In today’s lab session we created a simple set of armatures, and then applied the same technique to a full body model. An armature acts as the characters skeleton; by incorporating this we can ‘rig’ characters and move their limbs, allowing us to place them into different positions. There are several different types, giving us control in the ways we feel we need. Deform bones are the default in armatures, this allows us to freely move the vertices contained in a limb. B-Bones are bones broken into different pieces, giving the character more flexibility, the more we have the more we can detail we can incorporate into the pose. If there are only a few then the movement will be much more restricted. We can change the level of influence by implementing contraints, which are basically restrictions that make movements by a bone dependent on another object. These are the main areas we explored, creating an extremely basic arm with two bones. The first bone acts as the tip of the arm to the elbow, and the second bone from the elbow to shoulder. Manipulating the second bone allowed us to move the bone in the way the bone would normally act, but obviously we were restricted to what we could do. After creating a very basic armature (screenshots as usual below) we moved onto creating a full characters skeleton. Creating the armatures and then assigning these ‘bones’ to vertices achieved this. We used the simplest method, envelopes, to assign these bones, and although the process was fast it left us with several problems. The main one we encountered was when we tried to move the bones ‘too’ much, the vertices deformed and crossed with other vertices, leaving us with some rather unpleasant results! A much more effective way of doing this is to use weight painting on the vertices.

When in envelope mode we were able to see the area of influence on the bones. The pink and yellow areas are under full influence, so any deformations made to the bones will directly affect the ones covered. The pale white areas we can see have a gradated influence, any bones in this area will be partially influenced when bone transformations are made. This initially left us with a few problems, and we felt that even though the character could be placed in poses, the overall outcome was less than satisfactory.

Materials and Mapping - Lab 2

After the previous lab session we looked more into how things can be textured. We touched this lightly in the previous session, but it was only two objects that we textured. We produced a couple of examples, one with the textures applied and the other with a specified colour. This week we delved deeper into texturing objects, creating more complex textures, with multiple objects. We looked further into lighting (creating new lights and repositioning them) to give us a variety of different effects. We also changed the material properties in order to assess the level of detail for example; we made lights of different colors, creating almost a strobe effect. A smoother shaded object obviously looked a lot more effective than a sharper material, so we incorporated that into our work. This was mainly done using the ‘set smooth’ button, but other ways this can be done is by adding a subsurf modifier. The only problem with the subsurf modifier is that with objects containing a vast amount of vertices require large amount of computational power to render, something that can crash the system if we’re not careful! This will be explored further in future labs. We wanted to learn more about applying textures through a UV editor, so we set our sights to this goal and produced some interesting results! We produced a small basic room using a cube and then scaled it so that we could place objects inside it. Inside the room we created a table with a glass top and a chessboard on top of the glass surface. If we look closely at the picture we can actually see the chessboards reflection in the glass! We then textured the walls, ceiling and floor to add a bit more realism. Obviously at an early stage the level of detail isn’t industry standard but it’s still a good attempt! The chessboard was textured by subdividing the plane and coloring the squares in the same way a chessboard does.

The Basics - Lab 1

So, today we covered the basics of Blender, which involved us learning about in detail the user interface. With a vast array of functions available we're still obviously learning by doing, but so far we feel confident in our ability to create basic objects such as cubes, spheres and cones. We also covered the immense amount of different hot keys and shortcuts available to us which will (hopefully) allow us to work much faster when we become proficient with the program. After learning these basics we created a cannon from a simple cylinder and gave it a spherical base (just to add a hint of realism, if you can call our cannon realistic at all). We then proceeded to (or feebly attempt at first) to get the cannon to fire a simple cannon ball. Our results can be seen below in all their pectorial beauty! (Along with some others that show us creating new lights and assigning different colours, extrusion, texturing and smooth shading!)

Introduction and New Beginnings

Hey, guys! So, who are we? Well! 9001 productions consists of myself, Ben Morris, and a certain angry man who plays poker too much known as David Lafferty,we're going to be presenting to you over the next few months our work created in Blender. We'll be including screen shots, details on how we accomplished our goals, and our own personal thoughts on how well we performed, along with any random comments we feel like adding! So, without further delay lets get onto the first week!