode (tab), then go tothe editing panel (F9) and with the Sphere selectedlook for the “Modifiers” tab, press Add Modifier andselect Subsurf. Then in the “Link and Materials” tabpress the Set Smooth button.

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With the base done we're going to need a thing called a“String holder” in good English. Make sure that the cur-sor is still in the middle of the Sphere, else select it andpress “Shift” + “S” and select the “Cursor -> Selection”option. Then add a Add -> Mesh -> Circle, set thenumber of vertices to 16 and change the radius to 0.33.This sets the start size of the Circle to that value, whichmeans that we actually could have set the radius forthe main Sphere to 2 instead of scaling it after creatingit.

Anyhow, move the Circle up 2.46 units along the z-axis,go into edit-mode, extrude the whole Circle downabout -0.35 along the z-axis and scale the extrudedvertices up about a factorof 1.3. Deselect all verticesand select only the topring, extrude this up 0.05and scale it down to 0.8 itssize, then extrude up 0.05again and scale down to0.35 and finally extrudethis up 0.05 yet again.Next, deselect all verticesand instead select everyother vertex at the bottomring and drag these upabout 0.2 units and thenscale these down to about0.9 and it should lookabout as in the picture.

Let's set this piece smooth shall we? Exit edit-mode andgo to the editing panel again and press Set Smooth.Now you should probably see some weird black lineson the model, this is caused by the fact that Blenderdoesn't know which way is the outside of the modeland you will most likely bump into this problem a lot

more if you haven't already. To fix this simply go backinto edit-mode, press “A” until all vertices are selectedand press “Ctrl” + “N” and select “Recalculate NormalsOutside”. Now we're going to give the String Holdersome volume. To do this, select all vertices and press “E-> Region”, right-click orpress “esc” and thenpress “Alt” + “S” toshrink it inwards andwrite in a value of 0.01.Extrude and shrink againtwo times with the val-ues of 0.04 and 0.01.Then do the same thingas with the Sphere andadd a subsurf modifier and then set it smooth. Thoughthis time we want a more smooth surface than the de-fault so we increase the “levels” and “render levels” to3 and you'll see that we get a nice and smooth surface.It's good to know that there's a shortcut for the sub-surf-modifier, if you press “Ctrl” + “any given numberfrom 1-4” you will add a subsurf-modifier to the se-lected object with the given number's resolution.

Now for the string! Youcould make it of a Circleor tube that you extrudebut that wouldn't lookvery smooth and alsowould take a lot of time.Instead we can use thefantastic Curves inBlender that's muchmore easy to handle andgives a far more good looking result. Firstly, place thecursor a little above the Sphere, add a Add -> Curve ->Bezier Curve then replace the cursor a little to the sideand add a Add -> Curve -> Bezier Circle.

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Select the Curve and go tothe editing panel (F9), inthe Curve and Surface tabmake sure the “3D” buttonis pressed, this makes itable to model the Curve in3D else it will only move ina 2D space, then in thetext space after “BevOb”type in the name of the Bezier Circle, default“CurveCircle”, this will as you see make the Curve intoa tube. The thickness of the tube is linked to the size ofthe Circle, so scale the Circle down to about 0.02 orwhatever thickness you want for your string and thenpress “M” which brings up a panel of 20 buttons, press2 and then Enter. This puts the Circle on the secondlayer which you can get to if you simply press 2, getback by pressing 1 again.

The modelling of the string is a bit tricky but withsome tweaking it will hopefully look good for you inthe end. Go into edit-mode for the Curve and select oneof the 3-point lines by right-clicking on the middlepoint, with this you can grab and change the Curve,press “G” to move it and press “R” to rotate it until itsticks right up from the hole of the String holder. Thenlook from top-view (numpad 7) and in the editing panelgo to the “Curve Tools 1” tab and select “Retopo”. Re-topo makes it so that whenever you move somethingfrom a view Blender will automatically drop the movedvertices down to thesurface of the nearestobject that's directlyunder the verticesbased on the view.Hard to explain butyou'll see how it workssoon. Select the otherend of the Curve and

from top-view place it as in the picture and also rotateit so it's looking the right way. From here you can hold“Ctrl” down and left-click wherever you want the nextsection of the string to be.

Do this and add seg-ments approximately atthe places shown in thepicture and now it's veryimportant to deselectthe “Retopo” button orelse modelling will turnout very hard. The stringwill now look kind ofweird but at least thesegments nicely follow the surface of the Sphere. Whatyou have to do now is to move the points at the end ofeach 3-point line until each segment is aimed the rightway and no part of the string is below the surface ofthe Sphere. After you've got a nice string, select thesegment created last and extrude this with “E” andtweak it until it's facing down into the hole the sameway as the first segment.

If you've fol-lowed thesteps correctlyand figuredthe difficultparts out yourcompletedmodel shouldlook some-what like this.

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Secondly: The Render setup

In this part I'll show how to set up a scene for therender to make it look good. I will talk about lighting,Approximate Ambient Occlusion and also a little posi-tioning of the Camera.

Ok, to create a planeprecisely at the bottomof the Christmas treeball you can select theSphere and go into ed-it-mode, select the ver-tex at the bottom andpress “Shift” + “S” ->“Cursor -> Selection”.Go out of edit-modeand add a Add -> Mesh-> Plane and scale it upabout 40.0 or evenmore. Next select thecamera and go intoCameraview (numpad0), here you can pressG to move it around(not very fast thoughso to move the Cameralong distances it's rec-ommended to do thisoutside of Camer-aview) and you canalso press “Shift” + “F”to enter the so called“Fly-mode” with whichyou can look around,and also a lot of otherfunny stuff you'll prob-ably notice after trying it out a bit. Anyway, move theCamera until it has the Ball in the center of the view

and no edge ofthe plane iswithin the dottedline.

Next place thedefault Lamp onthe positionshown in the twopictures in rela-tion to whereyour Camera is.Then press F5 un-til you get to the“Lamp Buttons”panel and dosome adjust-ments as shownin the picture.

When you clickon the “Area” but-ton your Lampwill transform into a different form and will also get adotted linecomingout of it,it's impor-tant forthis line topenetratethe Ball asshown inthe pictureso rotate ituntil itdoes.

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The area lamp is different from the normal lamp sinceit is made for giving a really soft light and also withsoft shadows in a given direction.

Size: This increases the size of the lightsource andtherefore makes the shadows softer.

Energy: This changes the energy of the light. Arealamps have a stronger light than the normal lamp sothis value often needs to be pretty low.

The color sliders: With no big surprise this changes thecolour of the lamp, since no lamp is really 100% whiteit's more realistic to change it to, for example, thiswarm light yellow color.

Samples: The number of samples per pixel for the shad-ows. The higher the value the less grains there will bein the shadows and if set to 1 the area lamp will simplycast normal sharp shadows.

Duplicate the lamp and place it as in the two images,then make the adjustments in the “Lamp Buttons”panel shown below.

The spot lamp shows more exact what area it lightsand is therefore better when lighting specific parts of ascene or if you want more controlled lighting.

SpotSi: Changes the size the spotlight affects.

SpotBl: Makes the edges of the spot lighted moresharp/blurry.

