new site almost finished

Well it has been about 3 month since I started this project, and I am pleased to say that it is just about done! Blender.cgjam.net is just about finished!I am currently just putting some finishing touches here and there, I have a sidebar of related content that really needs some work as it currently relates to nothing! that's not good! and some video pages still need to be uploaded, but it is almost there!

 any way
 thanks to the Internet I have managed to create for free, a totally responsive website, with drop down menus, download buttons, integrated blog posts, responsive video frame, comments, twitter feed and social-media. which is awesome but only possible thanks to the massive range of free software and HTML tutorials available from the web. so i figure it's at least courteous to give these guys a link back so all you guys can take advantage of their knowledge too, if you were to be looking to scratch build a website :)

Timothy kwyn on youtube set me on the road with his in depth series covering the Microsoft Expression web software that i used to code the site, which is a really great piece of software though it is slightly out of date as it is no longer supported by Microsoft and thus only has limited understanding of HTML5. Not that that is a big issue as it doesn't stop you from using HTML5, it simply think there are code errors ( though that can be awkward when you have actual code errors and can't find them cause Expression web is hung up on a piece of HTML5 code! ).
The meat of the site comes from http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/ Their youtube video Create a responsive website with Html5 and css3 was fundamental to understanding how to make the site responsive, and much of the design for the tutorial pages stems from this template.
http://www.developphp.com/ web designer Adam khoury provided lots of little tricks and CSS3 tips that helped out in lots of small ways

and this lesson; HTML & CSS - Creating a dropdown navigation menu certainly got me going with the navigation bars. so yea, awesome!

I just need to come up with a badass design on the homepage  now :D

Another re design!

i just totally managed to break what was to be the main blog for my site. i am such a noob sometimes its unreal!
Ive been having trouble recently after purchasing some software that i was assured was html5 ready and i'd be able to do amazing things with it.
 it turns out that those amazing things are simply redesigning a handful of presets without giving you the ability to actually create anything amazing. it is fabulous if you want a static website that just shows your pages and impresses visitors from 2006!
i really hate software that doesnt let you be creative! so as it stands  my website sucks. it is impossible to view on anything less than a desktop and loads like its being delivered by dial-up.

so Prepare for Jam 3.0!!!

I am going to be coding this over the next few weeks before i delete the old crap.
written tutorials will be replaced by a summary on the site to keep everything clean and to the point. The huge text walls will be consigned to PDF documents that you can view online or download so you can follow along without having to be online. as a PDF you'll be able to have it on your kindle or other e book reader as well so you're not restricted to storing it on your regular mobile device.
 i am aiming to code a dynamic home page, doing away with traditional headers and nav bars etc. not quite sure how that is going to work with the lesson pages yet though, i will have to see what i can come up with.
the main site will be tranfered to its own sub domain as it should have been from the start, so unless you bookmarked the home page then i'm afraid some of your links might break. sorry but thats just the way it is. one of my main things i will need to do is work on the 404 page so you can be led back to the main page easily enough. currently my 404 is some generic spam page coutesy of my host provider. not ideal!
   but that being said, the old site will remain online and available with tutorials as it stands until the new site is ready. and will be updated with video lessons as they emerge!

Speaking of lessons; I have a up and coming course on rigging, texturing and animating a car for vfx. so not only will you be learning how to do the usual turning of wheels and moving around a scene, i'm going to show you how to realistically blow that Mofo to bits! and compositing the whole shebang into your video clip!
totally awesome so keep a look out for that, as well as a few bits and bobs that i have floating around for you. hopefully i will be back fully teaching blender and Sfx shortly.

stupid web software :(

A bit about digital integration

hello and welcome to Easter.
making movies often requires models of real things, props of props if you will. as an example. you may require a vehicle for a scene. which is fine, you may own a car or depending on your age have access to your parents or a friends, whatever. but the scene calls for the car to be Wrecked/flipped/burned out or abducted by evil metal eating whales from the planet Znargol. Now, I don't know about you guys, but i think my Mum would be pretty pissed if I torched her car or returned it covered in whale slime, which is where we come in with our digital awesomeness. Using a 3D facsimile of our prop we can integrate impossible scenes into the most mundane clips. an example of this i took some footage of  my bosses car on my mobile phone and caused it to explode, which was fun, but not great the clip could use a bit more work, well a lot more work but it was OK for a first time! take a look at the clip and I'll run through how it was done and point out some of the flaws

