On a down note, it seems that the Focal editorial team (who are generally superb) missed one edit I had given them. If you run across it (and you will), here’s the fix:

In Chapter 4, when we work through modeling a chair, I had indicated to them to remove the instructions on using the Bridge Faces tool and provided new instructions for doing it “by hand.” They added the “by hand” section, but didn’t remove the other. So, when you come to the bit about “bridge faces,” just skip the rest of that paragraph and move onto the next one. Sorry about that. Hope you didn’t give up on Blender in frustration when you hit that part.

And please remember, if you’re stuck, have a question, etc., you can email me at the address found in the book. I almost always respond the same day, and really do love hearing from people who are using the book.

Cheers!

Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.5

is now shipping!Let’s clear up three bits of grief first. The book cover and text reads “Blender 2.6″. Unfortunately, when the cover art was finalized and locked at the printer’s several months ago, the official (and unofficial) word was that the released version of the Blender after all of these alphas and betas would be called Blender 2.6. That has changed. We had to make a call, and we made the wrong one. So don’t be scared of the “2.6″. It’s entirely cosmetic.

I’ve also heard a couple of grumbles from people that the book was written based on “pre-release” software. The simple fact is that Blender is pretty much always “pre-release.” We’re not like these giant, sluggish software companies that do a release once every two years, giving writers and other documenters a huge amount of time to make docs that last. With Blender, if you start to write a book about an official release on the day it’s released, your resulting book will be out of date and probably at least one release behind by the time it starts to ship. So choose your poison: the future or the past.

Finally, the title. There was some controversy (hopefully all internal) regarding the book’s title. The Blender Foundation posed an object to the publisher that the title would could confuse people into thinking that the book was both an officially sanctioned publication of the Foundation it isn’t), and/or that it was a sequel to The Essential Blender. The Foundation and Focal Press were able to come to an agreement that the parties satisfied (I believe). Personally, I think it’s pretty clear what items come directly from the Foundation or have official sanction: you buy them in the e-shop on blender.org. That’s pretty much it. If I’m wrong, and you were personally confused, please put me some knowledge in the comments. On the notion of it being a sequel to Essential… If The Essential Blender was important for you because the title and who published it, then this is definitely not a sequel. However, if you appreciated Essential for the quality of instruction and the thought that went into it, then in spirit this book is a sequel.

With that stuff out of the way, here is what you get with Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.5 (2.6). The book takes you from zero knowledge, through the interface and into a field-tested practical instruction project that has a number of goals. First, you’ll produce a (very) short scene with an animated character, full set and production lighting. The final product of the book can be seen below in the embedded video. If you’ve been using Blender for a long time, that’s not going to be amazingly impressive to you, but the fact is that if you’ve never done 3D before or only dabbled, you’ll go from knowing nothing to producing that by the end of the book which is significant. Also, if you’re wanting to transition from another piece of software (Blender 2.4 series included), the examples demonstrate all of the major skill areas you’ll need to know. Third, I’ve gone to great lengths to give this book a “point of view” when it comes to art and working in 3D. It’s not just a tutorial (and it certainly isn’t a tools reference!) that shows you what buttons to push. Instead, I’ve tried to teach you how to think when you’re working in 3D.

The support website for the book, located at www.blenderfoundations.com, is a work in progress. It currently has all of the screenshots from the book, all of the sample files and textures, and a number of sections of added content that were not in the book. For example, the book tutorials on building a table and chair don’t have a screen shot with every single step. That would be silly to put into a book. However, you get a screen shot for every step of the way for those projects on the website. Also, there are a pile of animation clips and examples from the animation chapter. There are a couple of pieces I’m still working on (a hair styling video is one example), and I’m putting them up as quickly as I can make them.

