I through I could some of my computers to good use by helping them render animations. Everyone is stronger together as a team, no matter if we’re built on carbon or silicone. Sadly though, Blender doesn’t start its GUI via RDP, which means it’s not so easy to speak to the application – unless you employ clunky workarounds.
That’s where the command line interface comes in handy. We can issue a text command to Blender, telling it which file we’d like to render, where to render to, and which frames of an animation to render.
Before I forget how it works, I thought I’d best write it down somewhere.
On this week’s live stream I’ll take my 3D Shenanigans Logo and shatter it into pieces, to build a creepy backwards animation using the Cell Fracture add-on in Blender 2.79.
I’ll start by explaining how the tool works, then we’ll move on to building the logo from scratch, add materials, and then we’ll build something similar to this animation: https://youtu.be/pzi6ghRRfLg
I currently have TWO RTX 2080 cards in my system, which means I’ll do the shattering in Blender 2.79, and will render in Blender 2.80. Sometimes we’ll just have to use different versions to get a job done.
Here’s a video by Richard from CGCookie about this modifier:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEo_9AopfoQ
The Cell Fracture add-on is scheduled to make it into Blender 2.81 later this year.
In this live event I’ll show you how to create 3D Text Objects in Blender 2.8, then bring them in to DAZ Studio to animate and render. We’ll animate a single number first, then apply the same animation to the other numbers and add small variations using aniMate.
Other than that, I’m happy to answer any questions you have – join the chat and see if we can solve that DAZ puzzle you’ve been having for a while.
In this final episode of our serves I’ll show you how to create and apply a Density Map for use in Blender’s Particle Emitter. This will allow us to specify where objects are replicated and how may we want at which point. I’ll also explain how to invert the map.
I will touch on how to create different sizes of our logo (one square, one rectangular).
In this episode I’m giving our objects some colour with simple shaders: I’m making the grass green, give the ground an earthy brown and add a shiny golden touch to our logo. I’m also covering the logo with another replicator, simulating an interesting effect.
In this episode I’m building several simple grass stalks and replicate them along a plane using Blender’s Particle Emitter. I’ll talk you through the scary options we need and explain some of the concepts in using the Particle Emitter as an Object Replicator.
In this episode I’ll show you how to use the SVG file with curve information and turn it into an extruded logo using Blender. I’ll setup the scene and ground plane, get the camera ready and turn the default light into a strong side light. This will serve as a starting point to creating our logo.
The other day I wanted to convert a logo into a path, so that I could use it as a shape in Blender. It was in fact the WordPress logo that was provided as a PNG or PDF from the WordPress Branding section.
The trouble was, both the PNG and the PDF are rasterised, and as such cannot easily be used for an extrusion in 3D as an SVG file would. The question then was, how do I convert an image into an SVG in Photoshop, so that I could import it into Blender?
It took a bit of fiddling, but here’s how I did it.
Quick introduction to SVG Files
SVG files can actually contain three types of data:
Vector Graphics, such as paths (which is what we want)
Raster Graphics, such as bitmap images (which we have, but don’t want)
and Fonts
What I needed in Blender was indeed a Vector Path. Although the other two data types can be contained in an SVG file, Blender can only read path information at the time of writing. It makes sense too, because really I’d like to the path information available as a curve in Blender, not the potential raster or font information.
I’m mentioning this here because
a.) I didn’t know this, and
b.) importing an SVG containing either fonts or raster graphics will import nothing into Blender – which had me stumped.
Hence, for Photoshop to export vector data instead of raster data in our SVG file, we need to jump through a few hoops – but it is possible. Let’s see how!
In this episode I’ll show you how to create text objects in Blender, modify font and extrusion properties, and how to turn a text object into a proper mesh.
In this video I’m demonstrating how to export a character from DAZ Studio, apply a geometrical change in Blender, and import that change back into DAZ Studio as a Morph Target.
First we’ll prepare and export a Genesis 3 character (Eva 7) as OBJ. Here are the steps I’m using in the video:
