Curious, of course, about what Oliver Schömann was going to say in his talk about Character sculpting inside Blender.

Oliver

What he had to say was indeed quite new and extremely interesting: He showed that sculpting an already weighted and animateable mesh isn’t only possible, it even gives you access to areas that are normally hidden (like the inside of the mouth) and even renders most shape keys unnecessary because you can sculpt in all deformations a joint can have, giving you quite a good influence over how it deforms. The skin creases of the elephant he used as a demo character stretched amazingly realistic.

the elephant ...

... gaining detail

that's what a learning audience looks like

After a short break…

… most people joined this year’s modelling contest. After the topic, ”Insect”, was announced by Andy Goralczyk, everyone had an hour to create a scene that would please the jury (no materials, no light except for GI/AO). The three best renders and the most creative result got a “Blend & Paint” DVD training. I have no photos of the contest (and couldn’t take part) because when everyone worked hard there, a small group of people did a comparably difficult job in a different room: they (we) founded an Association to legally represent the German Blender forum and organize the BlenderDay in the future. There’ll probably be more information about that in a few weeks or months, as at the moment, nothing’s finished and fixed yet.

Afterwards, I did my presentation on my experiences with photography, what I learnt about composition and image editing in the last year and how I think these experiences can help to improve Blender-created images as well. Obviously, there are no photos from that, either (can somebody help me out here?).

So let’s move on to the last presentation of this year’s BlenderDay: Gottfried Hofmann, showing us the possibilities of the Blender smoke simulation in its current development status. After showing some basics, he moved on to some more detailed explanations of settings, showed us an example of how to set up a nice fireball simulation and even found a bug in the process.

Gottfried

from a simple smoke simulation ...

... to a nice fireball

(with many questions from the audience)

Even though that was the last piece of official content, with dinner to come and a lot of talking still to be done, it was not the end of this BlenderDay. Although the faces got a little less alert …

dinner...

Sooner or later, we all had to go home. In my case in beautiful weather (again).

I want to use this possibility to thank all people who created the BlenderDay in the first place and organized it, as always in an amazingly perfect way, for bringing the German-speaking Blender community together in a way that wasn’t possible before this event existed. It was the last time the event was organized by the “Schülerfirma” BlendVision, it might have been the last time it took place in the rooms of the “Erich Kästner Gymnasium” in Eislingen/Fils, but we will find a way to continue what we started. Also, I want to thank everyone who was there for making the two days as interesting as they were and making everyone feel like we are all a big family.

Again: How other people saw the day

Thomas Dinges

Gottfried Hofmann

> Day 1

Some other stuff:

• You can use all these images in your blogs and on your websites, regard them as CC-BY.
• If you want to have any picture of you in full resolution (even if it’s not in here but you know I took it), please contact me.
• If you want an image removed from this or the earlier blog post, please contact me.
• If you have pictures of me or my talk, I’d be happy to see them or even integrate them here, attributing you and linking to you of course.

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

July the 9th, 2011 - 9:11 in the morning

Arriving at the event, the anticipation of the people slowly filling the rooms was very visible.

As important as the talks and contests at the event are the times in-between, the moments of talking, sharing knowledge and just getting to know new, interesting people. That is why the talking began long before the doors of the Erich Kästner Gymnasium in Eislingen/Fils in southern Germany were opened – and why the opening announcements of Thomas Dinges can only be called the second subject of the event programme. With a new record of almost 50 people present, there were many people raising their hands when asked who came to Eislingen for the second or even for the third time. The first real presentation came from Immanuel Günther and Thomas Hintz who just released a book on Materials in Blender and gave an interesting insight into how the eye can be fooled when trying to identify colours, perspective and materials in the real world and on photos – and how knowledge about different phenomenons can help us choose the right settings in Blender.

