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Making of - Castelo
WEBSITE
Nam Pham nam@blenderart.org Making of - Castelo 9
DESIGNER
Gaurav, Sandra, Alex
WRITERS
Paulo Twain
Peter Rabel
Shane Newville
Roger Wickes
Vilda Novak
COVER ART
Nautilus - by Fotis Tsantilas
When creating an Epic Fantasy, whether in a fic- Next, cycle through the frames until you reach
tional setting or in a more common place one, at the right one you want the object/person to ap-
some point something "odd" is bound to happen. pear. The lower the frame number, the faster
And with the majority of Epic Fantasies, that "odd" the effect.
thing generally is magical in nature.
Select the object/person and press M >> then
The trick in producing these kinds of things becomes from the pop-up menu select an empty layer
one of how to best create these odd magical events that is visible.
At some point something "odd" and objects, so that the viewer not only knows that
is bound to happen. And with it happened, but that of course it was "magical" in Finally, apply another keyframe while the
nature. To our benefit, a number of these special person/object is on the visible layer (I >> then
the majority of Epic Fantasies, from the pop-up menu select the Layer that you
that "odd" thing generally is effects are easy to set up in Blender.
are using to display your object/person.
magical in nature...
Appearance / Disappearance Effect To make the object/person disappear, just set it up in
reverse. Place the first keyframe on a visible layer
The first special effect (and probably one of the and the second keyframe on a hidden layer.
easiest) I'll explain is having an object (or per-
son) suddenly appear with a simple animation. Now this is a very basic and easy effect, but it could
use a little polish and added pizzazz to convince your
First, make sure your object/person is on a layer audience that real magic is happening. Here are
that can be turned off. If it isn't, you can move some things you can try and experiment with:
it to a layer that can be turned off. To move an
object to a different layer, select it and press M Key frame the Alpha value of the object/person as it
>> then from the pop-up menu select an empty is appearing/disappearing.
layer. In material windows press I >> Alpha
Next, make sure you are on the right frame. For Set Alpha from 0-1 or 1-0, depending on whether
the purposes of this demonstration, use frame you are appearing or disappearing.
1. You can use the arrow keys on your keyboard
to cycle through frames. Be sure to set the Alpha key frames to cover sev-
eral seconds, so that the effect can be seen and
Once you are on the right frame, apply a key- appreciated, but not so long that the viewer gets
frame so that the object/person will initially stay tired of waiting for it.
on that layer at the beginning of the animation.
Select the object/person and press I >> then from
Use a Build Modifier Give the copy a low alpha material (.100-.200)
and a pale color (color choice will depend on the
The Build Modifier can create the effect of your object and the look wanted).
object/person appearing/disappearing in random
stages or pieces. When used with the two previously Set the “Emit" value to between 1-2 (might re-
mentioned techniques, changing layers and Alpha quire a few tests for the best look).
Key framing, the Build Modifier can both create cool
Parent the "glowing" object to the "real" object.
effects and be lots of fun to play with.
If you want your glow to actually cast light as
For best effect, set up your Build Modifier to
well as color, parent a few low energy lamps to
start slightly before your object/person
the object as well.
appears/disappears.
Using Lamps:
Add some Halos
You can parent several lamps (number of lamps will
Kernon Dillon recently created a set of video tutori- depend on the size and shape of your object) to your
als covering "Magic Wand Particles Effects". In addi- object Set the energy to a low value (you don't want
tion to creating a magical look in and of itself, this to blow out your object or scene with overly bright
effect could be used to surround your object/person lights)
as it performs its appearing/disappearing act. Try it
Use Lamp >> Sphere with a very small distance
with any combination of the previous techniques.
Depending on your object, you may need to overlap
David Revoy made great use of halos and the Build
the influence of the lamp distances to get a good re-
modifier to create a magical castle in his “Little
sult.
Fairy” animation. Instructions for his magically ap-
pearing castle can be found in Issue #10 of Blender- Halos:
art Magazine.
Halos can create a great glowing look, but be careful
Glow Effect: when setting the size and energy. Very small values
work the best, otherwise you will likely blow out
Glowing objects are always a cool effect and rather
your image.
simple to implement in multiple ways.