Ok, so i was using Blender version 2.64 for this clip and ran the movie clip through the movie clip editor. and tracked it as normal. blurry poor quality footage was a bit of an issue but by manually tracking  frame by frame in a lot of cases i manages a reasonable track, though i have still no idea what the focal length of my phone is! any way after setting up the tracking scene, i simply modelled a body around the car, i didn't need it to be an exact model as 1, it only needed to contain the fire Sim and 2, it wasn't going to be rendered. so with the box in place i inserted a fire Sim and set the box to be a collision object and added a turbulence force to give the flames a bit of life. i then set the box to be a mask layer and rendered out the crap you just watched, Hurrah! well almost! first there are issues with the clip itself. i used the raw movies clip and as you can see there are some parts where the clip "twitches" due to caching errors, blender works better with image sequences rather than movie files so it is always a good idea to pre render your clips into png sequences. also the track wasn't great, the flames float about slightly near the end of the shot and if you look closely when the pickup drives by, you can see the mask object showing faintly through the paintwork. i have no idea why this happened, except that something in the compositing sucked. and my choice of sound effect was a bit poor and i could have spent some time fixing it in Audacity... but i didn't. lol.

well, poor as that was, i think i can do a bit better today, so how would i go about it now? first i would make sure i had a clean plate for the background. i could achieve this by cloning out the car on one frame using gimp and mask out the car in blender and composite the clips together, or i would use projection painting to clone out the car in blender using a mesh plane which i think would work better. then i would replace the car with a complete 3D model, I'm sure there are some similar models available on places like Blendswap.com 

or if not i would have to try and model it myself. i would then be able to use the 3D model to create debris from flying glass and shrapnel and stuff as well as getting a more realistic interaction between the smoke and the vehicle. and give the car some interaction with the explosion, perhaps lifting it of the ground a little and causing wheels to bounce off down the road in the traditional wheel bouncing down the road cliche!#so with all that in mind i  am currently working on a new model which i will be using to cover:

 Rigging, this will include rotating and steering wheels working doors mirrors sunroof etc.

Integration, which will be about placing the model into a scene

And,

Exploding, which will include shapekey destruction, particles, modifiers and rigid bodies! so keep your eyes open for that, its going to be cool!

also i have some plans to look at prosthetic and digital makeup, so think Terminator and zombies and evil metal eating whales from the planet Znargol which will be a lot of fun, but I'm still learning this so you'll just have to be a bit patient! so for now i have a car to finish and i want to cover the explode modifier as a tutorial on its own ( i know its been done to death already but i should really include it as its quite useful.

OK I'm done now go find something interesting to do, i have work to get on with! 

bye

Jam upgrade and other new stuff!