Immanuel

Thomas

Included in the talk was a workshop. We were given some small sample objects and the task was to create the material of the object in a given sample scene. About half an hour later, the small groups presented their results, and they were quite impressive. Also, almost everyone had learnt something from working together with other people and chatting about techniques and settings.

lunch

After a lot of interesting material, people were hungry and the kitchen team had prepared wonderful noodles with Bolognese sauce, salad and chocolate and vanilla ice cream. More than enough for everyone.

ice cream with chocolate sauce, as much as you want

As every year, we used the school cafeteria as background for our group photo.

I failed at putting me on the picture, should have included more crop reserves...

Then, Thomas introduced us into the new Blender release cycle and the render engine “Cycles”, …

people listening, ...

... tweeting, testing

… followed by Jeroen Bakker, showing the current status of his OpenCL Compositor project (being not OpenCL, but completely awesome instead). The audience demanded the nodes he had developed to be added into trunk within a day, and the speed of the new compositor was just overwhelming.

Jeroen

Please go to his website to donate, helping him complete the project.

The following break was used to eat cake and drink coffee. And for talking, a lot of talking.

Next came Sebastian König, showing us the completely exciting development that went on in the Tomato branch in a time span of only about two days prior to the BlenderDay. After a simple application of 2D-Tracking, he went on to a stable, usable, user-friendly and seemingly almost-finished 3D-Tracker, within Blender. Enough words, see his excitement with your own eyes.

Sebastian, happy.

2D Tracking

I have no pictures for 3D tracking, but you can see the videos he showed us here: http://www.vimeo.com/26163426

That he was able to show us the workflow for projecting some video onto a filmed canvas and for positioning a 3D-Object into a video including the necessary compositing (not including 3D-Tracking itself, would take a little longer to set all the points) for realistic shadows says enough about the speed of the new system. Also, the problems he mentioned (focal length formula) are already fixed as I write this.

With so much matter to talk about, there was also no problem to fill the next break.

in focus (f.l.t.r.): Gottfried Hofmann, Sebastian König, Tobias Kummer (last two with Blender logo shirt)

The last talk of this day came from Beat Reichenbach who gave a comparison between Cinema 4D and Blender, showing some areas where Blender could learn from the commercial rival (mainly concerning the Outliner, Animation tools and the node programming system of Cinema 4D, being more artist-friendly than python-scripting in Blender).

Outliner equivalent in C4D

He also told us that he is allowed to model and texture in Blender and import the finished models into C4D at his current employment, showing that some people in the industry are open-minded in this direction.

After that, it was time for dinner and the presentation of the winners of the first BlenderDay Award (plus a great best of compilation from the nine best participants, including Christoph Pöhler, Beat Reichenbach, Georg Eifler and Jens Sesseg). They were presented by Francesco Faranna from Breitbild Visual Effects and Thomas Dinges.

Francesco, announcing the winners

AMEE runcycle

The Winners were:

1. Martin Lubich with some scenes from “Aras Tale”

2. Thomas Kristof with his robot character called AMEE

3. Lino Thomas with his “Horstner Mühle”

4. Sebastian Fischer with his “Fantasy Spider” character

5. Benoît Donat-Bouillud with his science fiction environment “Space City”

With the awards on the way to their lucky recipients, the official part of the first day ended.

After taking a look at some interesting artwork by Georg Hornung (photomanipulation with added 3D-objects)…

improvised art exhibition

front row (f.l.t.r.): Clemens, Sebastian, Georg

… , the cloud slowly dispensed, the people from further away drove to the youth hostel nearby to spend the night there – and in a Greek restaurant within walking distance.

waiting in front of the youth hostel

The weather and landscape on the way to the restaurant was perfect …

the location for the best part of each BlenderDay

… and I wasn’t the only one using the evening to take some more photos, so you might see some interesting content from these people (and others), too:

And that’s it for part one, stay tuned for the rest.

Eislingen saying "good night" to the Blenderers from Germany, Switzerland, Austria and the Netherlands

How other people saw the day:

Thomas Dinges

Gottfried Hofmann

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.