A Very Soft Glow/Color Aura Around Object: Create a simple cage around your object
Delete only the edges, Keeping the vertices in
Create a copy of your object. Depending on the place
object and how far you want the glow to spread,
try to scale up the copy ever so slightly. Apply a halo material
Remember, use Low Values!!
The HD version of the movie (.avi and/or .mov). September: Colin, David and Martin finalize
breakdown and work on storyboard
The third disk with a lot of video tutorials by the
artists and developers. Oct 5th: Durian project officially starts
All .blend files, models, textures, and so on… the As you may notice, it has been shifted a little bit… it
material used to create the movie. was more convenient to move the pre-production
workshop until after SIGGRAPH. The month of July,
The original script, breakdown, and storyboards. I’ll have other urgent work to do as well.
Documentation and other tutorials by the team This month, Martin will work on his scenario, with
members about all technical aspects the movie; the help of Colin. During August, the rest of the
like how to re-use assets, animate characters, or team will get involved with it and we should be able
add new shots. to finalize it all in the workshop here in Amsterdam.
Colin and David then stay, working on getting the
full breakdown and storyboards ready.
Also great news is that the Netherlands Film Fund Roger Wickes offers new Blender users a thorough
has decided to support Durian! Funding will first be explanation of its interface, tools, and features. He
provided for the concept/storyboarding phase. When also demonstrates practical techniques and shows
we show good results, their support will be contin- how to access the online and open-content re-
ued to cover a significant part of our costs! sources of this amazing tool. Specific 3D techniques
covered include navigating in 3D space, using cam-
The last week of September we also will organize an eras and lights, and rendering. Roger demonstrates
advanced Blender course here, led by Andy Goralc- how to rig, animate, and composite a character over
zyk, and most likely supported by the Durianers who live action. Exercise files accompany the course.
then hangout here as well. If you want to participate
in this great opportunity, visit this page for more in-
fo. Topics Include:
Navigating Blender’s user interface and access-
Blender Essential Training Release ing open assets.
From Roger Wickes: Modeling with vertices, Bézier curves, and
Hey everyone! I am SO excited to let you know about NURBS surfaces.
my course in Blender Essentials that has come on- Lighting and using multi-point light rigs.
line with Lynda.com. It was a huge effort taking over
6 months to write, record, edit, test, and produce an Working with cameras in a 3D environment.
absolutely top quality course that teaches you how
to use Blender. I strongly encourage you to plunk Painting and shading 3D objects.
down a few dollars and eliminate the frustration,
and come up to speed quickly on this amazing 3D Creating realistic hair, smoke, and swarms.
software. You have two choices: basic and premium,
and based on the hundred or so tutorial files availa- Animating objects and characters.
ble to premium members, I strongly encourage you
to buy a short or long-term subscription. Lynda is Compositing rendered layers
THE leader in video training, and I can vouch for Sequencing video strips with audio into a final
their production quality. Please visit Blender Essen- product.
tial Training.