well the past couple of weeks have been quite hectic, issues with youtube and content licences left me starting to feel less than motivated, trying to post simple videos of my sculpting chat videos has been more trouble than it was worth, which is one of the reasons that there have been no recent updates to that particular series, but as it was a crap series any way who cares right!  but... It has motivated me to work on other stuff, mainly the Brand new website! it is cool, and most definatly NOT bright Yellow! (what was i thinking...) Tutorials are set out in there own little categories, on there own page with, (Just be cause I'm a really nice sort of guy) a FULL text write up WITH pictures, especially for those of you with an aversion to watching videos. I know, right, Awesome! :D
OK so there are only two tutorials up right this moment but i have to start somewhere! Anyway, my main focus will be blender for VFX, so lots of compositing tutorials (something that is sadly lacking in the Blender community) but that doesn't mean there will be no regular modelling and rigging and texturing stuff, there most certainly will, as these things are an important part of VFX. of course i will utilize a whole bunch of stuff from blendswap and the like, but I'll be showing how to do it yourself too. oh, and I'll be using daily motion to host the main content videos rather than you tube, because this is a business and i cant afford for youtube to dick around checking out licences and stuff, you guys need these videos available straight away! (not that i'm abandoning youtube, there will still be regular content there too!)
so what about the financial side of stuff? well I would like to borrow the CG cookie model of business and have a subscription service, but frankly i have no real idea how i would implement that and make it viable so i wont! there will be a store flogging the usual mugs and Tshirts soon, I'll also be releasing Asset packs eventually, which will be fun to make, so basically adverts, Tat and interesting cool stuff you can use in your personal projects!
but, that aside what else is going on?
I'm glad you asked, FEATURED VIDEOS!
yes thats right, i want your work, films you've made using blender, whether its a short clip a couple of seconds long or an epic 4 hour hollywood blockbuster, that you have made ( that's kind of the important bit, no posting lord of the rings or something, unless of course your Peter Jackson, then I guess its ok).
share them on my facebook page or google plus and I'll choose one each week to take the coveted spot directly on the homepage of our site (well, it will be coveted one day...)
so for now thats it, i'll do another video chat thing shortly, i'm thinking of using the sculpting videos as a kind of way of chatting with you guys, a bit like Blender Guru's podcasts, but with the added exitement of watching me fail badly at sculpting... so all good there then!
 Andrew Price has just announced another competition so , i should try my hand at that, no prizes this time well something from the blender shop, so worth trying out for that at least :)
also Blender Version 2.70 is on the horizon, the developers have been busy tweaking and fixing and generally making blender more awesome, and the new UI team have been busy doing stuff too, the new Tab system on the tool bar is pretty good, though still a work in progress and needs to be implemented across all the other workspaces, and just generally made sensible!
Cycles gas volumetric support which is awesome for cycles users, and something that has been long awaited, still not something i can use to its full advantage yet, as i'm still on an AMD card, which sucks, actually i had the opportunity to purchase a Nvidea GTX 680 recently, but decided in the end that getting webhosting was more important. you see the sacrifices i make for you guys  :D
ok well thats about it, i can't really think of much else right now os i'll end this drivel around here and go make some coffee ( because thats a good idea at 2am just before bed...) lol

Green screening and stuff

So with christmas and new year causing lots of hecticness, and just generally getting in the way of blendering,
I have managed to find a few spare moments to get some practice in with Blenders keying nodes. and having a little bit of fun with the practice files being given away by Hollywood camera works. my first attempt wasn't too great as what looked like a good Key actually had a lot of holes in it where i had taken away more of the model than i was supposed to! but as I had a specific effect in mind it didn't turn out too bad after all!
my first effect was to use footage of smoke as a displacement map in order to distort the green footage, which i managed quite succesfully.

The nodes are a simple affair,  

First i added two clips of smoke that i got from AEtuts.com and combinedthem using an alpha over node, then de saturated the result and then using a distort>scale node, set the clips to match the render size.

i then added my pre-keyed footage of the girl scaled it and then plugged it into a distort>displace node. i then took the smoke group and plugged it into the vector input of the displace node. i could then simply add a background using an alpha over node and call it done, but i decided to add more smoke and make her a bit ghostly and fade into the smoke and finally become more solid.

 so the first thing i needed to do was to wash out the colour and fade that washed out colour into the full normal colour. I did this by adding an alpha over node and plugging the smoke group into the top colour socket. i then added a mix node and plugged the displace node into the top and the alpha over into the factor, to get the colour fade i added a time node, set it to 80 frames and adjusted the curve to a wierd little hump and plugged it into the factor of the alpha over. and finally i connected the output of the mix node of that little group to the alpha over that connects with the background.

that looked ok but i wanted more smoke over the top so i created a new group starting with a movie clip of more smoke fitted it to the render size and plugged it into another alpha over. this time into the bottom socket with the top colour set to black. this made the black parts of the footage transparent, i then duplicated the time node from earlier and plugged that into the new alpha over factor so the foreground smoke faded out at the same time as the colour change. a final alpha over was added and the smoke/background elements were plugged into the top socket and the foreground elements plugged into the factor and the output sent to the composite node for rendering. i then keyframed a few settings to get the transitions and diminish the distortion effect and that is it, done.

