Blender 2.5 Beta
I’m sure at some point you’ve come across Blender being mentioned on some website at some time or another. You may have even downloaded it run it and not much further than that. I personally think the idea behind Blender is incredible, I mean it’s free, open source and it’s up there with many of the other 3D softwares that are usually upwards of £2000. It’s very dense, can match the features of most but unfortunately the thing that has always been a stickler for many people is that it’s really difficult to use. I used it for 3D text etc… for uni projects a few years back and even used it for a match moving project but I always forget how to use it if I don’t use it for a while.
I noticed the other day that over at Blender.org they have a beta for 2.55. So I downloaded it not expecting much difference from the one I already have installed, but wow, it’s looks to have had a complete overhaul, at least interface-wise. It instantly looks alot closer to the stye of other 3D softwares such as Cinema 4D. Over the next few days I’m going to look into videos of animating characters in various 3D software packages, see if it’s actually a viable option for me. Other wise, I’m going to revert to my original plan of 2D animation using Animate Pro and After Effects.
.blok from Krystian Morgan on Vimeo.
.blok
This little short was contrived whilst i was teaching myself matchmoving. I think i made every mistake that was possible to make whilst creating this, but at least i have the process dialed into my brain now. The softwares i used to make it are blender(3d) and icarus(3d tracker) you can get both of these applications for free although icarus is for non-commercial work only. Basically you take your shot into icarus and you track a number of areas of your footage, find out your camera’s focal length and location in 3d space, then you take that information acquired by icarus into blender and your camera’s location relative to the objects you filmed are matched and the camera path is already set for you, so then you add your cg elements to the scene and animate them how ever you like. All that’s left then is compositing the original footage with the cg footage in After Effects.
I’m pretty happy with the way that it has turned out, i’d probably like it to be a bit longer in retrospect but more than anything i’m looking forward to using these techniques in other videos along the line (especially if i get good at blender). P.S in the final shot where it goes blurry to focused back and forth, was all accidental, the camera which was in auto focus at this point got stuck into this weird limbo where it couldn’t focus on anything so bobbed back and forth like you see in the clip, i liked what it was doing so kept it in.
Check out some of the screenshots of the softwares at work below.
Hope you liked the video!