Then copy this light and yet again place it as shown inthe picture. This light will be about the same though

this time we'll select the “No Specular” button to re-move this lights specular on the objects. This will nowbe our light setup but to get that really realistic lookwe'll use so called Approximate Ambient Occlusionwhich basically removes all the black spots in the

render by lighting up everything slightly. Press F5 againuntil you reach the “World Buttons” panel, here clickon the “Amb Occ” tab and click on “Use Falloff” andchange the falloff to 0.8. Falloff changes how far thedarker areas around objects go, the higher the value,the shorter the dark spots. Also change the “Raytrace”to “Approximate”, this makes the processing a lot fasterand also is without grains.

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Now if you press F12your render shouldlook something like thepicture nearby. Nicehuh?

Finally: The Materials

Add a material for the main Sphere called “Christmasball” or something and make the following changes:

RayMir: Sets the amount of mirror reflection, set it toabout 0.25.

Fresnel: Makes the surfaces aligned with the Cameraless reflective, set this to about 1.7.

Gloss: Makes the reflections a little blurry instead ofsharp, set it to about 0.8.

For the String holder add a material called “String hold-er” or something and press F5 once to get to the tex-ture panel and add a new texture and select the texturetype called “Clouds”. Name this texture “Silver”. PressF5 again until you get back to the “Material Buttons”panel again and make the changes shown in the nearbypicture. The “col” and “nor” makes the texture affectthe colour and the normal to make it look a bit bumpy.

Last but not least, add a material for the String withthe right values.

Spec: The higher the value, the shinier is the object.

Hard: The smaller the value, the more the specular isdistributed on the object.

Well, that's it I guess. Hope it hasn't been too boring tofollow. Now simply hit F12 and sleep for a while orsomething and when you wake up you'll find yourbeautiful Christmas tree ball waiting on the screen foryou. : )

If you have any questions, or maybe if you wonder howto do some of this in Blender 2.5, you can e-mail me

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John Bogren

I'm 17 years old, live in Sweden and havebeen working with blender on my spare-time for approximately 3-4 years.

Email: John_9998@blenderartist.org

Making Santa

IntroductionOnce again it is that magical time ofyear during which a jolly old manflies around the world in a sleighpulled by reindeer to deliver toys togood girls and boys, and we call thatold man Santa Clause. He is alwaysthe first thing to pop into my headwhen I think of winter and so Ithought it was only fitting to makemy own little Santa for this issue ofBlenderArt Mag, and show you howyou can too!

So let's get to it...

The first step is todesign the characterand decide how toconstruct it in 3D.For the purpose ofthis article I stuck toa design that wasfairly simple, havingno eyes and very fewdetails at all.MyPaint is my fa-vorite program forcreating quick sketches and paintings like this. Thegeneral concept of the character was pretty well fig-ured out before I had even begun to paint, but itwas still helpful to get an image down so I could seeit before attempting to model the character in 3D.

To begin the model, the shapes were blocked in us-ing primitives (mostly spheres). I find that blockingin the basic forms with simple geometry before

working into any details is essential to getting anappealing result. By starting rough and refining thewhole character at once, getting lost in details orlosing track of proportions is less likely to happen,making sure the shape of the character works welloverall every step ofthe way.

Once the primitivegeometry is in place,it is then necessary tore-design the topol-ogy of the surface toget better controlover both the facecount and edge flow.The Retopo tool canbe used for this, butsince I also want torefine the model dur-ing this step, I preferto do this 'freehand'using the primitivesas a guide.

Once the model iscomplete, it is time tostart rigging! Usuallywhen creat-ing a char-acter, I willbegin rig-ging beforethe mode-ling haseven beencompleted,but for thisarticle I

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have decided to make it a separate step for clarity. It isbeyond the scope of this article to explain the entireprocess I went through in rigging this character, but Iwill do my best to summarize clearly the parts that Ifeel may be confusing.

While design-ing a characterrig, I find ituseful to sepa-rate the bonesinto 3 mainworking groups– deformers,mechanisms,and controls.Deformers arethe bones that will influence the mesh directly (withthe 'deform' option enabled), Mechanisms are bonesused to define the motions of the character and toserve as 'mediators' between the deformers and thecontrols, and the Controls are the bones which will beused by the animator for setting keys during anima-tion.

Separating the bones by type not only helps keep thingsorganized and less confusing to look at, it also makestrouble-shooting a rig a far less daunting task. Since

the deform bones are constrained to thecontrols/mechanisms and not key-framed, they can bereconfigured even after animation has been created forthe character (since the controls are the only boneswith keys). This is a trick I learned from Nathan Veg-dahl when I was first starting out with Blender.

Santa is indeed very round, and so the meshdeformercame in very handy. The meshdeformer is very usefulfor volume preservation, and is fairly simple to use aswell. The trick to using it with an armature is to createa vertex group (usually called 'NoMDef') to blend themesh influence between the armature and meshde-former. You can see on Santa that the armature modi-fier is limited to the 'NoMDef' group, and themeshdeformer is limited to the inverse of the 'NoMDef'group. This group can be modified even after the mesh-deformer has been bound to the mesh, to balance theinfluences as needed.

The legs and feet arebased on a techniqueI've explained beforein this tutorial onBlenderArtists. I'vemade a slight changeto the design by add-ing an extra childbone on the leg, fac-ing back up towardsthe pelvis. This bonefollows the leg sinceit is a child, but doesnot scale with the IKbone because I have enabled the little 's' button in thebone options. The purpose of this is to get the top ofthe boot to follow along with the angle of the leg, butnot stretch as the leg does.

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The lips are a simplified version of a technique Ilearned from analyzing the Big Buck Bunny Rig. Basical-ly, a series of controls are laid out, and become the tar-gets for stretch-to constraints on the lip bones. Tocontrol the orientation of the bones (for puckering) an-other set of bonesalso track the con-trols using IK con-straints and controlthe orientation ofthe first set ofbones using rota-tion constraints.'Pole targets' areadded for the IKconstraints, whichare then used tocontrol the 'roll' or'pucker' of the lips.

Finally, controls are added for the foot roll, fingers, andmouth positions using action constraints. All presetsfor the rig are contained in a single action named'ARMATURE'. The advantage of using the Action con-straint is that thebones can be trans-formed in addition tothe constraint. For ex-ample there are presetmouth positions for'Oo', 'F/V', and 'P/B/M'which behave just likeshape keys but withthe advantage thatthey can be adjusted ormanually keyed at any time.

Once the rig is complete the fur and materials are con-figured, and last minute touch ups are made where

needed. To create a nice falloff effect for the coat, tobrighten the edges and make it look more like cloth, Iadded a ramp mapped to 'normal' (which is found inthe first panel of the material window).

The 2 particle systems used for the fluff and beard arepractically default. The key setting is the 'rough' optionfound under the 'children' tab to the right of the parti-cle panel to give it that nice fluffiness.

The Santa .blend file has been included under the Crea-tive Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 License foruse in your own animations, or for taking him apart tolearn some tricks for creating your own! If you do usehim, please let me know because I'd love to see it!

For more character development resources in Blendercheck out my blog The Rigging Repository.

Gord Goodwin

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IntroductionIn the beginning of 2009, maybe end2008 I had an idea.

What if we made a first person shoot-er, in blender? What if we made a pro-fessional game, with good graphics inOpenGL, x-platform? I wanted to makeit big, but not impossible to make. To-day our team counts 17 people (allyoung, from 12 to 20 years old) andour first demo is coming out aroundChristmas. We did a great job so far,

but we have a long way to go.

