Animation

Thinking about designing and making games in Blender 3D

By The Illustrator  |  2009/11/16 19:55 Posted in 3D, Animation, Blender, spaceship  |  Comments (0)

A basic spaceship mesh, rendered with nice lighting. I’ve recently been tempted – prompted by playing lots of FarmVille – to make a game using Blender, so I’ve been reading tutorials like this one –> Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Platformer: Creation and Controls – Wikibooks, collection of open-content textbooks. It looks hard of course, but not so hard that I’m totally put off from trying.

The next tutorial along makes designing a maze game seem almost easy. After reading it I decided definitely to have a go at creating my own game. It would probably be a space game rather than a maze game though.

And once the game is done I can save the results to an exe file to be used on Windows machines. That’s cool.

But what should my game be about. I think the easiest would be a 3d game with 2d action. I’m thinking of a spaceship having to navigate through an asteroid field.

One of the things I’m not totally over the moon about with modern games is that each level is programmed and set in stone. If there is a bad guy hiding behind a hay bale in level one of the game the first time you play it, then he is going to be there every single time you replay it.

For me, this just makes playing games a tedious exercise in remembering what comes next. I would much prefer to randomize the placement of these obstacles and in the space game I’ve just started to design in my head that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Just reading tutorials, which might seem dry, can be a great source of inspiration for my own art and illustration, and soon game design.

Facebook | Brett Fitzpatrick

By The Illustrator  |  2009/10/26 15:20 Posted in 3D, Animation  |  Comments (0)

Facebook, grrr, I didn't think I'd see that again.I’m back on facebook, not particularly because I love facebook (I hate facebook, because millions of people are creating great content and then posting it on someone else’s website), but because of that new game FarmVille. Farmville is a playing experience that has infected the brains of all my normally grown-up and business like friends and turned them into computer game addicted kids.

If you haven’t played it yet – don’t worry you will, you will, it won’t be long before you get an invite because part of the action of the game is persuading friends to join so that you can enjoy greater farm-related riches – if you haven’t played it, it’s like that Tamagotchi key-ring game of the 90s, but a bit more complicated and with better graphics.

And FarmVille has some of the addictive qualities of Tamagotchi too, where according to Wikipedia,

“Some parents also express concern because the device constantly calls the user to it with penalties for ignoring its signal, including death, starvation, and sickness, effectively keeping the device in the child’s consciousness at all times and interfering with other, potentially constructive, activities.”

If you ignore your farm crops can die, and you can lose FarmVille money. I’ve already experienced apparently sane adult people breaking off conversation over dinner to say, “I really must milk my goat.” Before running out the door leaving their meal half eaten.

It’s a mind bending plague of a game, but it does have great graphics, and it’s fun to play, and my crop of wheat is almost ready to be harvested.

I only wish I’d thought of it first.

Frozen, and at last something to show for my 2.5d 3d animation efforts in Blender

By The Illustrator  |  2009/10/16 15:27 Posted in 3D, Animation, Blender  |  Comments (0)

it's cold in here, brrr It is Illustration Friday time again and the word this week is “Frozen”, and that suits me just fine. Here in Vienna it is freezing, and we even had a little bit of snow yesterday, though it didn’t lie, perfect inspiration for this Illustration Friday word.

I’ve snipped out a detail from a painting I did a couple of years ago and I think it looks pretty and says frozen quite clearly as well. Looking at the image it seems like I overdid it with the “save for web and devices”, everything in the picture is a little blurry and pixilated. I’ll be more careful in future, but I think you can still pretty much see what’s going on in the image. It’s a picture of penguins sitting and killing time on an iceberg for anyone who needs a clue.

And it’s nice to have an old school painting on the site after all the Photoshop and 3d Blender CG art I’ve been doing lately. It’s tempting to pick the paint brush up again and do more of these images.I could even then scan in the paintings and load them into Blender. Then I could stitch them around an invisible 3d object and make animations out of them.

I’ve already started experimenting with this idea, although so far I have only scanned in some basic sketches, and not any complex paintings. The results are already starting to look pretty good though.

