3d Swamp - Knee Deep in 3d

Posting moving to Purpleboogers

2011-07-19T01:13:00.000-07:00

To the few followers following this Blog. I've actually moved over to posting on my website at PurpleBoogers.com. Or if you love blogger (though blogger is nested on that site) you can read about my adventures in 3d (and 2d) at purpleboogers.blogspot.com

2010-06-02T00:05:00.000-07:00

Yet another Sculptris/Blender work, I feel like I found the missing link in my workflow. Inspired by the cover of the Christopher Paolini book, "Brisingr".

2010-05-29T16:24:00.000-07:00

Sculptris for Orca - Sculpted/Textures/Normal Maps
Blender for Environment/particles/Lighting/Shaders/Compositing etc
Gimp for some texture stuff (inverting normals maps etc)

Ogre

2010-05-27T00:38:00.001-07:00

Model made it into Durian

2010-03-17T12:23:00.000-07:00

A couple of posts ago I showed a model I made in the modeling sprint for the Durian Open Movie. Well, some renders got posted up today from the movie and I'm happy to report that my model made it into the shaman hut scene of the movie! Yay!

You can see the stave tied to the wall of his hut on the left side of this image. You can see that they re-textured it to make it fit the theme of the scene. You can find the stave a few posts ago.

Radioactive Fluid

2010-03-12T16:56:00.000-08:00

Just a quick test with fluids and the new Indirect lighting feature of Blender 2.5. It worked - I now have Radioactive Fluid!

Radioactive Goo from Sean Olson on Vimeo.

Durian Modeling Sprint

2010-02-23T13:20:00.001-08:00

So, the Durian Team, decided to hold a modeling sprint to gain some ground on their open movie project. I saw this as a neat opportunity to get my modeling into a real project so I went for it. I decided I could actually use one of my unfinished models as a base and get to work on finalizing it for the movie. The original concept is taken from the Pandaren Brewmaster Staff. Anyway, here it is. Small, simple, but complete! You can download the finished model here:
Download Blend

Anyway, you should go support the Durian Project and Blender development by pre-ordering the movie!

HDR Fun

2010-01-18T20:56:00.000-08:00

I just picked up a Pentax K-X DSLR because I got my last camera wet on my honeymoon. Oops. Now I have a much nicer camera! I played with it a bit this weeked, and decided to learn a bit about HDR and tonemapping. I made this image with a free program called qtpfsgui (http://qtpfsgui.sourceforge.net/) What an awful software name! But, the software did what I wanted it to do quite nicely. So, my first foray into HDR!

2009-10-25T19:48:00.000-07:00

I just created a test with the Blender 2.5 system, animato, and the "Clumping" feature. This video shows the clump factor from -1.0 to 1.0 over a 10 second period. Thus, 5 seconds in has a clump factor of exactly 0. This video had default lighting and default blender material. The only variable is the clumping factor. Maybe it will be of use to somebody looking for the correct clump factor for a model.

Clump Hair setting in blender 2.5 from Sean Olson on Vimeo.

2009-08-30T23:21:00.000-07:00

A mason jar - a challenge by a friend produced this. I still need to fine tune some of the materials, but the bulk of the work is done.

Rendering Smoke in Blender

2009-08-27T09:57:00.000-07:00

Hello all. I stuggled a little bit while trying to figure out Blenders new smoke & volume features and I thought I would write a little guide to make the process easier for others following in my footsteps. I'm righting this tutorial for Blender build 22805 which can be found here. Keep in mind, this proceedure might totally change in the future since this is an early development build of Blender 2.5.

1. Open the build. Start by saving the file so the cache knows where to save. Hit Z to enter wire frame mode.

2. Add a plane to the scene. Scale it down and fit it inside the default cube.

3. Add a particle system to your plane. Set the physics option in particles to "No". On the Render Panel, set the option to "None".

4. Go to the physics tab and add the smoke to the plane.

5. Set the radio button to "flow". Select your particle system in the text box. The default name is "ParticleSystem"

6. Select the default cube and add smoke to it in the physics tab

7. Set the radio button to "domain". You can play with the other options to have fun with your smoke, but it is not necessary.

8. Go to the material tab for the default cube. Select "Volume" from the radio buttons that have - Surface, Wire, Volume, Halo.

9. Under the Shading settings, set Density to 0.

10. Go to the texture tab for the default cube.

11. Under type, select "Voxel Data"

12. On the Voxel Data Panel select "Cube" as your domain object.

13. On the influence panel, check the option "Density".

14. Go to the World Panel and set the horizon color to black to better see the smoke.

15. Hit alt-a to let the simulation run... Cool smoke!

16. Stop the simulation on a cool looking frame.

17. Drag your lamp next to the camera so you get some good front lighting on the smoke.

18. Hit F12 to render and get something like this!

2009-05-20T15:53:00.000-07:00

I've been away awhile as my life has gotten quite hectic recently. I just got married on May 1st and then went to the Dominican Republic for the honeymoon. In addition, we just got a new family member, Luna, a Siberian Husky puppy. Needless to say, my time has been quite limited recently.

On to recent graphics stuff I've done!

I just followed an excellent tutorial by Jonathan Williamson and learned a few cool tricks. It was fun watching a quick work flow on a simple project. You can watch the tutorial here:

Model a Steampunk Telescope

2009-03-16T10:47:00.000-07:00

Just thought I would let you all in on my latest project. A WWII P38. Here is my initial modeling.

Texturing goodness

2009-02-16T19:23:00.000-08:00

I followed this tutorial in order to really dig into texturing work. I learned a lot that I will be able to apply to my own images.

Brief notes for future reference

Color Map:
UV Template - Screen
AO Pass - Multiply
Scratches - Screen+Alpha (Hard scratches)
2nd Scratch Layer - Screen+Alpha (Soft scratches)
3rd Scratch Layer - Screen/Lighten + Alpha (Soft Scratch Pattern)

Bump Map from Color Map:
Grayscale
Scratch Layers - Invert Color + Multiply
AO - Off
Grime - Lowered or off
Decals - Off
Textured Fills - Filled with solid

Specular Map from Color Map:
Grayscale
Darken Less Reflective Areas

Discombobulate!

2009-02-07T14:48:00.000-08:00

Discombobulate from Sean Olson on Vimeo.

This is a simple cube with the "discombobulate" script used on it. It's got approximate ambiant occlusion and ray tracing applied to it. But the thing that makes this video extra special, is how it was rendered. It was rendered using distributed computing. Not just a renderfarm, but a world wide networked render farm. I'm one of the first people involved in the project, so we will see how much it grows, but hopefully this will be the way to render in the future. It gives the possiblity of rendering a full length movie in a fraction of the time it would take to render on one machine.

www.renderfarm.fi

Extracting Normal Maps from Photo Textures

2009-01-30T13:07:00.000-08:00

I've been playing with normal maps recently and learned a cool trick. Usually, you have to have a 3d object to make a normal map of the object. But, I learned a way to "Recover" normals from a photo texture, thus giving the texture the illusion of depth.

Original Texture

To do this you:
1. run the texture through a normal map filter in your chosen photo manipulation application.
2. Blur the image slightly to remove the fine details (I did not do this step enough on the example)
3. Create a new layer in "overlay" mode
4. Use a Gaussian Blur on the layer. (I used 3 pixels here)
5. Repeat steps 3-4 a bunch of times. I created 15 layers for this example.
6. Flatten the image
7. Run the Normal map filter again, but this time in "Normalize" mode.
8. Yay, you have an "extracted" normal map!

Extracted Normal Map
After extracting your Normal map, you can apply it to any surface in your 3d modeling package. Here are some pictures of my normal map applied to a simple plane. This illusion of 3d holds up until the viewer is almost at a 90 degree angle to the viewing surface. It's best used on surfaces that you know the viewer will not be able to get near or are usually seen from a distance.

3d rendering of textured plane with no normal map

3d rendering of same textured plane with normal map

This gives a great sense of depth!

Glowy Eyes

2008-12-18T16:05:00.000-08:00

Just a quick post showing some experimentation with a glowy eye effect I am working on. You know the type that are often seen on super heroes and in video games? Here is my first attempt/stage. It just uses particles emitting from a sphere and then colliding with the "eyelid" while being attracted to an empty spherical force.

Glowy Eyes Attempt #1 from Sean Olson on Vimeo.

Peace (Wizards)

2008-12-18T14:12:00.000-08:00

Well, today I was going to post a cool artistic piece that I made with topmod. It was a 3d abstract object that rotated on all 3 axis's at once. Problem is, the render of my movie crashed somewhere in between hour 26 and hour 28 of my animation. The upside of this experience is that it motivated me to learn about the "Image Sequencer" in Blender. If you care, here is a link to the tutorial. Basically, using this tool, I can render each frame of an animation to a seperate image file, and then combine them later. No more loosing 26 hours of render time if my system crashes. Yay!

So, since I don't have the cool topmod animation to show you, I'll show you another one of my projects.

When I was young, I was always attracted to the cover art of the movie "Wizards". I recently watched the movie, and it is not very good at all, but that cover art has always stuck in my head. So anyway, I've decided to model it.

Here is the reference image that I am using. The characters name is Peace.

I started work with the weapon in the image.

And Peace himself:
I've modeled some of the other parts of the image as well, but I don't have those images with me at the moment, so I won't be able to post them just yet. You will have something to look forward to now.

Flood Test

2008-12-16T10:15:00.000-08:00

So, I decided I wanted to push the fluid sim a little further and learn how to make a big flood, rolling down an avenue. I started with just trying to get the look of the water right, so there is not much "environment" yet. Right now the street just consists of some boxes and a plane for the street level. Also, though I am pretty impressed with the results, it could use some tweaking. You might notice the water hits the top of the domain, that is a problem. (You want to make the domain as small as possible as it is very memory intensive...and it's memory requirements are exponential with it's size.) The material on the water looks a little "goopy", maybe like dirty toothpaste. I think that could use some work too. But, all in all, I think the proof of concept is in place and looks good. I'm going to have to figure out how to make some nice rain to add to the scene too. As well as lightning!

Flooded Street Concept from Sean Olson on Vimeo.

Fire - Attempt #1

2008-12-11T09:39:00.000-08:00

This is my first attempt at creating CG Fire. It took about a weekend of work to produce. The method used was created by Francois Grassard. The general idea is like this:
1. Create an object that you want to light on fire
2. Emit particles from that object
3. Use a "magnet/attractor" type force to draw the particles in the upward direction.
4. Use "wind" type forces at multiple sides of the object. Variance in the wind is good too.
5. Attach small spheres to the particles.
6. Find a nice orange material for the fire. (or whatever color you want the fire to be)
7. Light the spheres with a hard light on one side of the object
8. The magic is in the composting. You need to add a lot of blurs and glows to make this look right.

CG Fire - Attempt #1 from Sean Olson on Vimeo.

I'm not entirely happy with this fire yet. The color appears off. If you look closely you can still tell that spheres are used. The base does not look thick enough. And the randomness of the fire does not look quite right yet. I'll have another go at it in the future.

Eyes!

2008-12-11T00:00:00.000-08:00

A few posts ago I mentioned that I would show off some completed eyes that use the Iris creation method I was talking about. So, here they are!

For the Iris you use the method that I described earlier. The rest of the eye is set up like this.

As you can see, there is the Cornea, which has a slight blue tint, and a lot of alpha applied to it. The iris is just the texture of course, but also make sure to set the material to be shadeless, otherwise you will get a nasty shadow on your iris. Then, the pupil itself it just a solid Black and the eye white is of course just a solid white. You can add some veins to make the eyes look more realistic, or leave them like this for a more "toony" feel.

Rain

2008-12-10T14:24:00.001-08:00

After playing with the fluidsim for a long time and studying the work of Mike Pan I created a really nice looking fluidsim. It's rain slowly falling on a chrome tube. Blenders fluidsim is very powerful and I can't wait to produce some more animations with it.

Rain from Sean Olson on Vimeo.

Magical Trevor

2008-12-10T12:05:00.000-08:00

So, I decided to make a 3d composition of "Magical Trevor" for my brother Trevor the Magician. I tried to stick to the style of the original cartoon, but pulled into 3d. I'm getting faster. This piece took me about a night.

Iris Texture

2008-12-09T14:16:00.001-08:00

I would just like to share the cool Iris making technique I learned the other day.

Modeling
1. Create a Circle and Rename it "Pupil"
2. Extrude the edges of the pupil out a short distance.
3. Select the Extruded Part of the pupil and separate it into a new mesh. Rename this Mesh "Iris"
4. Scale up the Pupil Object slighty. This will create the black ring around the outside of the Iris.

Materials
1. Create a new Black Material and apply it to the Pupil Object. Make it "shadeless" so that light does not affect it.
2. Create a new Color Ramp Material and apply it to the Iris Object. 3 Colors in the gradient look nice.

Particles
1. Add a Particle system of type "Hair" to the Iris Object. Bump up the Normals Size to "Grow the Hairs".
2. Invert the normals on the Iris object. This will make the normals go in towards the pupil, thus making the "Hair" grow towards the center of the eye.

Lighting/Camera
1. Make the camera directly face the front of the Iris object.
2. Place the camera in "Orthogonal" mode.
3. Scale up the Eye Objects (Iris/Pupil) so that they fill the whole camera viewport.
4. Snap a lamp to the same position as the camera

Rendering
1. Render Image and smile at your Iris Texture.

I'll show some fully rendered eyes with their whole setup soon.

Axe

2008-12-05T12:10:00.000-08:00

Ah, a weapon! I decided to make an axe the other day on lunch. I think it turned out quite nicely, but it shows that maybe it's time for me to start flushing out more materials and textures to complete some of my models. Everything is feeling a bit gray to me. The hardest part about building this model was keeping the topology of the Axe-Head clean and Triangle Free. (Triangles do not play nicely with subsurf animation.) I got it after struggling for a little bit. Anyway, here is the source image, and my version.

My first, "Paid Project"

2008-12-05T09:44:00.000-08:00

So, I needed a way to "bring attention" to our internal announcements web page when important updates were made to the page. At first I thought, since I work in a game company, that the Mario Star, , would be a good indicator. But then, after a little more thought, I realized that Activision and Blizzard just merged, so a Wow Quest Exclamation point would be ideal. After about 10 minutes of searching google images, I realized that there were no good Warcraft Exclamation points out there suitable for web graphics. (I was looking for a 3d animated gif exclamation point.) So, I decided to boot up blender and go to work. This only took about 10 minutes from idea to completed gif. I should have started with Blender and I would have saved 10 minutes of searching! Anyway, here it is. Simple and Sweet.
Sadly, it appears that blogger does not support animated gif. So you will have to settle for a still version.

Color!?!

2008-12-04T23:40:00.000-08:00

I felt this blog needed a bit of color. So here is my node based lava material. It could still use some work and tweaking, but I got the gyst of it down. There is a nice tutorial on how to work with node based materials in Bounce, Tumble, and Splash.

So you want to make trees?

2008-12-04T22:46:00.000-08:00

L-Systems are super cool! They take all the work out of making trees! And guess what? There is a great Python Script that works in Blender just for this activity. You can find it here.

Creature Factory Creature Modeling

2008-12-04T22:12:00.000-08:00

So, watching and following this DVD really bumped me up to the next level. Watching a professional artist create his work from start to finish really erased a lot of the nagging questions in my mind. Issues like, "Is it okay to have multiple objects be in one model?" got answered just by watching him work. I basically followed along and picked up a lot of neat shortcuts and tools that I had no idea how to use previously. Some of these tools, like the proportional editing tool, are hard to live without. The picture included in my post is my work in progress Creature. I'm sure more "Creature Factory" posts are forthcoming.

Buying Tutorials

2008-12-04T22:02:00.000-08:00

Ok, so my SCV experience left me craving more. I decided to splurge and go buy a bunch of Blender related resource materials. I picked up Creature Factory, Big Buck Bunny, Bounce Tumble and Splash, and Character Animation with Blender. To tell you the truth, I'm still slogging through most of them. I also have been working my way through the online version of "The Essential Blender" and I downloaded the torrent of "The Mancandy Faq". (Don't worry, these are both CC licensed so this does not constitute piracy in the slightest...in fact, it was sanctioned by the authors of the content! All in the name of Open Source!) Anyway, my next posts will highlight some of the learning that took place from these sources as well as from various spots scattered across the Internet. Here are the is the Big Buck Bunny Movie and the Creature Factory Trailor for those you you looking to be entertained.

Big Buck Bunny from Blender Foundation on Vimeo.

Creature Factory from Andy Goralczyk on Vimeo.

The SCV Learning Experience

2008-12-04T20:25:00.000-08:00

The SCV taught me a lot. Most of which is that you can take a lot of simple objects, combine them, and make something that looks really cool. Doing this project made me learn a lot of Blenders tools very well including extrude, duplicate, and all of the fun translation, rotation, and scaling tools. One of the biggest things that I learned on this project was how to control subsurf edges. I learned about the Mirror functions and the modifier stack. Ambient Occusion. Curve Manipulation, Lighting etc etc etc. It's really hard actually to catalog this project because so much learning took place. Basically, I can confidently say that this project taught me 3d, and everything since has just been refinement.

Here is a dual-Monitor Desktop background if you want it.

WoW and the 3d revolution

2008-12-04T20:10:00.000-08:00

Ok, for about the past 4 years...basically since college, most of my free time has been spent playing the MMO known as World of Warcraft. It is a pretty amazing game, but you give up a lot to play it as well. Your social life turns digital. Anyway, being very into Wow I was determined to go to the most recent Blizzcon. (I went to the last ones too. It really is a blast.) Anyway, there was a fiasco when Blizzard was selling tickets this year. The website kept going down, and it was almost impossible to get to the transaction page. Ouch. But maybe not, because I actually would define this moment as a defining moment in my 3d career. Every time the webpage failed, we would see this image. Well, after staring at that image for 4 or 5 hours while getting red in the face, I decided, "Hey, lets make the best of this!" I then decided to go grab Blender and try my hand a modeling that SCV that kept popping up. Here are the results!

Activision Web Programming and Administration

2008-12-04T20:02:00.000-08:00

These days I'm doing mostly web stuff for work. I was approached to implement web management solution for the disorganized document structure that was in use. The old way of document management meant asking various people if they had a copy of document X on their machine. Of course, they probably had document X on their machine...but it was version .08 when when about 12 other versions of the document had already been approved. Anyway, I got to spend most of my time researching a CMS solution for the department. Then I got the job of implementing it and organizing all the documentation for the department. Now, I'm basically the "web man". I'm currently working on a Microsoft Sharepoint solution now for individual document shares but no-matter how hard I try, I can't stop thinking about 3d.

Activision Network Lab

2008-12-04T19:37:00.000-08:00

My next step on being a major game industry player is learning the Network Lab. I got to learn all there is to network testing. What fun that is... Most bugs involve desync issues. I also got to learn all about Sony/Nintendo/ and Microsoft networking requirements that developers tend to always ignore until we tell them that their game is going to fail submission. Anyway, Netlab gave me the opportunity to get credited on a ton more games, most notably Guitar Hero. It also afforded me the opportunity to do some web programming. Oh yeah, And I learned how to ride a motorcycle in crazy LA traffic during this time. Here is a fun video that simulates my commute!

Activision Compatibility

2008-12-04T19:27:00.000-08:00

So, after doing general game testing for ahwhile, I realized I wanted more. I had found a lot of hardware related bugs on some of my projects, so the Compatibility Lab at Activision took notice of me. I expressed a strong interest to work with them, and when a spot opened, they grabbed me. This gave me the chance to learn hardware backwards and forwards. I had to tear apart and rebuild machines all day long with testing focusing just on hardware issues. You definatly get to know your problem video cards and sound cards, but you also get to play with some very beefy hardware. That's always fun! I made a 3d Tetris game during those years too, but It's stored on a harddrive sitting in my closet, so I'm not going to go dig that up.

Activision Testing

2008-12-04T19:10:00.000-08:00

Well, I got out of college, packed the U-haul, and moved to LA to make it in the game industry. I got picked up by Activision fairly quickly as a QA Tester on Tony Hawk's Underground 2. I then went on to test a number of other games including Call of Duty, Call of Duty 2, Call of Duty 3, and Rome: Barbarian Invasion. Though I did not get to play in the graphics world much, I did get to watch the development of a product from start to finish. That's always fun! (Minus the 80 hour work weeks...)

College

2008-12-04T18:50:00.000-08:00

I knew I always wanted to work on video games, and figured it was a very competitive field. I figured my chances would be best as a programmer, so I went to school for Computer Science. Now, let me preface this by stating that I am a very "Right Brained" type of person. Computer Science tends to be a "Left brain" type of activity... In short Computer Science was very very hard for me. But, I also tend to be a very stubborn person when it comes to giving up. I don't do it. I wanted to work in the game industry, no matter what. I forced myself through the boring stuff, (which in hindsight, was not that boring...Sorting Algorithms are actually fascinating creatures) until I got to some of the higher level courses of which I could apply the knowledge directly to the game industry. Matrix Theory, AI, and Graphics Programming were a blast!

Graphics Programming. We had to make a "scene" using just OpenGL programming. I wanted to make a remake of the MC Escher's famous piece, "Relativity". I would say, for just using code, I did a fairly good job. You can download my project here.

The next year I went on to work on a small md2 graphics importer. But I had much more fun making the character for my little game. His name is Max and Max supposedly lost his marbles. The overall concept of the game was to help Max collect his marbles. To create Max I used the 3d Modeling Program known as "Milkshape3d".

High School

2008-12-04T17:18:00.001-08:00

My first step into 3d was in an Advanced Photography class while I was in high school back in 1997ish. It was basically an independent study project to learn the program Ray Dream Studio. This first step was the roughest. I got an overly large "manual" that was extremely poorly written. The program worked nothing like the manual said it should. In short, I decided to pursue other interests and 3d got put on hold until my later college years.

The Beginning!

2008-12-04T16:29:00.000-08:00

The Beginning! This sites aim is to chronicle the blooming of a 3d CG "caterpillar" into a fully fledged butterfly. I'll probably touch on my game development goals as well. Hopefully, my path will help some others avoid some pitfalls, find some shortcuts, and answer questions. In addition, I will be maintaining the site in order to keep track of myself and my progress. Hopefully it is swift! The first few posts will be "catch-up". Basically bringing readers up to speed on what I have done in the CG and Game Worlds up to this point.