All images 

(There’s so few people there because that were the moments when I had the time to take photos. Also, it was Friday, the last day of FMX 2011.)

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.

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.

Astrophotographers (and some other photographers) use a great technique to reduce noise: They take several photos of the same object, on a tripod for the same position and perspective. These images will have a certain amount of usable information and a certain amount of unusable information (noise) added together to a noisy image. While the usable information stays the same throughout several shots, the noise varies with relatively good randomness. If you take the average value for each pixel from many of these shots, the usable information is preserved while the noise is lost (the average of random noise is some gray value). Now we normalize the image (to get rid of the noise-based gray) and we have a perfect image. That’s the idea.

In reality, of course, I can only get rid of some of the noise because I can’t take an infinite number of shots. Doubling the number of shots will about halve the amount of noise. Then there might be some noise that is not perfectly random, probably some pixels of the camera sensor will tend to give a noise that is slightly different from the noise of others. But it surely improves the image a lot compared to just on exposure.

Now to the software part. I’m a blender enthusiast, so I first tried the stacking inside the Blender Compositor. It works, but it’s a lot of work adding image inputs for all the images, mixing everything together, and in the end, my 4GB of RAM weren’t enough. Not even close. So I googled and found ALE, short for Anti-Lamenessing Engine (what a name) by David Hilvert. It can do a lot I don’t really understand, but it can also stack images to reduce noise. It is available as a Debian package, I just installed it from the Software Center.

It does the stacking amazingly well, relatively fast and with minimal RAM usage. Since it works by command line, I wrote a short script, basically trying to imitate what is done in the examples on the official website of ALE. You will also need ImageMagick (also available inside the Software Center) for handling the image-files. Take a look:

echo “starting”
mogrify -resize 2048 *.tif
echo “resized to 2048px for faster calculation. Change value for bigger images (takes a lot longer)”
mogrify -format ppm *.tif
echo “formatted as .ppm-files”
ale –md 64 *.ppm stacked.png
echo “stacked 64 files”
convert -normalize stacked.png stacked.norm.png
echo “normalized”
echo “final image is: stacked.norm.png”

CAUTION: Destroys original files, run in separate directory with duplicates of your original images.

It’s really only 4 lines of code and some useless comments between them.

What it does:

1. It scales the images. This is not necessary, but it helps a lot, because with large images, the algorithm takes forever. Also, although my camera produces 9 Megapixel images, I’m really happy with getting a sharp image with my full screen resolution – the lens and sensor won’t give a lot more sharpness than in the 1.3 Megapixels, anyway. For better results and for usage with better cameras, increase this value.
2. It converts the .JPG-files into .ppm-files. That’s simply because ALE wants .ppms. If you find a way to convert your camera-Raws into ppms, that would be even better. Be careful: The file type is case-sensitive, so check whether your camera probably gives you .jpg-files instead of .JPG-files. Change if necessary.
3. It stacks the images. This can take some time – about 30 seconds per Megapixel of input on my system.
4. It normalizes the result. Should only take a few deciseconds.

Any suggestions on improvements and more detailed explanations on ALE are very welcome.

This is the presentation sheet:

Software used:

• Blender (modeling, mapping, rendering)
• Gimp (textures, presentation, postproduction)

The launch picture is based on a NASA image, everything else is done by me.

Final Render

Hope you like it.

In this case, the workflow was:

• Render to multilayer exr
• Load result into new blender-file only for compositing
• Composite basics (depth of field, gamma curve, saturation)
• Try some changes for parts of the image in Gimp
• Export manipulation masks from Gimp
• Imitate Gimp-manipulation inside the Blender compositor using the masks from Gimp
• Compute final composition (takes some minutes with the heavy dof)
• Postwork in Gimp (e.g. wet paper after a hint from the forum, hand-antialiasing on important edges (full sample is not possible here, so rendering at 1,5x the size, scaling down and then hand-antialiasing is the method of choice))

And if someone is interested, a commented Node-setup:

Compo-Nodes with comments

—

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.