This animation is just a small test, just a rotating mouse head made from a sketch that I scanned in to Blender and animated in 3d.

Background Music for my Blender 3D Animation – Modest Mussorgsky – Night on Bald Mountain

By The Illustrator  |  2009/09/05 17:52 Posted in 3D, Animation, Blender, Illustration  |  Comments (0)

120 Mb wav, I hope Blender copes

I am planning to create my own soundtrack for “Caramel Cat and the Flowers” just as I did for my previous 3D Blender animation “Meow”, but in the meantime I need some background music for the work-in-progress animations. Remembering how effective a well-chosen bit of classical music can be in animation – I’m thinking specifically about Ren & Stimpy here – I went looking to see if I could find some public domain classical music to use on my animation until the proper soundtrack is complete.

I found musopen.com and the first thing I did was View music for Composer Modest Mussorgsky – Night on Bald Mountain, I did more than view it, I downloaded it. It’s a massive track, 22 megabytes, and I wrote the body of this post while I was waiting for it to download. You can judge by the length of the post I was able to put together during the download time, and the length of the words in it, just how good or bad my Internet connection is.

The track I chose for my animation, “Night on Bald Mountain”, is one of those over-the-top romantic and threatening-sounding pieces of classical music that is so perfect juxtaposed – I’m sorry for using the word juxtaposed but I went to art school and the British tax payer ensured that I was able to learn it, I can’t very well unlearn it now – against the cute visuals of a cartoon. In Fantasia it was personified by a demon. So as soon as it was downloaded I turned it into a wav and added it to my animation blend. Then on with my problem of getting particles generated by a 3D engine to look and behave like fluffy white clouds.

Speeding Up My Animation | Blender Underground’s Video Tutorials

By The Illustrator  |  2009/08/25 20:58 Posted in 3D, Animation  |  Comments (0)

 look at that fantastic ipo curve window

The titles of my animation were moving a little slowly, see last post, they should jiggle, not sway. I’ve noticed that the graphics in a lot of cool edgy stuff jiggles about as though it is on an old-fashioned reel of film going through a badly adjusted movie projector. I can’t actually think of an example right now, but it’s still a cool effect.

But because I hadn’t the slightest idea about how to go about this – except perhaps to delete the frames I had already done and start repositioning the mesh anew – I as usual turned to the internet for advice, via my trusty steed Google, and found > Animating the Time Ipo | Blender Underground’s Video Tutorials. Very interesting, apparently I just have to add a time curve to the blend file.

I gave it a try and it does work, now my titles flicker like butterfly wings instead of swaying about like a pendulum. Here.

Much nicer I hope you agree. But it is a little complex to use. While I was experimenting in the ipo curve window I found I could resize them in the x axis just like a mesh, and that sped things up nicely without having to do the mental gymnastics required with a time curve.

Now the next step is to get that cat doing interesting and fun things.

I’ve settled on the idea of getting the cat to blink and keep time with the music by tapping its paw. The eye blinking is simple, but getting the paw tapping to keep time is proving to be a giant headache. Well, nobody said it would be easy.

Solved Rotate and Add Mesh problem thanks to – Blender Artists Forums

By The Illustrator  |  2009/08/24 18:48 Posted in 3D, Animation, Blender, Illustration  |  Comments (0)

 

ooh it'S gone all pink Thank goodness for the internet and the brave nerds who post their problems there. In my latest fight with Blender (it had started refusing to add meshes, but actually it was adding them, just way, way, way off screen) I started pushing buttons pretty much at random in the vague, hail Mary, hope of a solution – always a bad idea.

Well I did some Googling and solved that problem – I just snapped the cursor to an on screen object to get things back where I could see them – but all of a sudden objects started refusing to rotate. I would never have worked out why, but it turned out to be one of those random buttons I had pressed earlier. Bones won’t rotate/scale/move anymore – Blender Artists Forums.

All these problems – well not quite problems, I just needed to learn a little more about the Blender interface – were encountered while I was trying to add some text to the start of my animation. But now the text is in place and here’s what it looks like. Oh wait it’s still rendering.

