Snowfall Tests with Blender Particles August 4th, 2009
I’ve been considering how to do a 3D camera move into a snowy scene, and it occurred to me that the snow would also have to be falling in 3D space. After Effects has plugins for snow, but they are a 2D solution the just sits in front of the camera. There are also third party plugins such as Particular that generate particles in 3D space. However I did not want to have to purchase a new plugin just for some snowfall tests.
fxphd Special Ops Submission August 1st, 2009
Online visual effects training site fxphd offers their students more then just videos to watch. They also have a program, titled Special Ops, that gives students the opportunity to work on real productions. Two terms ago, fxphd staff recruited program members to work on the visual effects team for the UK mini series Red Dwarf. For those invited to participate, it was an excellent opportunity to be a member of a globally distributed visual effects team. I did not take the time to prepare a submission for Red Dwarf, and regret wasting a chance to participate. When fxphd announced another Special Ops program this term, I made up my mind that I would not miss this chance.
Fallen Angel #7 March 23rd, 2009
The next phase of my Fallen Angel short film project is to create an animatic from the storyboards. In this previz stage of the project, I’m building the movie with simple elements in 3D so I can start to see how the sequence of shots flow. For example, I made a number of storyboards illustrating shots of a city. To simulate this, I created a simple cityscape in Blender. Since the model in Blender is 3D, I’m free to move the camera around to test out different angles of view.
Dogman Encounter Anaglyph March 1st, 2009
In a previous post, I used a camera projection to create an anaglyph. This time I decided to create an anaglyph from my Dogman Encounter post. As before, I used Blender for the 3D modeling and animation portion of the camera projection. Then I added a second camera into my 3D environment and created a second scene.
Camera Projection plus Dogman February 27th, 2009
I decided to do another camera projection exercise as part of the challenge posted on The Challenge Jar website. I visited Houghton Lake earlier this week where I had taken a lot of snowy landscape pictures. The image I chose for this project was taken at Hartwick Pines State Park. This time my goal was to create a camera projection from the snowy woods image below.
Anaglyph Test February 24th, 2009
In a previous post, I created a camera projection from a still image. In this post I discuss generating a stereoscopic 3D effect, also known as an anaglyph, from that camera projection. With the use of red/blue 3D glasses, anaglyph imagery will appear as a three dimensional illusion.
Camera Projection Test February 21st, 2009
Camera projection, also known as camera mapping, is the process of creating a 3 dimensional scene from a still image. There are two fundamental steps to creating a camera projection. The first step is to breakdown the image into pieces that can be physically separated in 3D space. The second step is to reconstruct the image in a 3D environment and map the image pieces onto simple geometry.