Duration: 10 Hours
Course Description:
Blender is a powerful open-source tool for 2D and 3D
graphics, full-on animation, compositing, and post-
production. It is used to create movies and special
effects, even in HD. In Blender Essential Training,
Modeling Process
Introduction
Continuing on with this,
There's one thing that must be said let's take a look at the
about any CG production. The easy mesh modeling. The four
manipulation of digital data makes it towers of rounds was
possible for artists to do fast changes my starting point, being
in most works of art without it result- made with a very simple
ing in low quality results, which modeling of a primitive
would happen in real world art. This cylinder and an array
great feature gives us two choices: do modifier. Then I im-
Making of “Castelo” pre-production or do not do it. The proved the top towers
second way seems be easier and faster, with spikes and filled it
but it hides not evident problems in up with windows, which
the development stage like loss of objectivity and took me some time. I
time, and low visibility of success. So, it's worth it modeled the top cones
to spend some time doing pre-production and plan- of the towers using a
ning your actions. primitive cone and another array modifier. At last, I
unwrapped the meshes and created some primitive
My first step in stone textures to composite a final stone wall tex-
developing the ture using Texture Nodes. The normal maps were
Castle scene, generated on Blender using Texture Nodes directly
was to draw on from bump images. For the other towers and stone
paper what I objects I repeated all of this process. The field is a
had in my mind. mesh with a huge
This took me a amount of texturized
few minutes and strands. The front path is
allowed me to some plane faces with a
develop good shrinkwrap modifier ap-
ideas. The draw-
By Paulo Twain
emit value makes true light, but if you set the mix mode tones of
as “add”, the color value also illuminates the material green,
with overexposed light. The amount of back light can be another
easily controlled by color and the emit factor. Now the giving a
most important setting: the size of “light source”. The gold color
scaling and offset controls allow you to change the size to the
of light and make it's hardness or smoothness - as the grass tips,
size of a area light -, you just need to play with the X and some
axis values to see the effects in the material preview others to
panel (select sphere view to get a better preview). Good create a
settings of a back light are X offset of -0.6 and X size of 5. small light random variation. At first I made a field of
grass using just textures, but it didn't give good results
I just needed playing with (X to X) coordinates (and (X in this way. So, the grass by strands seemed to me as a
to Y) coordinates (top/bottom light) to have some side great visual solution, in spite of some render time preju-
light and voilà: a soft bright material! If you prefer to dice.
not use any light sources in your scene, set the emit
value in the shaders panel as 0.25 or 0.5 and turn on The sky is a node texturized plane with stars generated
AAO to improve lightning. But remember that emit by a distorted noise texture combined with a blend tex-
value isn't affected by AAO or any other shadow type, tures. The moon
only the color value will be affected by shadows. is a small plane
with a sphere
Green grass and background blend texture
placed to give
The grass field was made using strands primitives, as it this half-moon
was said, and to give it a good material I used some tex- view.
tures. One of the textures changed hue value between
by Paulo Twain
Scene Nodes and Post-Production I usually do the post-production process in another soft-
ware, but this time I've used Blender. I saw it as a big
I believe the most important step in the Castle Scene chance to learn how to mix different render layers and
was the Scene Composite Nodes, this great and power- improve my knowledge about post-production with
ful composite system provides a good post-production Blender's Scene Node Composite tools.
step. I have to confess, I used many nodes in this scene,
so I'll try to compact my explanation. It's incredible how many good effects you can create
with the Composite Nodes. Blender is a powerful soft-
The first one was a tonemap and a curve node to adjust ware with everything we need. You just need to know
the general illumination. Then there's a Defocus node to how to use it.
make depth of field. Defocus is a great tool, but unfortu-
nately it doesn't apply anti-aliasing for z-buffer results.
I'm still trying figure out how to fix it. After this, there's
a Glare node and some nodes to do an add blur effect
and to put the copyright layer over the scene.
Back to vignette effect, it's a
very especial effect and must
be done correctly. I've cre-
ated a sphere blend texture
called vignette, then I
changed it's colorband to
black circles fading into the
white center, and added this
texture in the Scene Node
Composite (Add menu > Tex-
ture). Two mix nodes are
now needed: a Multiply node
followed by a Burn node, to
mix the scene results with
by Paulo Twain
great .obj import, I im- color in 1 layer - with only color enabled, over this I
ported the model to painted the fine details with the help of various masks
blender flawlessly. On in another layer. 3d-coat enables you to sculpt and paint
import, blender scales simultaneously, which I used quite widely to add bumps
down the model to fit together with subtle color variations. In the third stage,
dimensions of a typical I painted some wrinkles and details on the head in an-
blender scene, so re- other layer - with displacement painting only.
member to clear the
object's scale when- Export and Baking
ever you export back to
3d-coat. I very quickly After this I exported these textures - diffuse, normal
managed to mark map and specular. I didn't export displacement, since
seams in blender's edit- there were mistakes in the 3d-coat projection and I
mode - mostly with didn't want them to carry over to blender.
