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Expression web software that i used to code the site, which is a really great piece of software though it is slightly out of date as it is no longer supported by Microsoft and thus only has limited understanding of HTML5.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...