pretty simple and it gives a nice effect. of course, my editing leaves a bit to be desired, i could have worked a bit longer on that side of things but over all, not too bad!

for my next attempt i wanted to get a proper key with out having the issues with transparency that i got with the previous key

the only real secret to this is to pick a section of green that gives the best amount of transparency. most of the leftover carp was then removed by simply adjusting the clip black and clip white settings, almost everything else was colour correcting, although i did add a light wrap effect to blend the model into the scene a bit better. this is simply the matte result of the key inverted and multiplied by itself to give an outline which is then blurred and then used as a factor input for the background and foreground elements. a little bit of blur added to itself and some final colour correction and we have a nice result.

i think the camera movement kind of spoils things though, so, my next tutorial will be on match moving a background image to this footage. a kind of impossible thing as the whole point of the clip is that there are no tracking markers in the green screen...

preparing for the specials

Hye blenderers!
as pointed out previously i have decided to do a special episode to say thanks for subscribing, and as i am almost at the 100 subscriber target, I should really start preparing.

     so what is it all about first? well I asked a few weeks ago for suggestions on things that you might like to see translated from Maya or a C4D tutorial, and the suggestion i got back was for a skin deformation tutorial. ok fine, not a problem, except i have no idea how to do it!
      My focus for the next couple of weeks will be to figure out how blenders deform tools work. I will be looking at the various ways blender deforms stuff so shape keys, lattices, soft bodies mesh deformers displacement textures, basically whatever i can come up with to create a nice skin deform effect.
      but not to leave you all in the cold waiting, I obviously will need some assets, namely a skin to deform, so for my next few tutorials i will be covering the basics of creating an animation ready "thing" that in the special episode I will be discussing and building the deform rig ready for animation, so for my next tutorial I shall cover the basics of sculpting a base "mannequin" ready for  topology to be applied in preparation for sculpting. this will be a low detail sculpt of forms but with enough detail to recognise it as a creature.
      I shall be doing that over the weekend, hope fully I'll have it done by saturday afternoon so you all have time to play with it ( well the technique any way, theres no point in me releasing a startup blend really as you already have a default cube!)
So until then happy blending, see you all soon

Beginners series, and whatever next

So finally, a couple of weeks turns into a couple of months, but the beginners series is now finished and posted on youtube! Having taken forever to edit and put together, with more than a few oops moments! Trying to be concise and to the point seems to be somewhat of an issue of mine,  I must have edited out several hours of inane rambling about stuff that had zero relevance to the subject matter! Still it has been a good learning curve and I am managing to not try and give overwhelming amounts of information and keep on topic, also not to be afraid to split topics into multiple videos. I think it has gone quite well, each episode talks about enough of a single subject to get even the most nooby beginner started. there are a lot of things that I could have done better, like the intro video, man was that dull! the single most important video of the series and it was boring as hell! seriously, I had to pull it from the playlist it was so bad! so that is one video that is on the agenda for a re-release.
I did also kind of change tack about half way through the series, I got really bored with the opening sequence and thought it would be interesting to make the intro relevant to the content of each episode, so the cycles tutorial was rendered in cycles and has an animated texture node doing its thing, and the particles intro is made of particles. they were a lot of fun to do and as each one had to be made quickly in order to get them into the video each week between recording and editing, they are pretty lame! lol no time for refinements when you're on a deadline! but i think i managed to pull it off OK! ( maybe!)
Anyway here's the series,enjoy.
Beginners series

I hope to hear some comments and feed back on this subject, as the only way to improve is to know where I am going wrong!