loop selection and vertex path selection. Then I un-
wrapped the mesh with a single click and got very clean I used the low-poly mesh from retopo in blender, added
results. I only tweaked the islands' positions. I made a a subsurf modifier, and created a basic shader with the
mistake in this stage, since I didn't pay enough atten- 3 textures applied on the UV set. I also exported the
tion to the stretch of the uv's on the huge nose. This original voxel sculpt in high-resolution from 3d-coat and
mistake is visible in the image, but since the pores of baked it in blender to a new texture - I applied scale to
the skin in that area are rather big, it doesn't harm the both objects, and with the low-poly mesh having sub-
overall feel. After this, I exported the model from blend- surf on, I baked the displacement with the 'selected to
er. In 3d-coat, I removed active' option. The resulting displacement map was al-
the original retopo and most perfect, but had a few little mistakes around the
imported the one created borders of the mesh - in the eyes, and some badly look-
in blender. ing wrinkles on 1 side. I corrected these errors with
blender image painting - for the eye edges, I painted
Texturing with a very small brush set exactly to 0.5 intensity grey
color, which means I zeroed-out the displacement in
by Vilda Novak
I merged the mesh to these areas. For the wrongly looking wrinkles, I just
scene as 'microverts'. I did used smooth brush. This displacement map was applied
hide the eyeballs before after the subsurf modifier on the low-poly mesh as a
doing this, otherwise displacement modifier- with the default intensity set-
these get used for projec- tings, which fit perfectly in the case of a blender-gener-
tion too (same was with ated displacement map. Remember, the displacement
retopology). This enabled map must be a 32-bit image, for me saving as open exr
me to texture and detail worked best, otherwise you can get ugly banding in the
the model very quickly. displacement map after reloading the file.
First, I added the skin
Light rig
The light rig for
this is very sim-
ple and almost
not worth men-
tioning - it's just
a set of lamps
with shadow-
buffer enabled,
placed randomly
by Vilda Novak
Introduction
Description of a combined work flow of
blender & 3d-coat
Hello, my name is Peter Rabel, I have
been using Blender for about 6 years.
Mostly my experience has been with
compositing animations into live ac-
Cricket and Friends See a Comet! tion video. I decided, however, that
The Labyrinth making an animated short was long
overdue.
In this article I will talk about the production of my
animated short “The Labyrinth.”
to write a simple sto-
ryline involving a
Motivation classic Indiana Jones
style adventurer after
This project started out as an entry into CG Talk's his treasure. That
“Steampunk: Myths and Legends” competition. Due plot line seemed to
to the sheer magnitude of experience and talent fit well with the con-
floating around on CG Talk, I knew I didn't have a cept of a monster in
chance of winning. On the other hand, the competi- a maze. So I scripted
tion did provide a good topic, a strict deadline and a out the short, made a
wealth of inspiration to draw on from fellow works few concept draw-
in progress. ings for the
cartoon/steampunk hybrid style characters and set
The Process Begins to work on modeling them while I sketched out a
few storyboards.
By Peter Rabel
source to give him. The ing parts (pistons pumping, fly wheels spinning, etc...),
storyline called for the but in the end I decided to go with a much more simple
lights in the Labyrinth design to blend the minotaur with the cartoon style of
to go out as soon as the main character.
the minotaur awoke,
so I needed to give Texturing
Henry a way to light
the scene for me. After The tex-
considering a few op- turing in
tions (flashlight, lan- this short
tern, candle, torch, is not
etc...) I ended up going very com-
with a miners helmet with a head lamp. I thought it fit plex. I
his character well and allowed Henry's line of sight to wanted it
guide the viewers eye. I figured I could get some inter- to have a
esting lighting smooth
effects that way. cartoony
look with-
The minotaur out using
proved much the toon shader. Henry actually only has one texture on
more difficult to him. That being the leather straps on his helmet con-
conceptualize. I nected to his head lamp. I painted their leather texture
didn't have a in Photoshop. The minotaur had a brass texture and a
good idea of steel texture which I painted. I used Blender procedural
what I wanted textures to make the bump maps on the black iron piec-
him to look like, es.
so I experiment-
ed. I looked at a
lot of steam- Rigging
punk objects, I
I ran into a few problems during the rigging process.
