2D

Hard Surface Texture Painting Extra – Peeling Paint

I’ve seen this effect so much in Substance Painter and figured out a way to achieve the same thing in Blender. Paint peeling from the edges of worn away areas that you can paint in real-time. It adds an extra touch of detail and realism for your really worn, beat-up objects!

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Christmas Donation Tutorial Winners!

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Wow, I can’t thank you all enough! Lots of people donated, which was a wonderful surprise, since it was the first OpenVisualFX contest and I wasn’t sure how good the turnout would be. You all really came through, and thank you so much for that! The Maryvale Christmas party was great, and we got everything we needed just in time! (more…)

Intro to Compositing in Natron

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Finally, I’ve finished this up and I’m getting it out there! The first Natron tutorial for OpenVisualFX. If you haven’t heard of Natron, it’s an open source compositing program very similar to Nuke. In fact, it’s similar enough that if you know one, you know the other. I wanted to come up with a fun scene with some relatively standard compositing work, the kind of thing an artist at a professional studio is going to be doing all the time, and the TNT television show The Last Ship gave me the perfect opportunity. (more…)

Using Blender’s Vector Pass in Nuke

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Wow. Sometimes you think something will be easy and automatic, and then reality steps in and yells “Nope!” right in your face. This is one of those common things a compositor runs into almost daily – using a vector pass from a 3D program to add motion blur in post. Using a vector pass speeds up the 3D rendering and lets the compositor make adjustments to the motion blur without having to re-render any 3D elements.
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Creating a Matte Painted shot in Blender

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A few months ago, I was excited to once again contribute to 3DArtist magazine. This time I was asked to write a piece involving set extensions, which of course means matte painting. I hired an actress and headed right out to shoot something that could be open to lots of different creative interpretations! The printed article (and what was offered for download) was limited by space, but I thought it was a fun tutorial so I really wanted to go over all the details here on the blog and take it even further. (more…)

Blender – Stabilizer Improvements & Muzzle Flash

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If you’ve tried to stabilize footage in Blender at any point since the inclusion of tracking tools during the production of Tears of Steel, you may have noticed a large, glaring omission – scale. Translation and rotation, no problem. But we have not been able to stabilize scale in Blender at all.

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Smoothing Camera Motion in Blender

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Handheld camera work is very common today, but if you’re out there shooting your own movies, sometimes you may find your footage has a high frequency shake that is just really annoying. I’ve found that the smaller the camera is, the more chance there is of introducing that jittery motion. With people shooting movies on smartphones and GoPros, cameras really can’t get much smaller! That means there is a lot of high frequency jitter in those handheld shots. (more…)