Category: blog

Compositing In Blender Tips

animation, blog, Resources, tutorials

I love Blender…but I don’t use it for compositing.

I know, “Sacrilege!!!” I hear you cry. “How can you not use it for your comping?!” Well, because, I still think there are better options out there. However, I’m not one to look a gift-horse in the mouth without counting it’s teeth. Especially when the teeth can do lens distortion, chromatic aberration, glows, glints, bokeh depth of field and a host of other things that you can pump out of the render layers and into the final composite.

So this tutorial looks into the ways to take a simple render and make it into a more beautiful piece by adding some of the things mentioned above and showing how to combine them to get a pleasing result.

Take a look at the video below to find out more. Better still, subscribe to the channel and you’ll see a new one of these every week. Sometimes a “One by One” where we talk about what each part of blender does – at the moment we are concentrating on modifiers – other times tutorials on specific things or quick tips to make your life easier.

You want to see something not here? Then let me know in the comments. I’m always keen to help out where I can.

Take care and stay safe.

Planar Tracking in Resolve

animation, blog, Resources

A friend of mine, his name is Doug, asked me if I could do a quick tutorial about how to perform a planar track in Resolve. Now, I was surprised as this guy is a God at Resolve, grading is his specialty. And of course there it was, grading, not doing Fusion things. So, with a history of compositing in After Effects and Fusion, as well as a little Nuke, I took it upon myself to do exaclty that for him. And also for you.

Take a look at the video below to find out more. Better still, subscribe to the channel and you’ll see a new one of these every week. Sometimes a “One by One” where we talk about what each part of blender does – at the moment we are concentrating on modifiers – other times tutorials on specific things or quick tips to make your life easier.

You want to see something not here? Then let me know in the comments. I’m always keen to help out where I can.

Take care and stay safe.

Speedthru: Hovercar

blog, Resources, tutorials

I mentioned in the last video post that I love modeling. I do. So I thought I would set myself a speed challenge to build a 3D car in 3 hours. And I did it. Pretty Much. I did make it a bit easier for myself by removing the need for wheels, going down the hover car route, but that in and of itself brought up a couple of challenges.

Anyway, I sped up the recordings and, apart from a small section where I built the wing mirrors which was lost due to unforeseen recording naming issues, it’s all down here, from Default Cube to fully shaded.

Take a look at the video below to find out more. Better still, subscribe to the channel and you’ll see a new one of these every week. Sometimes a “One by One” where we talk about what each part of blender does – at the moment we are concentrating on modifiers – other times tutorials on specific things or quick tips to make your life easier.

You want to see something not here? Then let me know in the comments. I’m always keen to help out where I can.

Take care and stay safe.

One by One…ish – Follow Path

blog, Resources, tutorials

I think, deep down inside, I am at my most happy when I am modelling. No, not me in a swimsuit and a pink boa walking up and down a catwalk to a line of adoring photographers. Although, that could be fun. Anyway…

No, I’m referring to modelling something in Maya or Blender. Sitting down at the computer, pulling around vertices, adjust the flow of a surface; getting a mesh ready for animation. The front part of this tutorial I zipped through thanks to the power of retiming in Resolve, I really wanted to go to town on. I was all about to turn on Multi-resolution, Sculpt in fins and stencil in scales, but that would be a whole other tutorial.

This, though, is about an animation step that requires a model that will need bending, and that is Follow Path. It’s a constraint, rather than a modifier, but by now, if you’ve been following along, you should be able to make a simple organism (fish here, not molecule) and then make it swim around using one command and a few options.

It also teaches you a little about shape keys in Blender too. Again, something that we will come back to and do more on in the future.

Take a look at the video below to find out more. Better still, subscribe to the channel and you’ll see a new one of these every week. Sometimes a “One by One” where we talk about what each part of blender does – at the moment we are concentrating on modifiers – other times tutorials on specific things or quick tips to make your life easier.

You want to see something not here? Then let me know in the comments. I’m always keen to help out where I can.

It’s a very simple fish on a curve swimmin’ in a circle. Dinky!

Take care and stay safe.

VFX Bugbears – 001

blog

Now this is going to be quick. I know, not something you hear come out of me at all. It is going to be quick though. I occasionally come across things in my job that drive me barmy. Generally it’s stupid things like people on their phone in the fast lane of a motorway (seriously, you are risking your life just a bit!) or the number of disposable masks littering our streets now (put it in a bin!) that sort of thing.

But sometimes, they are VFX or 3D things. Things that people seem to do despite knowing it’s not right. Or basic errors that would never happen in the real world. I’m not talking about missing a shadow. No, I’m talking about practical things that are fundamentally incorrect.

And this one I see ALL THE TIME!

(sigh..)

So, here’s the thing. If I was to ask you the shape of a lens that fits to a camera, you know, the thing you actually screw into the body, what would you say? What shape is that?