by Peter Rabel
Animation Editing
There ended up be- I began editing the footage I produced from Blender as I
ing 36 shots in the finished rendering it. One down side to having each
final animation. I scene in a separate Blend file is that you don't get to see
had a separate them back-to-back. This can make the decision to
blend file for each render a shot a little scary because you don't know for
shot. My base blend sure how it will flow in the context of the edit. If the cut
file included Henry, from the last shot to the current is too jarring, you have
the Minotaur, the to do it again. Luckily I come from a background of
map, the gem and shooting live video, so I have a pretty good feel for how
shots will flow together. I did not do much cutting, I
the maze itself. The maze was formed with an array
wanted to render out just what I needed, so there
modifier, so with the base file for each scene it was easy wasn't too much I wanted to cut. I should have been a
to form the maze as I needed. To animate the maze I lot less conservative with my editing and tightened up
simply applied the array modifier for that shot, sepa- the final video, but at that point I had already missed
rated the vertices of the moving part and animated the deadline for the competition by several months.
them as objects without rigs. For the shot of the mino-
taur being crushed, I had to re-rig him quite a bit to al- I watched the animation all the way through, taking
low for the destruction. That was one convenience of notes on each shot to see what sound effects needed to
having each shot as a separate blend file. Aside from or- be found or recorded, then I set off to work on Foley. It
ganization, it allowed me to make changes to the file took just two days to get all of the sound effects in
that would not effect any of the other shots. place and put some music under it. Encoding and ex-
porting the final video proved more difficult than I an-
Compositing ticipated. I tried many different codecs with different
settings, at the cost of three days, before I arrived at a
I only did simple transfer mode compositing to put to- file that was a decent balance between image quality
gether render passes. I used the blender internal ren- and file size for the web.
derer for all of the render passes except ambient
occlusion (AO). I much prefer Yafaray's AO to the Conclusion
blender internal. When you render out the blender inter-
by Peter Rabel
nal AO by itself (to have more control in compositing), I hope you enjoyed this making-of for The Labyrinth.
the values of non-occluded areas are gray, not the pure Perhaps I will save some of you from making some of
white like Yafaray puts out. That causes your entire the mistakes that I did during the production. If you
scene to darken when you multiply it over the anima- have any questions or comments, you can reach me on
tion. In the case of the Labyrinth, I had to be careful the Blender Artists forums, my screen name is Asano, or
about not making it too dark when the lights went out. you can email me at Peter.Rabel@gmail.com
learning to animate. He used Poser for animation, than a full on short film. If I did not simplify, I would
but I wanted to see how well I could do using Blend- still be working on the project for the next few years
er. Seeing how disciplined, efficient and determined and by then feel burnt out. Because this was my first
he was at bringing his visions to life, has greatly en- attempt, I realized it would be more beneficial to
couraged me in my own journey to create stories. start small and work up to something bigger and
Technical roadblocks came at me like a stampede in better.
the process, but seeing the example Monty set, kept
me inspired and motivated to keep moving forward. For each camera change, I saved a new .blend file
Having access to the Internet has been a key part as (Example: 01_01.blend, 01-02.blend, etc). Since I
well. I have spent a great deal of time on the Blend- knew what I wanted to accomplish in a shot, I
erArtists forum as “Ghost_Train”. It’s also amazing would create all of the required animations in the
Action Editor for each character, then blend and time 2 Select the Body Armature and enter Pose Mode
each action strip in the NLA Editor, along with keying [Ctrl+TAB]
the Body circle (explained in the next paragraph) of each
character to move their position as needed. Let’s not 3 Go to Edit buttons [F9] and in the “Armature Bones”
forget the IPO Editor. Most of the time IPO curves had to tab type the name of the object to be used as a cus-
be adjusted while watching the animation play until tom bone shape. (See Figure A2) Make sure to also
things moved fluidly enough for my liking. After a shot enable the “W” so the object is always visible as
was finished being animated, I would render PNG image wireframe.
sequences (with alpha channels) for each character, I highly recommend checking out the Wiki.Blender page
background and fore- for more info on rigging.
ground separately.