In this article I, Thomas Kole, team leader of theCyclon project, will give you a tour through theprocess of Cyclon, how it began, all the way up tonow. I will give you tips for starting and keeping upan big game project with multiple team membersspread all over the world.

So, how did I actually start the game. Well, it allstarted with an idea. Just an idea. I remember that Iwas in my bed, and I was thinking about a game.I've never been a gamer. Never really played anyshooter in my life. So I had to think about every-thing from scratch. I saw a tropical island in mymind.

I wanted to do something original. Zombies aren'toriginal these days. I can tell you dozens of gameswhere you have to (re) kill zombies. But what aboutchip-zombies? Humans with a chip in their head.Controlled by it, after a failed experiment. I can'ttell any game which has that! The main idea wasborn. It needed a name. “Metal Storm” was my firstidea, but unfortunately that name is already taken

by a weapon company. What about “TropicalStorm”? Didn't sound that well. That's it. Cyclon.Sounds pretty sci-fi, yet tropical. Now the real workcan begin.

The real work began at the forum Blenderartists(http://blenderartists.org/). I just posted a thread. Itwas called “CYCLON WIP Thread”. Don't make it“OMG BEST FPS EVER NEED HELP!!!” That just won'tdo it. Sound professional. In the thread it told whatI wanted. What I can do, the story line and thestyle, and what I needed other people to do, theprogramming, modeling and texturing.

Then, slowly but steadily the team members came.They made some models and showed me some oftheir work. Then suddenly David joined the team.He was a talented designer, and a very good organ-izer. He helped me a lot. I made sure I had every-body's (not more than 4 or 5 that day) instantmessenger address, and we slowly started planningthe game and creating models for it. Then I sud-denly lost all contact with our programmer. Weneeded a new one. At the moment we have 3. Justbecause our project looks professional and showedpromising results.

So you might wonder “I have a team,now what?” If you have a big team,you need to manage things well. Makesure you have good contact with every-one. Use Gtalk, MSN, Aim and otherinstant messengers. Of course youdon't want to have all different appli-cation for all those different messen-gers. I Use Pidgin. You can download itat www.pidgin.im. It supports nearlyall messenger networks, an all in oneapplication. That is the first step to a good project,communication.

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The Making Of Cyclone

Now everyone needsall the files. We usedropbox(www.getdropbox.com). Dropbox is an x-platform file manage-ment program, whichlets you synchronizefiles over different comput-ers. You just have onefolder with all your files.And everyone one yourteam has them too. Youget the program plus 2gbof space for free, but formore space you will need to pay. The next step is to geteverybody working. Make a 'todo' file which containswho has to do what and when it needs to be done.Make a calendar. We used gCal. Because it's fast, onlineand everyone can see it, if you invite them.

Lets get to the more technical part. What makes it feelimmersive and fun to play, what makes it a good game?The first thing is: Don't worry about making things per-fect, but you still need to be happy with. For example:You want to design a gun. You want to make it power-ful, but if it is too powerful, and has no weakness to bal-ance it out, it ruins the challenge of the game, and thegame becomes boring.

Most first person shooters have shotguns, they are verypowerful at close range and will kill nearly any enemy injust one shot, but at a distance your just wasting ammo.Of course this is true in real life, because of the spray ofthe pellets from the shotgun shell, the closer the targetthe more damage, because the pellets haven't spreadout as much as they would at a larger distance. This iswhy shotguns are in every game featuring zombies andare great for killing them, because zombies have to be

close to the player in order to cause damage. The play-er's success in the game should come rather from hisdecisions than what gun he is holding, that's why youwill often see videos of people completing a game withonly a pistol or a wrench. You can see they play very dif-ferently to what most people would, because they aredeciding how to play to the strengths of that weaponand are avoiding its weaknesses.

Now that I've talked a little bit about game play, its timeto mention graphics. Today's games look almost photo-realistic, with their HDR lighting, Parallax OcclusionMapping, Depth of field, Subsurface Scattering, SoftShadows, Realtime Refraction and fully destructible en-vironments to name but a few features of them. If youwant to make that too, you will need to use tricks tofake it. Game design if full of tricks.

One of these tricks is to display low-resolution modelsfar away from you, and high-resolution models nearyou. This is called Level of Detail, or LOD for short. Itallows you to show a lot more objects on screen andstill have a playable frame rate instead of just havingyour objects disappear when you move too far fromthem. Allowing the player to feel more immersed inyour game, because in real life things don't just disap-pear if you move away from them, but neither does itrun at 2 frames per second.

The next trick is normalmaping and is used by manygames and can be done properly in blender. These“normalmaps” are textures that give the illusion thatyou are looking at a high-resolution model, but you areactually looking at a low-resolution model, the texturecontains information about how light reacts with themodel.

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Therefore giving the illusion details being modeled onthe object when they actually are just in a texture. Mostof our models in Cyclon have normal maps and SpecularMaps. Specular Maps or just Spec Maps, are gray-scaletextures that define the strength of Specular Highlightson objects, this is essentially your Spec slider on the ma-terial tab, but because it is a texture it lets you have dif-ferent specular values in different places on your model.This is very useful for metal because it allows thescratches that we have painted in the texture to reactmuch more with the light like it would in real life

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IntroductionHello, my name is Benjamin Bailey,and I will be taking you through theprocess I took to create my "WinterPine" image, made in Blender 2.49b. Iwill be showing the overall process ofcreating this wintry scene, as well as amore detailed view on the creation ofa pine tree, using curves and particles.I hope you enjoy this presentation!

This project started out as a simplelittle snow scene, complete with a

quaint cabin, rolling snow-covered hill, cute sprucetrees lining the horizon, and a cold moon lightingthe night sky. But that all changed as I neared thedeadline for writing this making-of article, when Irealized I was going to have to cut some corners inorder to get a good result done on time. So here'show I did it, from start to finish.

Note: In an attempt to keep this article in a linearorder, I will be showing the process I took duringthe making of "A Quiet Night" in the same order asit happened, which may not the most logical orderof operations in retrospect. In some cases I will de-lineate from the exact order of events for the sakeof clarity. All in all, I hope this article proves to bean accurate case study.

Concept

While I'd highly suggest drawing some concept artbefore you delve into your project, I rarely do. Thistime around, however, I tried a new technique:blocking out the scene with simple objects. Usuallywhen I start out a project, I just jump into Blender,

hit Tab for edit mode, and hack away at making anawesome model. After that I throw in some simplematerials, maybe a couple procedural textures, dropin a simple 3-point lighting setup, and hit render afew times, tweaking it till it looks cool. This time,however, I went a little further.

Blocking Out The Scene

Since I don't work on entire scenes much, mostlyjust individual objects, I found it a big (and reward-ing) challenge to create this winter scene. Startingwith a basic cube primitive, I sized it along the Yaxis to give it a little depth to resemble a house. Forthe hill I just added a plane, subdivided it a fewtimes, and put in some topographical detail by pull-ing vertices along the Z axis with the ProportionalEdit Falloff. Next I put in a cylinder for the trees,and extruded it along the Z axis in Edit Mode, sizingas I went in order to vaguely resemble a spruce tree,finishing off with a Merge at the tip of the tree. Iused Alt+D Key to duplicate the tree with sharedmesh data, so I could easily tweak one tree and af-fect all 10 tree objects at once. After placing thesecute little cartoony trees about on the hill, I addedin a moon, which proved to be the easiest object ofthe entire project. I will give more details on eachobject of the scene as we proceed.