One last bit that I need to implement on the site is an erratta section. I’ve had a few reports from readers so far of minor errors, or things that I should probably note. Probably by next weekend I’ll have the errata section for each chapter working, so you can always check the web site for the latest updates in case the developers do something that breaks the book horribly. Of course, I don’t anticipate that happening. Most of the stuff in the book is fairly basic, already hammered-out functionality. The only real difference is in the tools panel for the sculpting and painting tools. I’m working to get updated screen shots into the website for those so you can see what they look like if the minor differences bother you in the book.

So, if you’re looking to learn the new Blender series (2.5) and you like to learn via books (which not everyone does), I highly recommend this one. You get the same superior quality of instruction as my last two works (The Essential Blender and Creating Short Animations with Blender — just pop over to Amazon and read the reviews), as well as the superior production values that Focal Press brings to their publications (full color throughout, top grade paper, very nice typesetting).

Oh, and the last thing you get is me. I’m always available through animation@harkyman.com. I love to hear success stories and to see what you’ve produced. I’m also sensitive and responsive to problems you have with the stuff I’ve built. I think that I’ve created a superior educational product with this book, and I care very much about how it works for you. If you have a problem with it, I want to know about it so I can either fix it, or do it better the next time. In any case, I’ll do my best to help you.

Blender Foundations Beginner Project from Roland Hess on Vimeo.

And that’s it. Get the book. It’s really good. You won’t be sorry (unless you’re perpetually and indiscriminantly sorry, in which case I can’t help you).

Cheers!

Also, we were hard up for dinner ideas, so I made do with what was in the house. This takes 1/2 hour, start to finish, and turned out great:

• Two chicken breasts, defrosted and thrown on the grill
• Half a red onion, several close of garlic, and a small jar of artichoke hears, diced together
• Heat olive oil in iron skillet. Salt oil and throw in handful of Italian spices once oil is hot.
• Cook garlic/onion/arti’s in oil until they begin to soften
• Meanwhile, cook ravioli (or tortellini, rigontini or other cheese-bearing pasta)
• Put 1/2-1 cup of white wine into skillet with veggies and oil. Add 1 Tsp butter. Let simmer.
• Dice grilled chicken and add to skillet.
• Serve chicken/veggie skillet over pasta. Add fresh parmesean if you have it.

Programming. Animating. Writing. These are the things I did as a kid, lo those many years ago. I wrote games, utilities and graphics demonstrations on my Dad’s TI. I wrote stories and poems constantly. I made elaborate flip-book animations in every notepad I could find. And always, the three would cross-pollinate. I’d write on the word processor that I’d developed on my own. I’d program graphics visualizations and put animation into my games.

And now, how very fitting that I find myself doing the same thing as an adult. I write books about animation software, software of which I’m both one of the (very minor) developers, and one of the users. But writing isn’t my new job. It’s software development. Almost thirty years after I touched my first keyboard and typed

10 PRINT "YOU SUCK"

20 GOTO 10

Someone is actually paying me to write and maintain software, and that’s probably what I’m going to end up doing in one capacity or another until I’m too old to make my fingers strike a keyboard. It’s funny, and a long, weird road.

Ton used to say to me, when I’d start talking about some coding project I wanted to do in Blender “No! No! Write books! That’s what you’re good at!” And it turns out that I am good at that, and I’m grateful for the shot he gave me with organizing “The Essential Blender.” It also turns out that development, or coding, or whatever you want to call it, is buried just as deeply within my bones as writing.

As I was mowing the lawn tonight, I was contemplating the path ahead for many people in my position: management. The thought came into my head: “Nope. If I’m not inside the computer, I’m not happy.” And thinking back, it’s always been that way for me.

So I want to give a huge thanks to Ton, and to Blender, and to the community that recognized its potential, payed the ransom for, and ran like the wind. Without the Open Source nature of Blender to fiddle around with, so many things for me just wouldn’t have happened like they did. Working on Blender has allowed me to be “inside” the computer in a very meaningful way over the last several years.