Since a lot of the action
I won’t get too deep shots were too extreme
into rigging since for me to act out, I had
there are good tutori- to rely on what I have
als out there already, observed in movies and
but I did some experi- my imagination. My
menting with my rigs. animations are no
I did my best to re-cre- where near perfect, but
ate the setup used in even the minimal expe-
Poser where there is a rience I have in martial
circle (called “Body”) arts definitely gave me an advantage. I used to spend a
surrounding the entire lot of time on the trampoline doing flips when I was
rig. The “Body” is cre- younger too. Considering all of this, I had to close my
ated as a separate Armature (with only one bone) set as eyes and visualize each shot in my mind over and over,
the parent of the main Armature. This allows the changing things until it looked right. Besides that, it
character’s location to be keyed independently. (See Fig- was just a lot of trial and error.
ure A1) For example, you can create a jumping and land-
by Shane Newville
ing animation in the Action Editor while keeping the hip Blender was the most important part of this project. I
near its default location, blend the Actions together in used it for modeling, rigging, animation and rendering. I
the NLA Editor and then key the Body’s jump and land- also used Particle Illusion to create dust, smoke and
ing positions. It’s a sloppy method sometimes, but it other particle effects. I would import and edit these im-
provided more flexibility for what I was trying to accom- age sequences into Photoshop through ImageReady, ap-
plish. plying motion blur, smudges and other edits. I used
Director for compositing all the image sequences to-
To give the Body armature a shape that is easier to recog- gether. And lastly, I exported the finished composite to
nize: Adobe Premiere for final syncing of video and audio. To
1 Create a new mesh object of your choosing and edit create the music, I used FL Studio and Cool Edit Pro 2
into desired shape. I started with Add>>Mesh>>Circle for audio editing.
As mentioned earlier, I came across many technical is- fast rendering (3 to 4 seconds per frame). As far as light-
sues while discovering how to rig my characters to do ing, I have much to learn. I only used a few basic lamps,
what I needed them to do. For instance I had to figure sun and hemi lights. I’m not in love with the results, but
out how to make my own FK/IK switches for the arms. for what I was trying to accomplish, it really was not
The biggest problem I ran into frequently, was dealing that important to have perfect lighting. Instead, I ended
with the Quat IPO curve. Sometimes I would want my up relying too much on color correction for each clip in
character to do a simple 360 spin, but keying an IPO Premiere.
curve (for X, Y, or Z axis) from 0 – 360 degrees over time,
did not give me the results I would hope for. Instead it Currently I am exploring Poser because there are some
would spin half way around and then hang there. The strong features that may greatly enhance efficiency for
work-around was to key more frame-by-frame anima- creating more advanced action sequences; such as the
tion, just to make sure the character would continue ability to create motion data libraries that can be ap-
spinning. In many cases this may not be a problem, but plied to any character and the fact that there are no X, Y,
for action and Z Quat curves to get in the way. It also makes it very
acrobatic ani- easy to import BVH motion capture data. Those are
mation, where some things I hope to see Blender become more flexible
there are lots of with, in the future. Either way, I will continue using
spins, it would Blender for modeling and texturing and I am most defi-
have been help- nitely looking forward to Blender 2.5. For a long time I
ful if there was hesitated to use any other animation software due to
an option to my loyalty to Blender, but ultimately, I just want to
use an alterna- make movies and I have to use whatever tools are nec-
tive to essary.
Quaternion I will never for-
(hint, get how incredi-
hint…Blender Foundation). Another reoccurring issue bly important
was not getting consistent results from Soft Body and Blender has
by Shane Newville
the Cloth simulator. I would spend an hour tweaking been and will
parameters till the rabbit’s ears dangled correctly, but always be to me
after a while, for no obvious reason, it seemed the simu- as a 3D
lation became corrupted and no longer worked properly. artist/animator.