Next, I just added basic materials to each object,adding to the overall composition concept, as wellas adding a basic World color with Blend, to simu-late the horizon/zenith color gradation. I alsoadded the lights at this stage, including a white arealight behind the moon, a basic blue lamp for overalllighting, and a hot yellow lamp for inside the house,to give the rustic dwelling a warming glow.

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Winter Scene

With the scene fully blocked out with our altered primi-tives, it was now time to add in the little details. :)

The House

I made the simple house shell by adding a basic cube,which I grabbed one side of and stretched along the Yaxis, locking it to the grid floor by holding down Ctrl as Imoved the selection.

Wooden Siding

Duplicating the basic house mesh and keeping it in theexact same place, I went into edit mode and extruded itby Region along the X and Y axises. To do this, simplyhit "S" Key to size and then Shift+ "Z" Key to negate theZ axis from being sized in the operation. Once this wasdone, I placed the 3D cursor at the base of the entiremesh, right along the 0 of the Z axis, and then hit theperiod key, to set the 3D cursor as the operation pivot.With this in place, I sized the whole extruded housedown by Z till it resembled a thin band, to simulate thelog siding of the house. Adding a Subdivision Surfacemodifier, I cut in a loop towards the center of the band(to sharpen the edge where it rested against the housebase mesh.) Then I carefully selected one side of thesquare band and split it with the "Y" Key. After doingthis with each side of the house, I filled in the now-face-less ends of the separate pieces by manually selectingthe appropriate vertices and hitting the "F" Key to fill inthe ends with faces, one by one.

Next I added an array modifier along the Z axis, to dupli-cate the wooden boards, to simulate wooden siding or alog house. Once this was done, I exited Edit Mode, se-lected the house base object, which is still a basic cube,and in Edit Mode I cut in a door and some window holeswith Ctrl+R. With this done, I moved back to the woodsiding and cut in similar details, splitting the extra wood

faces from the doorway and windows, and deletingthem. Here I ran into a counter-intuitive issue, where Iwould either have to cut and fill in the ends on eitherside for all the siding pieces that had a doorway or win-dow in them, or do it on one siding piece and duplicateit. I choose the latter choice, which was probably thefaster method.

So I cut in the loops where the door and windowswhere, deleted the extra faces, filled in the empty endsof the wood siding, naming the pieces that were to beduplicated, duplicating them, and renaming them asnecessary (changing the default naming system ofname.001, name.002, name.003, to name1, name2,name3.)After allthat, I wasready to goonto thenext step.

Note:There'smore that Idid withthe house,but I'll con-tinue withthat later inthe article.

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The Snow

As I stated before, I simply used the Proportional EditFalloff tool in Edit Mode to grab some vertices and pullthem up or push them down along the Z axis, to simu-late a rolling hill. It was pretty easy, but the finishedresult turned out very, well, ugly. However, it lookedgood enough from the camera's angle, and that's all Icared about.

Snow Material

The snow material gave me someissues. Fortunately, I got it goodenough by the end of the project.My issue? Well, I wanted thesnow to have irregularities, suchas bumps and rises, and yet Iwanted it to be frosted, sleek, andsparkly - you know, like thefrosted snow you see early in themorning, all shining and crustedon top, like a frozen glaze offrosting on a cinnamon roll.Yum. :) Actually, I had wanted tojust do fluffy, "normal" snow, butit turned out the frosted way, so Iwent with it. That's what seemsto work with me: if it turns outone way, a way that is differentfrom how I had anticipated it, Igo with it. Maybe not always, butoften it turns out just fine - differ-ent, but good.

First I tried having two textures,the bumpy one and the frosted,sparkly one, both in the same ma-terial on the same snow object.

Well, I kept getting fudged up results with this - eitherone texture would work, or the other one would. Itseemed the frosted texture overrode the bumpy one,both using Nor to give the material a dynamic feel. OK,so that didn't work.

Next I tried duplicating the snow object, and placing theduplicate slightly above the original, giving the second,higher object a material with the frosted texture, addingtransparency so you could see the bumpy-textured snowobject underneath. Well, this didn't work either. Ohwell.

Finally, I got smart and de-leted the duplicated snow,along with removing thebumpy texture, instead mak-ing a procedural texture andapplying it to a DisplaceModifier. Yep, that's right, Isubdivided the snow objectsome more so the displacemodifier's texture would givethe rather flat snow somehumps and bumps, and viola!After a little tweaking withthe strength of the modifier,my snow was now bumpyand shiny - with both a mod-ifier and the frosted texturecombined on the same snowobject. Well, that worked. :)

Later I slightly adjusted thesnow's furthest edge (fromthe camera's viewpoint) withthe Proportional Edit Fallofftool to fit the scene's newcomposition.

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The Moon

The moon, as I said, was the simplest mesh object in theentire project. At least, that's what I thought, till I gotthe final rendering stages. But I'll get back to that issuelater. :) For now, we'll concentrate on the ease and sim-plicity of initially setting the moon up.

First, I added a sphere,with the standard34x36 setup, and setthe shading to Smooth.Next, I looked onlinefor NASA images(which have a lenientlicensing) of the moon,and, to my great de-light, found a websitededicated to offeringplanet textures, mostof which are based offof NASA images. Usingthese two moon tex-tures, one for the im-age, one for bumpmapping with the Norvalue, I created mymoon.

I added one area light,pointing directly to-wards the moon andtowards the scene - soit's right behind the moon, facing us, the camera. Thisprovided ample lighting to the scene, as well as givingthe moon an extra pizazz and glow.

More on the House

It was time to give the house some textures, right?Sheesh, this wasn't going to be as easy as I thought. So Ilooked online for a wood material made with proce-dural textures, and found just the tutorial I was lookingfor. Sadly, the finished texture really isn't that good, andabove all, you couldn't tell what my texture was likefrom the outside very much. Besides, my house wassupposed to look like a log cabin, (and turned into awooden-slatted house,) and that type of texture doesn'twork well with the outsides of logs. :)

Anyhow, I used a few sized empties (as the wood texturetutorial instructed) to stretch the procedural texturesalong the correct axis. The problem is, this only workedfor half of the wooden slats - that meant that for theother half of the slat objects, I'd have to set up a differ-ent set of empties along with their unique material set-tings. What a pain. But I did it, complete withseparating each layer of wood from it's right-angle part-ners, and keeping the parallel slat siding in the sameobject, allowing me to use two materials with their owntextures and empties to create the wooden texture formy siding.

By this time I was ready to add some more detail to thehouse, pulling it away from the boring, rounded shape ithad been stuck in up to this time. So, I went into EditMode and cut in some detail with Ctrl+R, EKey for ex-truding, Alt+S for shrinking/fattening, and Face Selectionmode along with "K" Key for the knife tool (Midpoints.)Equipped with all these tools, I hacked away the wood,trying to roughen it up. All I succeeded in doing was giv-ing it some irregularity, however, and overall it still re-tained that smooth, sub-surfed toon look.

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Man, that's really not what I was going for, but oh well,I'd keep with it. It was a style after all, even if it wasn'tthe style I was going for. (See Marcin Wodzynski's wind-mill to get an idea of the rugged look I was after.)