Of course, I’m still waiting for the day when I’m independently wealthy enough to take a whole summer off of work, drag my family to the Netherlands and donate my time just doing whatever needs to be done. But until then, I’m going to enjoy my new job, enjoy my family, and keep trying to become more than just a hack animator.

I developed the constraint (which is extremely simple) to help with adding squash and stretch to characters. There are a number of ways to do this already, but as I’m not the world’s greatest rigger and don’t have a lot of patience for layering several tiers of controls on top of each other, I wanted an easier way. First, I tried doing it with Drivers. I figured that if I could drive the X and Z scale of a bone as a function of its Y scale that would do the trick (the equation btw is: X (or Z) scale equals the square root of the constant volume divided by the Y scale). Unfortunately, Blender didn’t like this and considered it a cyclic dependency. So, I moved on to using the Transform constraint.

Another user (mtracer) said that he’d done just such a thing with the Transform constraint, and it seems like that’s the case. I just couldn’t get it to work. I find those types of value-mapping interfaces horrible to deal with. I could have tried to do this with a PyConstraint, and in fact something like this was done by Cessen in Big Buck Bunny. Unfortunately, I’ve never done a PyConstraint before and didn’t feel like learning the new API for what should be a relatively simple effect.

So, I was at the point where most users find themselves. Yes, I could have brute-forced any of the previous four solutions (complex rig, drivers, transform constraint, py constraint). However, that doesn’t solve the problem for everyone else. We can’t expect people to be programmers just to use the software. So, I did the easiest thing for me, which was to add a constraint. You can see the effect below:

Blender 2.5 “Maintain Volume” constraint from Roland Hess on Vimeo.

It’s in trunk, so update, compile and have fun!

Thus far, I’m very happy with it. I like the options and such way better than the Gnome ones presented with the default Ubuntu install. Look and feel fits the way I like to work better, too. In fact, after several days of using Kubuntu on my desktop, I’ve also switched over with my laptop. This isn’t to bust on the Gnome desktop or anything. It was fine for a long time for me. After a suitable acclimation period (like, a day) though, I have KDE working in a way that really suits me.

Having to deal at home with supporting Windows XP, Windows 7 (which ain’t bad) and a Mac makes me appreciate the ease and elegance with which I can administer my two Linux computers. The Mac’s not bad, but trying to get those Windows machines to place nice is really taxing me.

So, you can click on the thumbnail below to get the full sized image of the network.

Film Look node tree

Download a .BLEND file here.

The effect is created from an old tutorial I had found on some kid’s website for adding a film style look to his digital photography in Photoshop. I re-purposed the decently complicated Photoshop layer-based work flow into a nodes-based one for Blender. I went looking for that original one, so I could link and credit, but I’ve been unable to find it since that one lucky strike a couple of years ago. To be fair then, the general theory behind this technique isn’t my own, although I added and adjusted a bit while I was nodifying the process. As a reminder, the results are:

Before

After

You adjust the way that the shadows, highlights and midtones cast by changing the colors in the RGB color node, and in the Color Ramp node. If you’re going to use this, make sure to set the render dimensions to match the dimensions of your input image.

Merry Christmas!

The whole point is that if you want to do some quick camera mapping for 2.5D matte work and don’t want to deal with the UV Project modifier, you can just blast it to UVs from camera view now. The nice part is that you don’t have to do anything special to use it — just jump into edit mode, press the U-key for the Unwrap menu and choose “Project from View.” If you’re in a camera view, it’ll do it.

Now, besides being called the “top recommendation” among all books about short animation production by one reviewer, it is also available for perusal on your Kindle or iPhone with Kindle app.

You can bop over to check it out here.

The other day, Brecht committed an addition to the Cage Deform modifier which performs this same task. I believe it uses the heat weighting algorithm for pinning, followed by the cage deform method of deformation. I haven’t tried it yet, but it sounds like it will do exactly what was needed!

In the end, I had absolutely nothing to do with it. I’m just happy that there’s now a way to pin one entire mesh’s surface to that of another.