Blender workshop in Lausanne december 20th @Fixme Hackerspace

Last week I gave an introductory course for the GULL (Linux Usergroup of lake Léman area), and as a followup, I will hold a workshop about Blender in Lausanne.
The venue place is FIXME hackerspace, rue de Genève 79
It will be open-schedule, meaning you can come in at anytime from 19h to 22h30. There is a little fee (5 chf) for non-members, and free for FIXME members .
It is open for all levels, beginners to jedi masters !
French and English spoken
Bring your laptops and mouses and let the fun begin!

first blender Cycle rendering test

So, in the recent weeks, we have been seeing a huge income of renders using Cycles, the new rendering engine of blender…. I finally got some time yesterday evening to try something.
Being not very inspired creatively speaking, the result is just what it is : a christmas inspired scene. It might be used as Christmas wish card.

click to view in HD.

It took quiet a while to render in hd… and it still had some grain/noise in the background out of focus. Any thoughts on improving this (except changing graphic card

You can find the scene on blendswap…. as with all creative content, feel free to learn, modify, reshare, and enjoy it !

Swiss Blender Users

Salut a tous / Hallo zusammen / Saluti a tutti / Hello everyone

SwissBUG form :
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?hl=en_US&formkey=dDNJYzVzdjN1UEhTUUR0SGhFV1FmVkE6MQ#gid=0

EN : Little blogpost to invite all swiss users to register themself on this form.
We will eventually try to organize some swissBUG (swiss blender user group)

FR : Petit post de blog pour vous signaler un formulaire pour vous inscrire comme utilisateur Blender en Suisse (tous niveaux bienvenus). On essaiera d’organiser un souper ou rencontre

DE : ein kleines Formular um sich anzumelden bei der swiss blender user group. Wir probieren denn einmal ein Zusammentreffen zu organisieren. Ich bitte um Entschuldigen für mein Schrecklisches Deutsch

IT :
Piccolo post per dire che c’è un formulare per registrarsi come utente di Blender di Svizzera (tutti livelli benvenuti). Si proverà ad organizzare una cena o incontro. (thx fossilite x 3

Blender conference + challenges files

In this post I will share the files I used for my presentation called blender challenges.
But first I have to apologize for posting a short blogpost, my wife is here and we are going to visit Amsterdam for 2 days, so not much time for writting

This was one of my best conference, if not simply the best! Got the chance to meet a lot of new people, especially some swiss guys this time too! Hope we can do some gathering one day soon.

Apart from meeting people (which takes some time and even makes you miss some talks because chatting and sharing is so much fun) you also get the chance to see talks and presentation of techinques, researches or simply showcases of what people do with blender.

Blender Challenges
I had the chance and task to host the open-stage time slot, and so decided to share some files and problems encountered during some productions, but in a simplified way. It resulted in a series of 6-7 .blend files, with something wrong in them, and people would need to solve them.
The files were handed out at start of the talk, and folks had to gather in groups and try to solve them. The few first ones were rather easy, ranging from bad oriented normals, to overlaping faces. some others were a bit more tricky. The audience was very participative and it started some nice discussion and trick sharing, I loved it.
Instead of giving out the answers, I will give out the files for your pleasure and you can try to solve them.
Here is the link: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6506660/challenges_2011.zip (1.1 mb)
I hope you can enjoy them as much as the audience did
Can you solve them ? Do you have some answers ?
Do not read the comments if you dont want to be spoiled

Back from USA, back to work & 2 new Blender 2.5 books

We are back from our USA travel and it is now time to get back to serious things : 3d

If some of you are interested here is a link to the flickr account with some pictures we took:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/oenvoyage/sets/72157626969992601/

We have some project at the studio, some 3D anims but a bit stylized, we will see how it comes out. I also would like to remind my blog readers (if there are any) that i have a twitter account, because i am a social person (tweet me at @oenvoyage)

I have also 2 books from Packt Publishing that I plan to read and share my thoughts on.

Blender 2.5 Character Animation Cookbook
by Virgilio Vasconcelos

Blender 2.5 Hotshot
by John Edison Herreño Velasco

I recieved them as e-books so I plan to either read on my phone or ipad (which I dont use much anyway)… I will see how it goes, but there are chances I might end up reading on the computer as most of the time reading blender books (and especially with those recipet-style books) you might want to put your hands and try immediately the learned material.

My FMX experience, Conferences, Blender and Cycles

Hello Everyone !

Mohit Kallianpur @ fmx2011 : Untangling “Tangled”

I just came back from Stuttgart where I attended the FMX 2011 conferences. First of all let me tell you it was amazing!  Not only where the conferences interesting, but also well attended and often full. I did miss some because of that. But well, on the other hand I also saw some great ones like Disney’s presentation on Tangled/Rapunzel lightning and shading, or Pixar’s cinematography (layout & camera) . Special effects were also not forgotten with nice sessions around Harry Potter’s movie and some stereoscopic 3d workflows. The House der Wirtshaft building is a great place to hang around and has good installations. I just wish I could duplicate myself using Shift-D so I could see all the talks and workshops.

