Photographic report: BlenderDay 2011, Day 2

In the morning of the second day, everyone gathered in the lecture hall again, a little bit more tired than the day before, maybe, but just as curious.

Photographic report: BlenderDay 2011, Day 1

As Thomas called me the official Photographer of this year’s Blender Day, I want to present my results of the first day of the event here, surrounded by small bits of text to explain and complete what you see.

Have fun, because that was what we had. A lot of it.

Pictures from the Blender booth at FMX 2011

I visited the Blender booth at FMX today and took some photos for you.

It was a fun day for me and a fun week for all people there (from what I’ve heard, at least ). Definitely something to repeat.

Visit the German Blender Day 2011

The German Blender Day is a yearly Blender Conference for all German-speaking people who like to talk about Blender and meet other people from the German Blender-Community. This year, it’s on the 9th and 10th of July, in Eislingen/Fils near Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg. Like in the last years, there will be interesting talks and workshops and most probably also some contest.

The ticket-shop has opened, so you can get yours now for 39.00 € (+ 20 € for an overnight stay at a local youth hostel – recommended to be able to spend the evening with the others).

I will certainly be there – if you want to invite friends and see who already announced to come there, the event is also on Facebook.

Image Stacking against Noise (Linux)

Background:

Digital Cameras always produce a certain amount of noise in their sensor signal. Whether this noise is visible depends on how much the camera has to amplify the sensor data (ISO-value), which again depends on how much light is entering the lens and how sensitive the sensor itself is. That’s why cheap, small cameras produce more noise than expensive cameras: they have larger, more sensitive sensors and usually better optics.

Scenario 1: I want to shoot at night, I have plenty of time, but only a relatively cheap camera. The object I take photos of does neither move nor change in any other way. I want a great image without noise.

Scenario 2: I have a great camera, but even when shooting with ISO 100 (Canon etc.) or 200 (Nikon), the image noise is visible because I only want to use a very small part of the tonal range (e.g. in foggy situations) and therefore the small amount of noise is heavily amplified.

Space Shuttle

This is a new project I finished for a competition on the German Blender forum. The task was to create a (science fiction) space shuttle  for a film project in production in the German Blender community, so I gave it a try:

Buy New Fish Food

I just finished the scene for the Starfish I did some time ago to show the possibilities of Material Nodes in Blender. Rendertime was horrible (> 30 hours, I can’t give any exact number because I paused the render a few times to work on my windows partition which confuses the render-time counter of Blender). Simple reason: Node-Material with about 5 different materials on a glossy reflection surface with about 20 passes, giving about 20×5 reflections per pixel to compute (most of them with SSS).

Final Render

Hope you like it.

Themes in Blender 2.5

Update 2010-04-13: There is a python-script for managing themes in Blender now, download it and read about it here.

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Now that I understood how themes work in Blender 2.5 (version 2.55 to be more precise, older versions of 2.5 are slightly different), I thought I should probably share this knowledge because information about this part seems to be a rare thing on the internet.

Small New Scene for Frecce Tricolori Jet

I made a relatively quick rendering (not rendering-time-wise but regarding the time it took me to set the scene up) of my model of a Aermacchi MB-339 PAN of the Italian Aeronautica Militare ”Frecce Tricolori” – a night scene with lots of motion blur and little foreground-background-contrast.

Now a dawn scene is always problematic for Luxrender since there is hardly any direct light, I have to work with animated light-providing textures (not officially supported by Luxrender) so the efficiency of the rendering process is very bad. It took me 12.646 minutes to render this – and I’m not even happy with the noise level in it.

So here it is. Enjoy. I called it “Low Pass” – because that’s essentially what the plane does.

Modeling Detail on round Surfaces using Retopo

For my latest work, a scene with a HH-65 Dolphin in it, I found a great way to model detailed shapes (like windows, little holes and similar things) onto a round and complex surface without getting ugly crases and similar things on the surface because of edgeloops destroying your round shape.

What I did: