Akta's Way – Blog

Hey folks!

Sorry to let you without any update lately. During the summer I promised myself that I wouldn’t have had any time to be spent in front of my Mac.. Moreover since last Monday I changed my job, moving into the game business at Rovio, the finnish company that developed the most famous iPhone game, Angry Birds! So working there as a game programmer is taking me 99% of the time while I know I should finalize projects such as LiveMesh! and some other else which is on hold. Stay tuned anyways, LiveMesh! 2.0 with texture support should be out very soon!

Akta

Hi folks!

This is the outcome of some experiments I’ve been doing lately using C++, Qt and OpenCV, the computer vision library. The goal of this software is rather simple, but handy!

When you launch the .exe a window is shown on your screen. Press start to open the connection to your webcam and start acquiring frames from it. Then drag selections over the webcam window to select the area, when you release the mouse button the software will calculate the selection’s average rgb pixel component and it will show it in the main small window in three separated text fields. So obviously watch out what you select to get right color there (btw the color is shown also on the top left corner of the webcam window)

Why use this small piece of software? Well personally sometimes I wanted to know: which color is my sweater? Or, whoa, I like the color on this book/flower/pen/muffin etc etc, but what could it be? Well now I can find my answer with this software just putting the object in front of the webcam and selecting the region of interest. As I said is a small piece of software, but handy for any kind of graphic app, Blender shaders and materials included!

You can download the software here, it’s in a zip file, unpack it wherever you wish and launch WebCamPalette.exe.

WCP in action!

Yeah, before you start giving me the f%&#&ng MS supporter/developer, I can upload the sources and you can compile them yourselves on your favourite platform, however you need them to have also the OpenCV libraries compiled for the OS on which you are going to run WCP.

Hi!

Just a quick post, I spent the whole week-end trying to rip the video about my talk in Amsterdam during the BC 2009 available on the De Balie website ( http://debalie.nl ). So here it is the presentation, hope you enjoy it!

Akta

I wish I had a laptop in my brain from where to share every single thing I saw and learnt in my first BC to share that with you guys, unfortunately I can just write a sort of final report on what this experience has been for me.

If you are Blender fans, you must go there. It’s impressive to see how many people love this open-source tool and how much close you can feel to them even though you met them only few minutes before. It’s like everybody there has been your friend since the childhood, there’s feeling between people, a kind of magic friendship in the air which lives under the same flag, Blender.

Besides the human aspect of the conference, where I had the chance to meet really cool people that I knew just because their tutorials or articles on the web (like Sebastian König, Andrew Price, Anfeo and all the italian Blender community), I must say that the quality of the conference was extremely high. This from several points of view: artistic, scientific, organizational.

Artistically speaking I’ve never seen such a good quality artworks made by Blender users. I was especially impressed by the Durian concept art sketches made by the french artist David Revoy. His epic fantasy style really astonished me. Also the Suzanne Award Festival was great. It took me some time before I could decide for whom I was going to vote.

Blender as a tool for scientific applications was an important aspect of this conference. It really showed the endless possibilities that the software can offer also to the scientific community, beyond the artistic one.

Dolf, Anja and Anna. Three words to express the same concept: organization. Without them all of this wouldn’t have been possible, so thanks!

Personally I feel really satisfied. The feedback I got from the talk was much more than I expected, people were really excited about the idea of having emotions in games and they come up with several interesting possible applications. I thank them for their support and as I promised my aim for the next year is to release a full game which uses biosignals in realtime

If you are interested in paper and abstract, you will find them soon on blender.org, as well as the video of my talk.

If you want another point of view of this conference, I recommend to visit Andrew’s website BlenderGuru , you can find there an article and a lot of cool stuff like tutorials, tips and articles about Blender!

Marco

Well I must say that during the summer time I was pretty lazy (who isn’t? ), but now that I’m back in my beloved Finland I found some time to study and try to get some skills with Node materials and compositing. I took some character I modeled during the spring time, Vampig, and tried to apply what I learnt from Pablo Vazquez and his amazing DVD Venom’s Lab, released in the beginning of July in the Blender e-shop. I strongly recommend that, beginners-intermediate and advanced users! There are plenty of good tips in there and besides that Pablo looks like a funny guy when he’s explaining Blender stuff, so for sure it won’t be boring!
This is Vampig V2, hope you enjoy it!
Akta

Vampig V2

Here you go guys, one of the Blender’s masterpieces, something that you must definitely have if you love Blender and you want to learn more about techniques and new feature in the version 2.49.
Made by Venom (Pablo Vazquez) this is a must for all of you Blender friends! Here it is the teaser:

The first time I started to do character animation I found really helpful this tutorial on the BlenderWiki page. I really recommend it to everybody, beginners and medium-advanced users because alle the steps, from modeling to shading, rigging, walk-cycling etc. is explained there

Have it a go here:

Introduction to Character’s Animation

Happy blending!

Hello Blender friends, this tutorial is actually in italian or at least the user has Blender with the italian UI. However it’s quite straightforward and understandable, hope you enjoy it!
The tutorial can be watched also from the source where I watched it, www.blender-tutorial.com

Diffuse shaders determine, simply speaking, the general colour of a material when light is shined on it. Most shaders that are designed to mimic reality give a smooth falloff from bright to dark from the point of the strongest illumination to the shadowed areas, but Blender also has other shaders for various special effects. You have to master them if you want to achieve good results in your renderings and to do so you need to know and, of course, try them! So in connection with that here it is the page from the Blender manual where you can find detailed informations and examples about diffuse shaders:

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Materials/Properties/Diffuse_Shaders

Take your time, try them and try to combine those with the specularity shaders that are listed just after the diffuse ones in the link I provided you

When you can master them, results will improve significantly, below an example with toon shaders:

Vampig

Happy blending!

M.

Texturing is an important part to make our models real. We give them bump maps in order to make them with some (fake) irregularities so they look more real, we use normal map for displacements and then we have a big variety of choice of other textures we could use, such as image maps, alpha maps, specularity maps and so on..
But before we can apply our textures we need to do one of the most tricky things in Blender, especially if our model is complex and this thing is the “Unwrap”.
To unwrap means literally to open the mesh and put it on a 2D plane, like if it were an image on which we can draw on and define its materials/textures etc.
You can unwrap in Blender selecting the mesh in edit mode (TAB) and pressing (U).
Before you unwrap the mesh you have to select the faces you are going to unwrap (A to select them all) and if you want (I strongly suggest it) you mark a SEAM that will be the path on which the mesh will be “opened”.
Well to understand how to mark your seam, make a lot of practice. You can mark a seam just switching to edge mode and selecting the edges that will be your seam, then go to Mesh -> Edges -> Mark Seam. You need a seam if you use the normal unwrap method.
Another way could to use the smart projection system or the unwrap from the current projection (for example if you want to unwrap a face you switch the front view, select the face’s polygons and unwrap from that view).
However since the unwrap is a big and tricky topic I suggest you to check this link from the official Blender manual, where you can find all the possible usages of this function:

Blender manual – Unwrap

Happy blending!