Well, yes, it is cylindrical. It has to be to have room to fit in the lenses. But what do we know about a cylinder? It has three sides, yes? Yes. A tube body and two…come on…you can get there…

Two circles. In fact it is the edge of the casing of these circles that manages to stop a little light reaching the corners of the pictures. So if you are taking a landscape through a lens, you’re light will be diminished in a circle…

…even if you are shooting through at HD, the lens and it’s housing is still round.

So why, oh why oh why, do people still keep doing this for a vignette?

No! No, no, no, no…

Your camera does not have an ellipse for a lens. I has a circle, so the light, even when there are gates on the camera front, still has a circular vignette. This ellipse thing is so wrong. Do not do it.

QUICK TIP:

Make a circular mask on an adjustment layer or color corrector, set it to be subtractive, feather or soften it’s edge and add an small negative exposure shift. Nothing fancy, just a little bit. But there should not be any of that at the top, unless you want to give the impression you cropped your image from the top down, then shift the circle mask down until it touched the top.

Stop using ellipses. Please.

Bugbear 001 over.

One by One…ish – Edgesplit

blog, Resources, tutorials

The modifier toolset in Blender is by no means the most exhaustive set of tools, but it’s not slacker either. It tops out at 53. Which is more than enough, really for most non destructive stuff jobs be they animation or modelling.

And in that pool of tools is Edgesplit. It, well, it splits the edges of polygon models so they no longer join together. Edge split splits edges; it unjoins them, if you will. Which is really, err, useful as a single, err, modif…no no I can’t do this. It’s useless on it’s own.

But coupled with a few more of its pals, it’s a veritable wonder of a tool. You can edge-split, decimate, displace and solidify an object to create some really considered graphical elements. It’s ace actually. But on it’s own, well, it’s a bit of a fixer-upper.

Take a look at the video below to find out more. Better still, subscribe to the channel and you’ll see a new one of these every week. Sometimes a “One by One” where we talk about what each part of blender does – at the moment we are concentrating on modifiers – other times tutorials on specific things or quick tips to make your life easier.

You want to see something not here? Then let me know in the comments. I’m always keen to help out where I can.

Take care and stay safe.

Tips and Tricks – Texture Painting

blog, Resources, tutorials

There are always things you can learn about in Blender, it’s really diverse for a free package. And even though it’s not the best at painting textures in, it gives it a pretty good go.

In this tutorial I talk about how to paint in the workspace as well as how to use multiple UVmaps with texture paint to allow you to do clever things on what might be messy UVs, without going in and having to change what already works!

It’s not a long one, but it’s there to get you started.

Take a look at the video below. Better still, subscribe to the channel and you’ll see a new one of these every week. Sometimes a “One by One” where we talk about what each part of blender does – at the moment we are concentrating on modifiers – other times tutorials on specific things or quick tips to make your life easier.

You want to see something not here? Then let me know in the comments. I’m always keen to help out where I can.

Take care and stay safe.

One By One – the Build Modifier

blog, Resources, tutorials

The Build modifier in Blender is another of those, “well this is good, but whatever can I do with it?” modifiers. It’s just not great on it’s own. Add in an edge split, displace and some other guff then woohoo, you’ve got MGFX heaven.

But once you understand how it works, you can see the possibilities of what you can achieve with it without needing another modifier at all.

Take a look at the video below. Better still, subscribe to the channel and you’ll see a new one of these every week. Sometimes a “One by One” where we talk about what each part of blender does – at the moment we are concentrating on modifiers – other times tutorials on specific things or quick tips to make your life easier.

You want to see something not here? Then let me know in the comments. I’m always keen to help out where I can.

Take care and stay safe.

One By Ones

blog, Resources, tutorials

Hi there, Gary Here

Just wanted to let you know that there is a new tutorial out for January, ever though it was released at the very end of 2020 – the Bevel Modifier One by One.

Here it is:

It’s a really interesting modifier, as you can control the bevel on an edge by edge weight basis as well as create custom contours for your bevel.

Far better than a standard bevel in any other software I know…cough Maya cough.

Goodbye 2020! Roll on the madhouse that 2021 is looking like!

Take care and stay safe.

One By One – the Array Modifier

blog, Resources, tutorials

There’s lots to get your head around in Blender, but when addressed one at a time, you can see the potential in all of them.

So I decided I would start a special stream of tutorials whih concentrate on each of the modifiers.

There are tutorials on the web that go through all of the modifiers in one big rush, and they’re pretty damned cool, but I wanted to do each one as fully as possible in a single video.

So here is the first one – the Array Modifier. It’s a bit epic, truth be told. It’s a lot more powerful than a simple instance and, coupled with another modifier, it produces things that would take ages to do by hand.

Anyway, please watch the video, leave a comment, and if you can think of something you wanted to know how to do in Blender drop me a line and I’ll make a tutorial for it if I can!

Take care and stay safe.