First, the basics. You can change all settings available about colours and icons in the User Preferences, Themes tab. If you change any setting there, and press Ctrl + U to save them into your startup.blend, they stay there and when you start Blender, your changes are back. In that respect, themes are like all other changes to the interface like changes of the layout and everything else.

What is different is that Themes are not saved in normal files. So if you just go to File > Save as (F2) and save your file, the layout of your user interface is saved, but not the theme colours. So you can’t save any file and send it to someone and he sees your theme, you have to use the file that is saved if you press Ctrl + U. This is important if you want to send themes, or just save them for yourself or copy them to a different computer. What you don’t have to do is create a backup of the standard theme, because you always get that one back by clicking on Reset to Default Theme in the User Preferences (or File > Load Factory Settings, for a reset of all changes).

Please note that there is no way you can only save the theme, there will always be all user defaults attached to the file. However, you can load a theme without overwriting all your other settings. For that, save your startup setup into a normal file, then replace the startup.blend with the theme-file, open blender again (loading the theme and the other settings you don’t want) and load the file you previously saved with your other settings. This will at least give you back the window layout and any models, lights and cameras you probably had in there. You can then save the combined setup with  Ctrl + U.

The startup.blend file is stored inside a config-directory in a directory named after Blender-version you use (e.g. “2.55″) that is stored on a place in your file system depending on your OS. You find the path if you go to Help > System info in Blender, then open the generated text-file in your Blender Text editor and look for this path:

Directories:
============================================
scripts: ['...', '...']
user scripts: /home//...
scriptsdatafiles: /home//...
datafilesconfig: /home//.blender/2.55/
configscripts : /home//...
scriptsautosave: /home//...

Add /config/ to this path and you find the file.

Second, the theme-settings. Most theme settings are really well-named so you can guess what they mean – nevertheless, it’s useful to have the part of Blender opened that you currently change since the changes you make are updated immediately, giving you the possibility to play around with the sliders and see what looks best and is best in readability.

While most colours don’t have a transparency channel, a few (for example backgrounds for overlapping menus like pulldown-menus and scroll bars) give you the option to change the alpha channel – this can be done with a fourth value below R/G/B (or H/S/V) named A for alpha.

The Shaded-settings give the possibility to add a shading-effect (colour gradient) to most areas – from -100 for very dark to +100 for very bright for both the upper and the lower area of any item. Convex, Concave, feel free to threedimensionalize your user interface.

What can be slightly confusing or even problematic is the separation of global and local settings – the settings under “User Interface” are applied to all window types in Blender, the changes in all the other categories apply to the window type the category refers to. So while you can give the header of the 3D Window a dark colour and the header of the Timeline a bright one, you get a problem with reading the text on both because the text colour for them is set globally under User Interface > Pulldown > Text.

What now?

So have fun personalizing and customizing your Blender 2.5 and sharing your themes with others.

You can find two examples of themes I did for myself here: German Blender Forum post

And one done by Pablo Vazquez here.

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.

What I did:

first model

1. I modeled the basic shape of the helicopter, totally free of any detail but with a lot of care to get a nice surface with relatively few vertices.
2. I added a second object, activated retopo and started to model all the plates, windows, door-frames and similar objects onto this surface. These parts got the nice rounded shape of the object below, but had a topology fitting to the shape of the detail and having a lot more polygons than the original model.
3. 

   final result (as you can see, some minor corrections are still possible after a good retopo)

   I deactivated retopo and extruded and fattened the plates/windows to give them some thickness and realistic edges. The result was a nice, realistic and detailed model with the nice shape of the original sub-model.

I found this technique very useful and therefore wanted to share it with you.

I also recorded some video of the basic workflow using some aircraft canopy as an example.

I hope this helps some of you who want to model aviation models or similarly detailed things (like cars, trains, space ships, rockets, …).