A large part of my time was also spend revolving around the Blender booth were we gave out nearly a thousand free DVD’s of blender + tutorials to interested people. I was suprised at the number of people who actually had tried blender few years ago and are still interested. A fun question to be heard : “How can it be free and so powerful? Who pays for all this ? “. We gave some demos and had some afterhour beers. I was very happy to meet Ton again, and of course all the german blender users/guru and say hello to all you guys ! Especially big hug goes to Thomas W who was a great after-work-dinner-relaxation-chill-out-evening organizer. Taking us to typical schwäbische restaurant on first night, and exotic african on the 2nd day. + thanks for the hosting.

blender cycles rendering demo can harm your car

The big attraction (and it really did attract people) on the booth was indeed Cycles, the new render engine work-in-progress. It was my first time see it live, and got a good chance to play around with it. Mostly turning around the viewport and staring at the scene rendering.  We did show a lot the BMW scene from Mike Pan (and I enjoyed changing it live) , and it was fun because a few booth away was Cad Networks (reseller of rendering and vizualization solutions Nvidia partner) and they were showing off some real-time raytracing, but to be honest the speed difference beetween their powerhorse and our modest setup was not big… Of course a lots of parameters has to be taken in account, they use windows (cycles seems 2x faster on linux (due to no win optimization yet i think) and their software to demo is different. So we managed to get cycle win build on a usb stick and plug it in. It was cool and working, but it seems it did not use all the 4 graphic cards in parralel, only one… So we still have to wait to see full parallel CUDA.

The engine also integrates a new shading system based on OpenShading Language (opensource project from Sony). It has some basic shaders that can be viewed in nodes or as property list. More complexe shaders to be added later, or you can create/program  your own ones.

I will definetly be at FMX 2012 next year.

And here are some more photos :

cars, cars, cars....modern art ?

Stuttgart was also hosting the International Animation Festival- With open air screenings !

Aerial view of the blender booth

myself fooling around the booth

Sintel Shaman Hut scene remade using ultralite model

Yesterday evening I was browsing a bit blendswap. A cool website with some very sweet models, all files are released as creative commons, so mostly free to use/reuse for your own project.

One specific model that made me laugh is Sintel Ultralite rig by hjmediastudios.
It is a fun version of Ben Dansie’s sintel light. It ‘is even lighter than a light version!

So while seeing this squary (but not scary) girl, I was wondering how the movie would have looked with such a model… no need to tell you that such an idea doesnt stay long in my head before getting to action. So 1,2,3 and I decided to take one scene (if possibly not involving too much actions,… lot of actions means lots of rotoscoping, means less time to work commercially, means less money, means less travels) and intergrate that model in it.

You can see the result here:

Brender: a new render farm solution for blender needs beta tester.

Hello everyone.

Good news we have decided to release brender as open-source for everyone to enjoy!

I have already mentioned a few times in this blog the use of an in-house software called brender. It was first written in 2005 when I needed a simple render queuing system built around blender. The system is an apache/php/mysql server running a script  and dispatching the different render orders to client machines. There is a web interface for managing the projects, job, clients and orders. It has a slightly more complicated setup time (due to some paths possible confusion) because it allows scene files (and all the dependencies) to be on any machine in the local network, not necessarly on the server. They can be hosted on the editing machine for instance.

So after 5 years of lonely use in Swizerland and 2-3 months of rewrite with Francesco Siddi, we can proudly release the source code to the wild.

The project is hosted on a github repository here. For easier access you can find a download at this page.
Installation procedure and help is on the brender wiki.

We welcome any feedback from beta testers.

for more help you can either :
- email me (Olivier oenvoyage AT gmail) or Francesco (fsiddi AT gmail)
- post a comment/question on this blog
- check the blender artists thread
- join us on IRC freenode #brender

and to get started you can find some help/installation/introduction videos here :

simple project rendering :

installation help :

Please keep in mind it evolved from an in-house (and very hardcoded) solution to something more open, We tried as much as possible to ease the installation process.
Some complicated aspects include the paths needed for projects setup. This is mostly due to the concept of brender to not move the .blend files from server to client. All rendernodes renders through network in a “local” way. It gives less hassle with linked files, textures, simcache etc.

the codesource can be downloaded on github : https://www.github.com/oenvoyage/brender

3d tracking on mobile phone shot

Yesterday David (our young new talented 2d animator) and I were walking to the bakery to grab some sandwiches and in the flow of the conversation we started talking about 3d tracking. For a mysterious reason that even google doesnt know, we had the compulsory need to track something.

But we had no camera on hand, just a mobile phone. No problem, smartphones are supposed (its amazing how we believe ads) to shoot videos ! So we gave it a try and here is the fun result after an afternoon of cam tracking and some animation + film grading/degrading for hiding the bad shadows and comp hehehe

Maybe if spare time is available (!) I can make a little making of video. Tracking was done using Syntheyes.

By the way the 3d model is a CC model taken from  www.blendswap.com : FLOPSY by hjmediastudios

Blender Introduction Workshop in Lausanne, Switzerland, Jan 19th 2011

Being a member of a hackerspace in construction in Lausanne called Fixme, I have the honour to announce that I will hold an introduction workshop to the world of Goo…oups….to the world of Blender !

This intro/workshop is intended for people who have no knowledge at all or very limited use of blender, so do not expect advanced topics. That’s for later
I also expect to show some of the open-movies and maybe have some discussion about opensource softwares for graphics.

It will take place on wednesday 19th January of next year (2011). You can check more infos on this page.