Well, it was about time I did something about a roof,isn't it? By this time I had give the house mesh a basic,slanted roof with deep overhangs. I had some issueswith this roof, simply some issues with messed-up to-pology that caused me some frustration. But now it wastime for some detail on the roof, right? You bet!

The Shingles

Surprisingly, this didn't take me all that long to do. Basi-cally I added a Plane object, deleted the vertices, hit Re-topo, and using Ctrl+LMB, Iadded in some new, con-nected vertices on top of theroof, making a face with "F"Key and extruding (but un-checking Retopo first,) thewhole plane slightly. I dupli-cated this strange, flat cubeand placed it right next to it'stwin, and then I sized theends to resemble another veryawkward, funky shingle. Re-peating this process, I addedvariation to a row of simple,ugly shingles. Then I dupli-cated the entire row, moved it up the roof slope some,and went into side view to align and slightly overlay theshingles. I did this one last time, finishing off the top ofthe roof. Of course, to quickly add more variation to theduplicated rows, I mirrored the duplicated row alongthe X axis, then manually tweaked various shingles,making some shorter, other's longer, and making sure to

have the shingles hang slightly over the edge of the roof(on the side towards the camera.)

All the while I'm doing test renders, along each stage ofthis hazardous project. I noticed gaps in the shingles,showing the roof base (which is still part of the house.)So I fixed this problem by going back into Edit Mode andcarefully shaping each shingle to fit snugly with eachother, making a happy family of frosted steel shingles.:D Of course I added some textures to this new baby,which simulated, as I've already hinted, a frosted, snow-covered, metal roof.

Mr. Shadow Man

I had the idea that I wanted a long, slanting shadowcoming from the house, right outfrom the doorway, which wascasting a magnificent flood oflight on the snow. So, I quicklybox-modeled a simple, stringy-alien figure, to be my "ShadowMan". Inspired by Tim Burton'swork, I most appropriately sawthe correlation between myproject and his excellent "TheNightmare Before Christmas,"and so my character was alsolanky, like Jack, King of thePumpkin Patch. However, I soonfound my idea wasn't going to

work.

I tried a different angle, I tried a more intense light, Itried area light (ouch, that light was WAY too bright atfirst - nice, crisp, pixelated pure golden-yellow light.Yeah, that's real nice.) But it ended up that you can'treally tell there is a shadow of a man on the ground - itjust looks like long lines coming out from the doorway.

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I even tried disabling the Displace Modifier, which defi-nitely helped, but in the end I decided that the DisplaceModifier was much more important for the overall com-position, and just kept my silent,shadowy man hidden in the housedoorway, casting his ubiquitousshadow, even though you can't reallytell what the shadow is supposed tobe.

The Trees

The trees at this time looked quitecute, simple, and toony. Oh well,why not leave them that way, right?Not good enough, I say!

Tracing the Branches with Curves

So, taking the trees from their basic,cylindrical shape, I go into the longprocess of making highly-detailedtrees with the use of curves and par-ticles. For the most part I followedAndrew Price's tutorial on How ToCreate Stunning Trees. Where I dif-ferentiated from his tutorial is inthat I used a hair particle system in-stead of alpha images on planes.This seemed to work better for myproject, as pine needles are eitherclustered in groups or shooting outin all directions around a twig, like inspruces. It was actually my sister'sidea to use particles to solve mypine-needles problem - kudos to her!

So, using a background reference of a spruce tree, Itraced the trunk of the tree using a 3D bezier curve.

Next, I arbitrarily traced some branches, about 6, com-ing out in a ring formation from the trunk. Addingsome mild variations to each branch, I duplicated thering of branches and moved them up the Z axis a little,to about where the next set of branches should be. Ofcourse, I rotated the branches along the Z axis to addsome variation, and repeated this process all the way upthe tree. After that, I did some tweaking on the branch-es, especially for the top branches, which behavedrather awkwardly.

Adding Volume to the Branches

Now here's where I did the stupid part: now that I hadall the 3D bezier curve "branches" in place in the sameobject, they were still just curves with no volume. So, Iadded volume, with Bevel Depth. But there was an issue- the curves were only half-pipes, half-spheres. Yuck! Soto solve this, I unclicked the Front and Back buttons,which are right next to the 3D button in the Editing tab,under Curve and Surface. This made my curves verynicely shaped and full of volume. Not that stupid, right?Well, yes and no. The technique is fine for this situation,but the issue of stupidity was this: with all the branchesin place and now with volume, I would have to manu-ally go in and resize the tip and base handles of eachbezier curve, which is what I did. Sigh, what a waste oftime. I should have done this step then copied all thebranches, tweaking and arranging them. Oh well.

So this is what I did next: I started grabbing curve endsand resizing them to a fine point with Alt+S one at atime, handle by handle, and then gripping the base andshrinking those down to a reasonable size as well, fin-ishing off the operation by selecting the entire inde-pendent curve and hitting W (specials key) and selecting"Smooth Radius."

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This smooths out the radius of the branch based on thestart and finish points of the curve. Extremely handylittle trick.

However, this was going too slow, so I quickly adoptedthe idea of selecting multiple tip ends and shrinkingthem down all at the same time. I did this a number oftimes, each time selecting smaller and smaller groups ofcurve ends as my task was nearing completion. With allthat done, it was time to shrink the base of the branch-es, because they were too big as well. So, one by one Iselected, shrunk (with Alt+S,) and smoothed the radius(with W>Smooth Radius.) Whew, done with that. A littlemore tweaking on each branch tip to size them to aninvisible razor point, and onto the next step.

The Twig-Clusters

Now came another truly grueling stage in the produc-tion: the making of the twig clusters, or, rather themesh volumes thatwould be used to setthe parameter for thetwig generation in thecurves2trees.py script(now in all official re-leases of Blender) Iwould be using lateron.

So I added a cube ob-ject, subdivided itsmooth three times,and then manuallytweaked it with theProportional Edit Fal-loff tool, both withRandom Falloff torough up the mesh

and with Root Falloff (or you can use Sphere or SmoothFalloff) to bend or pull large portions of the mesh atonce. With this I shaped in the twig clusters - smallertowards the trunk, spraying out larger towards the endof the branch, always going past and enveloping themajority of the curve segment that the mesh belongedto. With manual tweaking I made sure everything wasin place, with no meshes intersecting one another.

Then, of course, I ran into a problem: my computerwasn't fast enough. So, guess what, brilliant me, I cameup with a solution. And this is what I did: since every-thing was slowing down with such a high-poly count inthe twig cluster collage object I was editing, I took oneof the twig cluster meshes and separate the mesh into anew object by hitting P>Selected. Then I could edit thenext portion of twig clusters in a separate object, onlyhaving to view as many vertices in Edit Mode as were inthat object, which greatly sped up my working perform-ance. Inevitably, this happened again, so I repeated this"separate object" maneuver about three times, as wasneeded. In the end I had a collection of various twig-cluster objects, which of course I joined to be one meshwith Ctrl+J.

Using the Tree from Curves Script

Next? Time for the Tree from Curves script, under theWizards section of the Scripts menu in the Scripts Win-dow. OK, so here's how I did this next part. I found thatit was going to be super-hardware intensive on my ma-chine. So it was time to switch to someone's more pow-erful PC.