Nothing happens in the animation yet, the text just jiggles a tiny bit, but pretty soon this animation is going to be be full of action, oh yes, it’s going to be legendary.

Right now, as I’m writing this, the animation is rendering in the background. The rendering process has reached frame 21 of 130, oh well, I guess I’ll go read a book.

Right now I’m reading House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds (in German long story) – he’s one of my favourite authors because his SF is as hard-boned as any. In this book the poor characters aren’t even allowed to travel faster than the speed of light, poor devils.

OK, now we’re up to frame 31, I’ll let you see that animation as soon as it’s ready, drum roll….

codebase="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab#version=6,0,2,0">

…hmm, it’s over a megabyte in size for two seconds of animation. I’ll have to work on that.

Cracked it, I just got Blender to output sound and video to the same file, and it plays back in Quicktime.

By The Illustrator  |  2009/08/21 16:49 Posted in 3D, Animation  |  Comments (0)

 

Thank you so much higginsdj I just tried the settings you suggest here..  FFMpeg QuickTime H.264 export only works in VLC…? – Blender Artists Forums   ..and I got Blender to output a 3D animation with sound. Just click that play button and watch this tiny little test animation strut his stuff.

OK it might not look like much to you but this animation is in a format that most people can play (Quicktime), it has sound, it’s less than a megabyte in size, it works smoothly and it rendered in about ten minutes and that all makes me very very happy indeed. I’ve used higginsdj’s settings as a starting point and tried to shrink the amount of data being packed away in the .mov file even more, and the results speak, or rather meow, for themselves.

So what are my magical working video settings for Blender, well…

animation_settings1

The most important setting here is ffmpeg, it’s the only one in Blender that will output sound with your animation. The rest of the settings I left at default, then I pressed the preview button and it changed things like the Asp X: setting to give me a nice small web-friendly animation. Our job isn’t done yet though, next we click the video tab that can be seen peeking out at the top of this little block of buttons.

animation_settings2

Two important settings here, we need to set Quicktime as the format, and also we need to chose H264 as the codec. I’m not one hundred percent sure that every machine has this codec, but I think it ended up on my laptop because about half a year ago I downloaded a free version of it that I found, I think on sourceforge. For me anyway, with my XP machine this is working, right now – but I know codecs are a dark art, all I can say is good luck.

Now we want to hear our cute animated characters make noises so we click the audio tab next.

animation_settings3First push the giant “Multiplex audio” button, otherwise nothing will happen, and then you chose a codec.

And would ya believe it, using a simple mp3 codec works a charm. As usual I left all the other values at default. Even though that bitrate looks a little on the high side to me, Blender is still turning out nice small 3D animations in no time flat and, as the saying goes, if it aint broke, don’t fix it.

It now seems to me that I was completely incompetent, trying out so many different combinations of settings, but then the answer always seems so easy when you find it. I hope this little run through is useful to you if you are on the same weeks-long quest that I was, the quest to render a working 3D animation with sound that is small enough for the web and formatted in something like a popular file type,,, cue heavenly quire,,, mission accomplished.

Found • How to embed VLC 8.06 player in HTML

By The Illustrator  |  2009/07/02 22:41 Posted in 3D, Animation  |  Comments (0)

As I mentioned in my last post – well actually I more complained loudly than mentioned – I have been trying to get 3D animated video with sound out of Blender. I managed it (after weeks of work) but the only media player that could handle the strange file that Blender spat out was the robust and friendly VLC media player. I already had it hanging around my hard drive because it is my player of last resort when I am trying to watch DVDs with anti pirating measures on my laptop. It will succeed in playing them where other players fail, sometimes.

So the next problem was how do I embed said player in my web pages? This page seems to have the answer.

