Creche Masters - A young Obi-Wan fic

Batman - if you just hit F12 I believe that's just a preview, it doesn't write to disk - am I right lokmer?

Anyway, Lok - update on my sabre exercise. I've got a basic working model now, I just have to go back and make sure the proportions are correct. I've also managed to link the ridges to the body of the hilt (they're seperate discs, lathing will have to wait till later). That was fairly straightforward.

Tomorrow I will look into materials, and maybe bump maps, as your sabre seemed to have a hammered finish to it...

All in all, I'm not doing too badly so far, and blender is becoming less of a pain the more I work with it...!

Saeed TTC

 

Cool! I'm glad you're enjoying it.

As far as rendered files: When you hit f12, it does write a temp file to the disk. If you like what you see, hit F3 and it will let you input a filename to save your file (however, it will only save in the format you have selected in the RenderButtons screen (F10 I think), the default is .TGA, but you can change it to JPG just by toggling down the JPG butotn). For saving animations, hit the ANIM button, it will render each frame and write them to the disk in whatever the default format is (AVI RAW is the best one to chose for this). It saves the rendered animations to the directory listed in the upper left hand corner of the RenderButtons window (the default is C:\render, listed on the window as //render).

There you are.

-Lokmer

 

Hey Lokmer, great trailer. I loved it, and the blasts looked well done. I never would have thought of using a program such as blender for something like that. It looked good for Real media file aswell. I'd seen a few clips from it before, but not the whole thing put together like that. The music worked nicely aswell.

I can kind of understand your reasoning for not spending money on software. For me, it's more a case of getting the tools that will allow me to do what what I want to do as easy and quick as possible. And if that means spending $199 + $99 for the upgrade on a 3d app that has features comparable to a program that costs $14995, then so be it!

By the way, I'm not sure if you use Terragen aswell? That's a nice free landscape program which lets you create some very realistic looking scenes. Here's the address: http://www.planetside.co.uk http://www.planetside.co.uk I guess you could use it to create moving landscapes, and maybe have some blender SW ships composited flying over the top.

Another thing, those X Wing images the guy did.. They look good, but to look more realistic he'd need to bevel the edges in order to avoid that sharp cgi polygon look. The maps also, he could have maps for specularity which would make the surface look kind of shiny, but not where the dirt is. And maybe some slight bump mapping aswell.

While I'm giving tips.. Saeed, I've been watching your movie. There's one thing I could suggest, the colours on the droid seem a bit bright. Well, mainly just the red. You'd not get a red that bright from a video camera. So, perhaps in some kind of compositing app, or even something like Premiere, you could make the colours slightly duller aswell as blurring the droid very slightly, in order for it to blend in with the video footage more so. In Hash, there's a NTSC gamma setting which takes away a lot of colour to make the scene look more like video. I used it on this pic http://www.crosswinds.net/~avene/images/Avene009.htm http://www.crosswinds.net/~avene/images/Avene009.htm

Well, those are my comments for the day!

 

Oh, another tip for colouring. In that pic I just posted, I copied the colours for the grass from a jpeg image I had of one of the Naboo shots from TPM. Copying colours from photos is the best way to get realistic colouring in your cgi scenes. Just load the pic into an image program, highlight the area of the pic which contains the colour you're after, then just write down the RGB numbers and then apply them to your materials/textures.

 

Thanks for the tips, Avene! I'm glad to hear that my short film is worth a repeat viewing...

For doing my special edition, I wanted to give Spidro a more menacing look, which is why I gave him those red eyes - Idid try to make them semi- transparent and see some camera type lenses thru the outer shell, but the thing was already taking too long - both to model and render. Infini-D does have some good options regarding video-safe colours, but I just ignored them due to time constraints.

Also, one of the main reasons the CG looks sharper than the footage is that the camera I used was a banged up vhs-c camera, which someone passed on to me 'cos it was uneconomical to repair. It didn't have sound, and sometimes the power would fail...its picture quality was fairly poor, but I didn't want that to prevent me from using quality CG. It's a similar thing with the shadows - people have been very complimentary, but actually the shadows are far too sharp and prominent than you would really get indoors - and in such a dull country! I knew this when rendering, but decided to keep them fairly strong - simply because they look great!

Many of these issues will be adressed when I come to working on TTC2: Rogue Jedi - it's even gonna have dialogue!

Saeed TTC

PS Lokmer - I'm not exactly 'enjoying' Blender. It's taken me half a day to do something in Blender that I could do in half an hour in any other package...but, maybe that 'enjoyment' will come in time - here's hoping!

 

wow, this new board is like the Blender interface. It takes time to get used to. Anyways, I work for a company that manufactures pipes, and found out that the Drafting dept sits right around the corner from me. So I drop in, and find them using Lightwave 5.6 to make 3D renderings of our products. I went there during my lunch break, and found LW isn't overly difficult like MAX. and it models much better. too bad the drafting guys werent there to help me.
( i have no idea why they have LW in a drafting room, i thought they just used CAD)

Batman