Chapter 14, Final Output. It’s done!

Here it is guys, the result of following this awesome book from start to finish!

Chapter 13, Simulations

Happy birthday to me! Just thought I’d let you know ;) Penultimate chapter! Time to learn a bit about environmental simulation, so we read about cloth simulation, soft-body, particles and smoke. Click to read the second-fastest post yet, to see some magic and to say happy birthday in the comments!

Chapter 12, Rendering and the Compositor

It can tell if something is moving, to generate motion blur. It can differentiate individual objects from each other. It knows what light comes from diffuse shaders, specular shaders, ambient occlusion, reflection, and refraction. It even knows if you’ve been bad or good. This was a quick chapter for me – because of my side [...]

Chapter 11, Animation!

“The fun stuff: character animation. We make the kid walk across the room, grab the chair and throw a toy. It’s not How to Train Your Dragon, but it’s a start.” Yeah, you guessed it: lots of work (if you want to make it look half-decent), and LOTS of FUN! Click for more, including the opengl video of my first animation.

Chapter 10, Shapes and Morphing

Yet another chapter that was a lot of fun to play with, hard to stop playing with, and even harder to get right when I got serious. We learned how to create shape keys and how to set up drivers to use and blend those shapes more intuitively during animation. Read more!

Chapter 9, Part II

Wow, this whole process really is a lot of work. After creating the armature, dealing with (bad) deformations after applying it to the mesh made that seem like a walk in the part. More intuitive than all the thinking about bone configurations and IK constraints and all that, but hard work nonetheless. Click for more.

Chapter 9, Part I

The author confessed his dislike for rigging straight off the bat, and I can totally see where he’s coming from. This is a lot of work, even more work to get it right, and apparently the rig described is “relatively simple”. The instructions were clear and precise, so in the end we had a nice working armature, but I can see myself doing it all again from scratch to make sure I absorbed the concepts. Click for more!

Chapter 8, Sculpting

Considering that next Thursday is the release date for the Vehicle Modeling Series I mentioned a while ago, I decided to focus on the book until then leaving (modeling intensive) projects to the side. So on with the book I got, quickly tackling the introduction to Sculpting in chapter 8. Click for more, and by “more” I mean “a Sith version of our character”.

Chapter 7, Episode VI

And we’re done! Quick and easy again, and a surprisingly cool effect – that background you’ll see in the picture isn’t just a background picture. It’s called a Live Matte, and you’ve seen it done in TV lotsa times. Click for more!

Chapter 7, Episode V

After the load of work that was UV unwrapping this was a quick and easy part, but fun nonetheless! Painting textures directly on your subjects. I’m no painter, so I guess I had even more fun painting the petals on the flowers and laughing at my own hopelessness. Click for more!