Once I had made this transition to the tougher PC, (andoh, yes, I'm working on Windows XP Pro,) I could getonto working on the Tree from Curves script.

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Even though this newer machine I was now on wasmore powerful, it didn't speed things up all that much.Oh well, so much for that ingenious plan!

Anyhow, this is how you use the script: first you hit "FillTwigs," and set various parameters like RandomizeScale, Shape Strength, Generations, and so forth. Playaround with these settings till you get the desired look.You can think of Generations as controlling how manytiers or twigs to generate (for instance, if you had onegeneration, you'd get straight twigs jutting out of ourcurve branches. But if you had two generations, you'dget the first, straight twigs, and then more, smallerstraight twigs coming out from those first twigs, and soforth as you add more generations. At least that's how Iunderstand it. Then you set the name of the OB Bound,or "Object Bound," which would be the name of ourtwig-clusters object.

I couldn't have very many Fill Twig generations, so Iopted for a small amount, like 1 to 3 generations, tospeed up performance. And that was about it, since Iwasn't going to use their Generate Leaves dialogue forthis project. So, with both objects selected (the curveobject for thetree trunk andbranches andthe mesh objectfor the twig fill-ing,) I hit"Generate fromselection," andafter my com-puter chokedand sputteredand nearlykeeled over fora little while, it

spit out my new, nice little tree.

The way the script works is it keeps your selected ob-jects and just generates a new mesh object that is yourtree. Make sure to move your curve and twig-clustersmesh object to another layer, or the newly generatedtree mesh to the scene's primary layer.

Weight Painting

Next, I went into edit mode and carefully selected (withthe paint selection tool by hitting the "B" Key twice,) asmany twigs as reasonable and most of their parentbranches that they were stemming from, and created anew Vertex Group, to which I Assigned my selection to.Then, with that done, I got to the fun part (yeah, right!)

Particles for the Needles

Keep in mind that I'm writing most of this article aboutmy project from memory, so bear with my errors andtired brain, please. :) I added a Particle System, set it totype Hair, and went from there. Yes, I know that

rhymed. :) Anyhow, you can see myparticle settings in the accompany-ing screenshot. Using some -Z onthe particles, I could simulate thehanging needles. Maybe someBrownian would have done themgood. I also made sure to set mynewly-created vertex group as theemission area. Oh, and don't forgetto hit "Emitter" under the Rendersubsection, as well as setting theMaterial to the right number mate-rial (mine being 2, as I had createdanother material for the needleswith Editing Panel>Link andMaterials>Materials>New.

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I used a Blend texture for the needles material, adding aColor Ramp to control the alpha and colors of the nee-dle. I also made sure to set the Map Input as Strand, andtweaked the Strand start and end settings underShading>Links and Pipeline>Render Pipeline>Strands.

I did some render tests and Color Ramp tweaks on theBlend texture, and I was ready to go.

But one issue: since I was now using a very complex treeas my pine tree, I could no longer have 10 pine trees.No, no, no, I now could only have 1 tree. Ouch. That'sgotta hurt in the composition area.

Compositing and Composition

Since the start of the project, right after the blockingstage, I started doing some compositing. First with abasic DoF (Depth of Field) setup, which I soon droppedfor lack of need, and then later as I developed the scene,complete with the moon's illuminating glow and soforth.

Early off in the project I was set on making a simplewinter scene with a cabin. But as I neared the deadlineof the project, I tried a different arrangement with thecamera angle, tried a portrait setup with the cabin, butno, no, that didn't work. With only one tree, I waspressed on my objects. The issue with the cabin wassimply that the warm, orange glow and the bright, fullmoon contested with each other - which one would winthe viewer's eye? I knew my answer: the moon. And thatwasn't my goal. I had a conflicting composition, andthat just wasn't going to work.

So, after a lot of fidgeting with render tests and tweakswith the cabin composition, I ditched the cabin alto-gether, for lack of time and inspiration in that area. Sonow it was just the pine tree, a new snowy hill, and thebeautiful moon. I could do this, really! But man, was I

down in spiritson how theproject was turn-ing out, withsuch a conflict-ing compositionand time run-ning out on meto complete thismaking-of. Butfinally I had agood composi-tion, and I wasgoing to keepwith it, or die.

Conclusion

Well, hardpunches come tothose who ask for it,which is what I did.After a lot moretweaking and renders,I finally came up withthe final compositionand render you seebefore you. Yahoo!

Note about the finalwork: I do admit thatthere are some blackartifacts on the moon,but since I was notable to fully destroythem from the face ofthe celestial satellite,they'll have to stay forgood

MAKING OF: A Winter Scene

By

Ben

jam

in B

aile

y (B

anor

)

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www. ble nde ra rt. org Is s ue 2 5 | De c 2 0 0 9 - " W inte r W onde rla nd"

It took a lot of time, and I'mglad to have this new piece inmy portfolio, and to have thisgreat opportunity to share mywork with you in the Blender-Art Magazine! But I must say,when Sandra Gilbert firstasked me to write an articlefor the magazine, I wasn'tsure if she was really askingme to do an article for themagazine, not just about it,and then I wasn't sure whaton earth I was supposed towrite about. So, instead of just taking it easy and beinginterviewed or writing about Christmas shopping hab-its, I took the initiative and suggested I make a winterscene and then write a making-of article about it. Andthat's what I did!

Hope you enjoyed my article, and I apologize before-hand for any mistakes or technical errors.

God bless and happy Blending, friends!

Benjamin Bailey

www.benjamindbailey.com/blog

Note about my website: The website is not built yet, butthe blog is up and running!

MAKING OF: A Winter Scene

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Ben

jam

in B

aile

y (B

anor

)

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www. ble nde ra rt. org Is s ue 2 5 | De c 2 0 0 9 - " W inte r W onde rla nd"

Benjamin Bailey (Banor)

Is an 18-year-old home schooled artist from rural WestVirginia, who's current activities include finishing highschool studies and starting college at home, writing forBlenderNation.com, working on various small film andopen source projects, singing, drawing, writing, chattingwith friends, and of course playing around in Blender.You can keep up-to-date with Benjamin's latest endeavorson his personal blog.

Website: www.benjamindbailey.com/blog

When I first began using Blender, I found thata great way to learn the software was tofollow tutorials that I found here and there

on the web. One series in particular that helped meimmensely as a beginner (and one that I later di-rected other beginners to) was the “Introduction toCharacter Animation” from the BlenderWiki. Whilethis series was (and still is) an invaluable tool, it's afew years old, and some of the tools and techniqueshave changed with the newer versions of Blender. Itwas from this series that my idea first stemmed; Iwanted to show users how to create a completecharacter: from a single polygon to a fully functional“marionette” that they could animate in any fashionthey desired, as well as give it a nice texture, somerealistic hair or fur, and maybe a few clothing items.

I began the series towards the beginning of August,and would record four or five “episodes” per week,basing the instructional material over the generalmethod I used when creating most of my characters.I finished the last episode in the beginning of Sep-tember, so the total time it took was about a month,give or take a week, as I had a business trip that Iwent on during that time and was unable to recordanything.

Most of the difficulties I encountered had to do withrushing through things, and pressing the wronghotkeys; or sometimes I would forget how to do acertain thing and have to pause the recording while Iresearched to figure it out. One instance in particu-lar that I can recall was towards the end, when I wasgoing over the cloth modifier. I was unable to get thecharacter to behave as a solid object for the cloth todeflect from, so I had to pause and look it up. Afterfinding the obvious answer, I began recording againand informed my viewers that my problem was thefact that the character and the cloth were on sepa-

rate layers, and that's why they couldn't quite“interact.”

While I didn't really learn anything new during thecreation of the series, I was happy to see quite a re-sponse to my Youtube uploads, and that's when Ilearned a few more tricks from people suggestingthings in the comments. For example, I had no ideathat you could use “Alt+S” to “slim/fatten” parts of amesh; I had only used this key combination to resizebones while rigging. Now I find it to be a very usefultool, especially when creating clothing items.

I hadn't really expected to get the response that I'vegotten; I'm very glad that it's helped people and thatthey find it to be a useful addition to this greatBlender Community. I plan to keep going with what-ever assistance I can offer, and at this point, I amplanning a second series which will cover a lot of thesame things, but this time in greater detail (i.e.; mul-tiple clothing items, more advanced rigging tech-niques, and tangent normal mapping to give betterdetail than regular normal and bump maps).

-dw

You can view the Johnny Blender series on Youtube

You can purchase the Johnny Blender dvd atlulu.com ($13.75)

Twenty-Eight part series on the complete creation ofa character in Blender, from a single polygon to afully-rigged and textured character. Recorded usingBlender 2.49. The tutorials are in WMV format, (eachpart equalling roughly 20 - 30 minutes) and bestviewed with either Windows Media Player, or VLCMedia Player. Also contains the final ".blend" file

ARTICLE: Johnny Blender Training DVD

by D

avid

War

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1 - How/when did you get involved with CG Cook-ie?

I got involved with CG Cookie a little over a yearago. It was one of those chance encounters thatjust happened to evolve into much more. To behonest I don't even remember how I stumbled onCG Cookie, I believe I was googling for somethingwhen I saw it.

I really liked the content CG Cookie had for 3DSMax and Maya but I was disappointed to see therewasn't any Blender content, at which point I sawthe ad that said "We pay for tutorials!" and so I satdown and wrote up a tutorial for submission. Wesseemed to like the tutorial and asked me to do an-other one, so I did. It too was well received andfrom there it was history. I have been doing tutori-als for CG Cookie ever since :)

2 - Do you plan out your video tutorials in advance,or do you just sit down and wing it?

Pre-planning all depends on the tutorial. If, for ex-ample, I am doing a human head, it is somethingthat I have done so often that I just sit down andstart recording. But for something like the PistonRigging tutorial,http://www.facebook.com/l/46bf9;www.blendercookie.com/2009/09/21/rigging-a-piston/ , where thereare some more in depth settings to play, with Igenerally plan it out in advance. I like to be sure Iknow what I am doing.

However, that being said, a lot of times I do like tojust sit down and wing it even if it's something Ihaven't created before. Tutorials like the Barrel,Pumpkin, and Hand tutorials were all done thisway. I find it a bit more enjoyable, assuming I don'troyally screw it up while on the spot!

3 - How long does it take you to complete a tuto-rial from start to finish?

As I very seldom do any post-processing (asidefrom minor sound corrections), the productiontime is generally the total length of the tutorial +encoding time + uploading and posting time.

When I create tutorials I do everything at the sametime, everything you see is live. I like to do it thisway as I find it to much more cohesive and moreinteractive for the viewer. It took me a bit of prac-tice to get this down since it can involve a lot ofmultitasking at times but in the end, I think it givesa better result.

4 - Where do you get your ideas for tutorials?

Now a days most of my tutorial ideas come fromuser requests and brainstorming sessions withWes. Since we are catering to a large number ofBlender users, it is very important to try and keepthem happy (as much as possible) and so the bestway to do this is to produce tutorials based onwhat they want.

Just a few weeks ago we posted a survey for futureeducation that allowed people to submit any ideasthey had and to vote on a few topics I laid out. Theentries for this gave us a really good idea on whereto focus for the next few months. This kind ofthing really helps steer the direction of the site andthe tutorials.

However, I also like to do tutorials from time totime for my own pleasure. Tutorials that coversomething I WANT to create. It's more fun thatway :)

5 - With the launch of BlenderCookie, how hasyour role changed, what new responsibilities haveyou taken on?

The launch of Blender Cookie has brought on aslew of new tasks for me. Technically I am the Sen-ior Editor and so I am responsible for communicat-ing with authors, assigning tasks, retrievingcontent from authors, publishing content,

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answering support emails and responding to com-ments, etc. And then I also produce a large numberof the tutorials and graphics for the site. Whereasbefore, with CG Cookie, I was ONLY producing tu-torials. All in all Blender Cookie keeps me on mytoes most of the time. It's a full-time job and a half.

6 - CGCookie/BlenderCookie has just announced itsCitizen program. Can you tell us a little about it, thebenefits and Citizen only resources mentioned in theannouncement?

CG Cookie's Citizen program is a membership serv-ice that provides unlimited access to all of the tu-torial source files (normally purchased for $4 USD)and exclusive tutorials/content.

Exclusive tutorials and content are resourceswhich only Citizens (members) will have access to.These tutorials are more in-depth and advancedthan our free tutorials and will cover a wide rangeof topics. We are also looking to provide a series ofcontent packs to Citizens such as a fully texturedgame model pack.

The program really has two purposes:

A. To provide more, higher-quality content to theusers and to make it cheaper in the long run forthose that like to purchase the source files.

B. To bring in more funds for maintaining the siteand producing content.

All of the tutorials for Blender Cookie (and CGCookie) are created on a commission basis. Each ofthe author's are paid for each and every tutorialthey create. The Citizen program helps to bring inmore funds, which may then be used for commis-sioning authors and to continue improving thesite.

In the end, our goal is to improve the site and itsservices with every tutorial we release and every

change we make. The Citizen program is one ofthe ways we can do this :)

7 - What are some of the future plans forCGCookie/BlenderCookie?

We have a lot of ideas floating around that wewould like to implement, it's just a matter of timeand actually getting to it!

One of the main plans right now, is to create a net-work of sorts. CG Cookie is the mothership of allour current sites (CG Cookie, Blender Cookie,Mavenseed) and we would like to continue push-ing it in that direction. Currently, Blender Cookie isthe only site dedicated to just a single softwarepackage. CG Cookie hosts all of the Maya, 3DSMax, and ZBrush training. We would like to mi-grate all of this training to its respective site (MaxCookie, Maya Cookie, etc.), leaving CG Cookie asthe central hub that all of the content would filterinto and that would represent the company as awhole.

However, before the above can happen we havesome house cleaning to do. Even though it maynot seem obvious, there are a good few problemswith the sites that we would like to address. Thisneeds to be done before any new sites arelaunched. At this moment we are working throughthe sites and putting together a list of everythingthat needs changed, features that need added, etc.so that we may launch a version 2 of BlenderCookie and CG Cookie, with all of the needed re-finements

8 - How much of your time is taken up withCGCookie/BlenderCookie?

CG Cookie/Blender Cookie is a job and a half. If Ihad to put a rough estimate on it I would guessthat I spend about 40-50 hours per week onBlender Cookie related tasks.