So whats next then? well I have a few VFX videos that I am working on, I have a Plane track video which is new for 2.69 that I am working on for the CG Masters tutorial competition, basically showing how to use the new plane track feature in blender. There is currently nothing on plane track on the web, except a few demos of the early prototypes and a demo by the developers, but hopefully I can do something interesting enough to inspire you all, we shall see!
I also put out a request to see if there was anything you might have seen in a different software package, like autodesk or aftereffects, that you might like to know if blender could do the same. I was kind of expecting starry eyed newbies to reply asking if it was possible to make certain textures or do some effect that they had seen in an advert on TV or something. but no... I get one request...
Can blender do this skin sliding thing...? video
Great OK just request a feature that not only is like, the holy grail of blender deformation, but also not even a feature of Maya! It is entirely a custom plugin developed by Chad Vernon, co Founder of the Digital Creature Studio, responsible for amongst other things, Pirates of the Caribbean, with its tentacle faced pirates and sea monsters! Thanks a lot Slawek Nezumi!
So  in the next few weeks I will be showing you how to recreate this effect using just the existing functions of blender, (including any suitable plugins I come across) and teaching you how to apply it to a character for animation. :D
But it will be a subscriber special and I will be beginning the series once I hit the 100 subscriber mark on  youtube ( have to do something special to say thanks don't ya) :)

Happy blending, and don't forget you can keep in touch, we are available on Facebook, Twitter and G+

updated youtube channel

so, i have been busy making certain changes to my youtube channel to create a bit of recogniseability, as anyone that has been following on google+ will already be aware.
i decided on a fairly simple yellow and red theme which looks quite pretty but i am considering diversifying across the different softwares so each program video will have its own individuality. though i am not there yet progress is coming along and i can finally get around to doing the fun part- creating great images and teaching how its all done!  enjoy the video and subscribe if you hanvnt already!

Dont forget you can follow us and share your work on Facebook and Twitter too!

Agenda for the next couple of weeks!

It has been a while, not that i have been slacking off or anything... OK i have been slacking off, but mainly i have been looking at how to take this channel forward, and creating regular tutorials that are relevant to both beginners and intermediate users and also incorporating additional software tutorials such as GIMP and Krita. Although i haven't yet decided if i want to create a separate blog for each program or keep everything unified. considering though, that the aim of this blog is to help you the reader/viewer to get the best out of your digital art and as that means often crossing from one platform to another, it kind of makes sense to have everything in one place.
so with that in mind i will be completing an introductory series for absolute beginners covering the basics of :
1: installing and setting up blender
2: introducing the 3d viewport and toolbar
3: basics of object mode
4: basics of edit mode
5: modelling a simple thing
6: lighting and texturing in blender internal
7: lighting and texturing in cycles
8: rendering in blender internal
9: rendering in cycles
10: basic animating
11 basic rigging
12: rendering an animation
13:basic compositing
14: introduction to the video editor.

once the basics have been covered i will be able to move on to more advanced, fun stuff like designing scenes and doing short movies and stuff and introducing the other software. i will also be reviewing the free software that i have found around the interwebs, there are some surprising toys out there even from the commercial software houses so stay tuned for them!

anyway, back to work!

meh, stupid idea anyway

Oops should have up dated this posted ages ago!
 anyway,so having decided to create a most excellent adventure, it all turned out just a little bit pants and didn't work at all how i wanted. For two reasons, first I didn't notice there was a time limit on the length of the film and second  I suck bad at animating!
  so I had to re-think the film based on what assets i had, and came up with a warehouse heist, kind of what i had in mind for the original opening sequence.
  my goal was to have an android cop investigating a robbery in progress, it enters building sees various things in the main office such as stock manifests and distribution route plans, on holo screens then it enters the warehouse and finds the criminals in the process of looting shipping containers. there ends up a big fight ending with the cop being beat to scrap by a loading mech, a kind of sci fi fork truck but for shipping containers, so, big.
criminals escape. cue chapter 2 once the comp is finished. Easy. No.
  models were rushed through and not well rigged making the whole animation process slow and cumbersome, and knowing very little about proper animating the whole thing looked horrific.
  Scenes were cut and then cut again to get everything into the time frame, with time running out completely I had only just time to download and hack together the most absurd sound effects.
  with blender playing up and not allowing me to hear the sounds in the VSE i had to attempt to time them in audacity and hope it melded together properly back in blender. nothing of the sort happened, and i also ran out of time to add actual script to the players so the whole film no one says anything, though clearly speech is meant to be happening.
anyway the whole thing sucked like the worst sucking thing ever and probably caused a few WTF raised eyebrows from the judges, and every other submitted film looked like some pretty awesome professional work. but oh well.

lol, enjoy.