Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Oceanscape

If you're new to blender, still developing your skills or even are an expert at it the Blenderartists Weekend Challenge is a great way to hone your skills. I usually check back there every week or two to see what the theme of the contests is and if I like it and have the time then I'll enter. You can read up on the rules here and then you can start designing!

For last weekend's Weekend Challenge the theme was "Cityscape" so after some initial concept creation I made this:

I decided to make this a big learning experience as well so I split the scene up into layers and composited all the render layers together. There are 3 separate layers: the foreground (The buildings in the front and some of the water), the background (all the far off water and buildings) and the sky (moon, stars, etc.). I then applied some colouring effects (making everything a little blue) as well as giving some bloom and a little background bluring. I modeled all the buildings, platforms and bridges, then I lit it all (extremely hard work I must say.) and got everything the way I wanted it to be.

My final result was what you see below:


I used the .blend files from a Blender Guru tutorial to give me some hints on how to create my highrises, and from there I was on my own.

I do wish I had gotten it a bit more complete, maybe added some people walking around, some more building variation and I was hoping to create some sort of transportation system (monorail or something.) however I am very happy with what I accomplished and learned in my latest foray into the world of 3D.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Blenderstorm

The title of a recent BlenderArtist thread, and then an email in the Blender Developers mailing list: Blenderstorm... Is Back. I haven't see it before, but then, I haven't seen a lot of things. However one thing is for sure, it has one slick website.

By now I'm sure you're going, "What is Blenderstorm anyway?" Well you can head over there and check it out, but I'll also give you a short summary as well.

Blenderstorm is essentially, a big, online brain storm of problems with Blender and (This is important) solutions to those problems. You must have a solution if you add a problem! The problems (or ideas as they are called by the website) are then put into the "Idea Sandbox", where users (you must create an account to use Blenderstorm) can comment on the ideas and provide other solutions as well.