The VideoLAN Forums • View topic – Embedded VLC 8.06 player in HTML

It didn’t work first time. I just got the box with the depressing missing content symbol instead of a player with a 3D animation. I had to take the code out because it was crashing Windows Live Writer. But I then found some more similar looking code here.

name="video1"
autoplay="no" loop="yes" width="400" height="300"
target="http://etc/tiny_test.avi" />


Play video1
Pause video1
Stop video1
Fullscreen

again Live Writer crashed and showed no vid. I decided it might work on the site even if it didn’t in Live Writer, so that’s why this malfunctioning player is sitting here right now. I’m trying to get it to work. But it doesn’t yet.

Reading the BlenderWiki to make Blender spit out some sound

By The Illustrator  |  2009/07/02 21:33 Posted in 3D, Animation, Illustration  |  Comments (0)

sound_screenshot

I’m writing this as Blender is rendering a little chunk of 3D animation that has a mouse running from the right of the screen to the left. I’m pretty confident that I can make Blender create the 3D images but I have yet to have it make a peep of sound (but look at the screen shot, there is a sound file there, I can see it at the bottom of the screen). Apparently if you output stuff to a games format it’s easy to add sound, but for me – I’m creating an animation right now, not an MMORPG – it’s proving a bit of a prob.

Doc:Manual/Render/Output Formats – BlenderWiki This document has a lot of information about the different ways of outputting audio and video from Blender – including a lot of stuff I didn’t know about codecs – but the settings recommended (ffmpeg with Avi for video and mp3 for audio) didn’t produce any noise.

I’ve been forced to go back to a process of trial and error based on my best guesses. The Blender documentation seems to be suggesting that is possible to use almost any codec with almost any file type. This seems unlikely to me. If my hunch is right and some codecs work better with certain file types, then Blender should probably suggest good ones to pick. Surely some people using an XP rig are able to get Blender to spit out some sound.

This is a frustrating process with Blender creating invalid combinations that just won’t play, no matter if I try to play it in QuickTime, Windows Media Player or Blender itself. Shouldn’t there be a warning along the lines of, “These messed up codec settings you chose haven’t got a hope of playing, don’t bother dude.”

I’m absolutely not an expert, I’m tending to use the mp3 codec because it’s the only one I’ve heard of for instance. I’ve had a look at the gibberish spat out by in that strange C prompt window Blender always keeps open and some of it looks to be in Norwegian, or Russian with Cyrillic letters, and that’s not a good sign.

I eventually found a combination of settings that produced an animation that the mighty VLC Media Player managed to play with sound, although it was still too spicy for rubbish old QuickTime or Windows Media Player, and Blender itself played it without the sound. Now the only problem is how do I embed VLC media player in my website, if I can’t do that I might just give up and create games instead of animations.

Rune Stryders, a Fantasy Mecha RPG, and the latest illustration for Illustration Friday

By The Illustrator  |  2009/06/29 17:12 Posted in 3D, Animation, Illustration  |  Comments (0)

Red and Blue Swirl

It’s been a whole week since I posted to the site, and how do I know that? The last post I made was the weekly illustration I do for Illustration Friday, and that time has rolled around again.

Doesn’t time fly.

Here is this week’s illustration (to the right) in response to the word “worn”. It is a scan of a painting I did which has worn edges. It is intended to look like a little bit of alien or dinosaur hide and is pleasantly abstract.

My time this week has been eaten up with working on my animation, but not terribly productive work. I’ve been trying to set up a system to add music and sound effects to my animations – the problem was that Blender didn’t want to play nice with QuickTime and won’t add sound to QuickTime movie tracks, so I’ll have to make AVIs and change their format later -but I think with a combination of Sound Studio 2, MPEG streamclip and Blender I’m almost there. It’s been a frustrating process of trial and error but there should be some results soon.

As always I’ve been taking a peak at some role-playing game sites too and I’ve found a few interesting little titbits.

This is a cool idea for instance, ents Vs mecha anyone?

Rune Stryders :: The ORIGINAL Fantasy Mecha RPG

But the search goes on, and it’s not just me, there are lots of forums full of my travelling companions on this particular RPG quest. And there are always new things to check out, like BESM. And a mech PDF for ORE, this one took some finding but looks good.