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This includes everything from time taken toprep, produce and publish tutorials, updatingthe site, responding to emails/support tickets,responding and moderating comments, weeklymeetings, brainstorming and just about any-thing else you can pile on there.

You could almost say I (and Wes) live in BlenderCookie. As Wes put it, "it is threaded into ourdaily lives."

9 - Do you still have time for personal projects? If so,are there any you care to discuss with us?

I only wish I had more time for personalprojects... Some how or another, though, I man-age to squeeze in the occasional project. Moreoften than not, in the recent months my per-sonal projects have revolved around my tradi-tional art. I have been working to develop mytraditional art/drawing skills in an effort to en-hance my 3D work but also as a means of sanity.Drawing is my way of zoning out and getting abreak from the rest of the world.

In the near future I also hope to do a few moreof my own Blender projects, primarily focusedaround character modeling and creating fullscenes. We will have to wait and see what thefuture brings, though, there is only so muchtime in each day :)

INTERVIEW: Jonathan Williamson 34

www.blenderart.org Issue 25 | Dec 2009 - "Winter Wonderland"

This time we have a book from Allan Brito,titled 'Blender 3D 2.49 Incredible Ma-chines' published by Packet Publishing.

The book has an unusual approach towardsthe choice of topics, it starts off with an expla-nation on incredible machines, quickly movingon to useful bits on pre-production. It con-tains three modeling tutorial based modulesaccompanied by their respective sub modulesin form of various 3d techniques ranging fromrendering, particles and animation.

For a book that reads like it's being targeted atnovice blender users, it provides surprisingly amuch higher level of information at the sametime. For example after the first modeling tu-torial, it has a chapter for rendering the gunmodel, rendering it with a raytracer, noneother than Yafaray. Now the introduction ofYafaray at this level feels rather odd as thescale of this project doesn’t seem to necessi-tate throwing a novice reader into nitty-

gritty’s of an external raytracer.

In a later part, the book also throws in Luxrender, anon biased rendering engine. This again goes a littleagainst the central idea of being ready for novicereader. While reading through the book, it gives animpression that it had a lot to offer, which it actuallydoes considering the range of topics, but in a unas-sumingly confusing manner.

Positives

The book provided good explanations on variousmodeling problems faced by an novice reader and itdoes a good job of explaining the proposed conceptsin just enough detail needed to impart enough confi-

dence in the reader to replicate the example ex-plained.

The thing that made unique is the bold attempt tointegrate teaching external rendering engines likeYafaray and Luxrender into the tutorial.

Not so positives

Extremely simplistic choice for models, a simple gun,the steam punk space ship and the odd transformingrobot made of 3d boxes.

The difficulty level is varied; initial chapters suggestits nature to be ready for ‘novice to intermediate’readers however the choice of selection of topicsranging from external rendering engines and anima-tion begs otherwise.

Endgame

Considering the authors experience in externalrenders, you feel that an attempt on a separate bookfor rendering engines such as these would have beenfar more fruitful, still the entire book have enoughmaterial and depth to comes across as a good read-ing companion for people with beginner to interme-diate blender knowledge.

BOOKREVIEW: Incredible Machines by Allan Brito 35

www.blenderart.org Issue 25 | Dec 2009 - "Winter Wonderland"

ISBN 978-1-847197-46-7PDF Edition: 316 pages

First published: November 2009Language: English

Snowman - by Dave CollisonGALLERIA

36www.blenderart.org Issue 25 | Dec 2009 - "Winter Wonderland"

Winter -by WBR TenchikeGALLERIA

37www.blenderart.org Issue 25 | Dec 2009 - "Winter Wonderland"

Cyclon - by Thomas KoleGALLERIA

38www.blenderart.org Issue 25 | Dec 2009 - "Winter Wonderland"

Cyclon - by Thomas KoleGALLERIA

39www.blenderart.org Issue 25 | Dec 2009 - "Winter Wonderland"

Snowman who longed to touch the Sun - by Robert J TiessGALLERIA

40www.blenderart.org Issue 25 | Dec 2009 - "Winter Wonderland"

Winter Glyphic -by Robert J TiessGALLERIA

41www.blenderart.org Issue 25 | Dec 2009 - "Winter Wonderland"

Christmas - by Jevon LambrightGALLERIA

42www.blenderart.org Issue 25 | Dec 2009 - "Winter Wonderland"

SnowScene -by LightningIsMyNameGALLERIA

43www.blenderart.org Issue 25 | Dec 2009 - "Winter Wonderland"

Snowmen Jackson -by Jack REDGALLERIA

44www.blenderart.org Issue 25 | Dec 2009 - "Winter Wonderland"

Madame Chronos - by Zoltan MiklosiGALLERIA

45www.blenderart.org Issue 25 | Dec 2009 - "Winter Wonderland"

Snowman - by Stephan McQuayGALLERIA

46www.blenderart.org Issue 25 | Dec 2009 - "Winter Wonderland"

1. We accept the following: Tutorials explaining new Blender features, 3dconcepts, techniques or articles based on currenttheme of the magazine.

Reports on useful Blender events throughout the world. Cartoons related to blender world.

2. Send submissions to sandra@blenderart.org. Send us a notification onwhat you want to write and we can follow up from there. (Some guidelinesyou must follow)

Images are preferred in PNG but good quality JPG can also do. Images should be separate fromthe text document.

Make sure that screenshots are clear and readable and the renders should be at least 800px,but not more than 1600px at maximum.

Sequential naming of images like, image 001.png... etc. Text should be in either ODT, DOC, TXT or HTML. Archive them using 7zip or RAR or less preferably zip.

3. Please include the following in your email: Name: This can be your full name or blenderartist avtar. Photograph: As PNG and maximum width of 256Px. (Only if submitting the article for the firsttime )

About yourself: Max 25 words . Website: (optional)

Note: All the approved submissions can be placed in the final issue or subsequent issue if deemedfit. All submissions will be cropped/modified if necessary. For more details see the blenderartwebsite.

47

www.blenderart.org Issue 25 | Dec 2009 - "Winter Wonderland"

Want to write for BlenderArt Magazine?

Here is how!

blenderart.org does not takes any responsibility both expressed or implied for the material andits nature or accuracy of the information which is published in this PDF magazine. All the ma-terials presented in this PDF magazine have been produced with the expressed permission oftheir respective authors/owners. blenderart.org and the contributors disclaim all warranties,expressed or implied, including, but not limited to implied warranties of merchantability orfitness for a particular purpose. All images and materials present in this document areprinted/re-printed with expressed permission from the authors/owners.

This PDF magazine is archived and available from the blenderart.org website. The blenderartmagazine is made available under Creative Commons‘ Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5’ license.

COPYRIGHT© 2005-2009 ‘BlenderArt Magazine’, ‘blenderart’ and BlenderArt logo are copyrightof Gaurav Nawani. ‘Izzy’ and ‘Izzy logo’ are copyright Sandra Gilbert. All products and com-pany names featured in the publication are trademark or registered trade marks of their re-spective owners.

48Upcoming Issue ‘Theme’

Issue 26

Disclaimer

"Ready, Set, Play! | Blender and Gaming Content"

External game engines

Have written your very own game engine

Create characters, props, levels for use in established commercial games (ex.world of Warcraft, Doom etc)

Create characters, props, levels, just for fun with no game in mind

www.blenderart.org Issue 25 | Dec 2009 - "Winter Wonderland"