If only there was a reset button for those simulators. I hope one day I
After spending hours wrestling with the features, I can do some-
ended up deciding to make shape keys to animate ear thing great to
movement manually. give back to
For this first animation, I chose low-poly to keep things Blender Foundation and the entire community for giving
simple. This way I was able to focus more on learning me the opportunity to learn for free what would have
and practicing animation. This also resulted in super otherwise required tens of thousands of dollars that
Shane Newville
Website: http://shanenewville.deviantart.com
Email: i_awoke@hotmail.com
by Shane Newville
Links
1) My Music
2) Syntax
3) Monty Oum
Watch Little Ninja Project on any of the following:
GameTrailers
Vimeo
YouTube
mation with Blender”. I was in- obtained approval and ap- to really feel that I had covered a
spired by what I saw in that book, proached the Blender Foundation topic. Then the challenge became
namely how a talented author for recommendations. Since Ton creating a good example, or mini-
could take one aspect of Blender, knew of my work on the wiki and project, that the reader could fol-
dive into it, and fully explore the being a Certified Trainer, he rec- low all the way through the book,
features, options, and work flow ommended me, and, as they say, from beginning to end.
techniques for that one area, and the rest is history.
that it took 500 pages or so to re- Well, not quite. Writing a book is
ally do an adequate job. Previous- a lot harder than it seems. First,
ly, I rewrote the Sequencer that 2 page outline becomes 10
Did I mention a deadline? Yes, when joyable to read. I tried to use exam-
you write a book, they say, “ok Rog- ples from Orange and Peach, as well
er, there are 14 chapters, we want to as some BlenderArtists, as well as
publish this book this summer. In my own work, to give a blend of
addition to writing, you need to styles and a range of material.
come up with artwork, example
files, oh and by the way, there are I would also like to add that my first
three review cycles and two publish- book that I read to learn Blender
ing cycles. You write it, Michelle was Carsten Wartmann's "world"
comments on it, Roland reviews it, book, which I still have and refer-
and then you go around again.. and ence. The text and examples in that
again, if necessary, until its perfect. full-color book were clear and the
We then lay it out and you review imagery was beautiful. It is still an
that, and then we send you PDFs for inspiration to me both in the way
you to review and approve.” That the organization was portrayed, and
means you basically get one week to in the quality of the results shown.
write the 30-page chapter. Needless So, I want to thank everyone who
to say, some of my chapters started helped me, either by loaning me as-
out as really rough drafts. I ended sets directly, or previous authors
up, on average, working about 60 who have written on some compos-
hours a week on the book's initial iting topic that allowed me to adapt
drafts, for at least the first two those concepts to Blender, enabling
rounds of editorial reviews. all of my readers to become experts
Roland was very kind in his com- in Compositing. Thank you for your
ments – thank you Roland. But he support.
was also very sticky, making sure
that what I said, or assumed, was
actually true. At times he drove me Sincerely,
by Roger Wickes
26
www.blenderart.org Issue 23 | Aug 2009 - "Epic Fantasy"
NinjaBunny - Peter Loeb
GALLERIA
27
www.blenderart.org Issue 23 | Aug 2009 - "Epic Fantasy"
Minenatour - Toudou
GALLERIA
28
www.blenderart.org Issue 23 | Aug 2009 - "Epic Fantasy"
Castelo - Paulo Twain
GALLERIA
29
www.blenderart.org Issue 23 | Aug 2009 - "Epic Fantasy"
A tu niespodzianka - by Mariusz Iwaniuk
GALLERIA
30
www.blenderart.org Issue 23 | Aug 2009 - "Epic Fantasy"
Rocvalley square - by Alfisko(the-eleventh.com)
GALLERIA
31
www.blenderart.org Issue 23 | Aug 2009 - "Epic Fantasy"
Smith and his workshop - by Petr
GALLERIA
32
www.blenderart.org Issue 23 | Aug 2009 - "Epic Fantasy"
Thief! - by Brad Braund
GALLERIA
33
www.blenderart.org Issue 23 | Aug 2009 - "Epic Fantasy"
Werewolf - by Adrian Kubasa
GALLERIA
34
www.blenderart.org Issue 23 | Aug 2009 - "Epic Fantasy"
Veryklein - by Christopher Pahl (Spohst)
GALLERIA
35
www.blenderart.org Issue 23 | Aug 2009 - "Epic Fantasy"
Yaga - by Crani Stepan (sfepa)
GALLERIA
36
www.blenderart.org Issue 23 | Aug 2009 - "Epic Fantasy"
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