Now that I’ve learned how to add music to my videos, I can fill my Drew Ackermann channel with mediation-type videos with looped animation and relaxing music.
For this one I used the Falling Rings video as the basis and replaced the rings with a doughnut. There was a slight issue with the tumbling effect because the original rings turned 180 degrees through the animation sequence. This looked OK because they had horizontal symmetry. The doughnuts don’t, the icing meant that the doughnuts would spin 180 degrees then suddenly shift to the original orientation. Once I realised that this was happening it was fairly easy to fix. It was slow because the doughnuts have a lot more faces than the rings so it took longer to render each time I wanted to change anything.
Cartoon doughnut! There are a few tutorials about making a doughnut in Blender, some of them also add sprinkles but I thought that would be too much detail for the type of video I planned to do.
There’s a similar video of tumbling brollies that I’ve put up as well. This one uses three different brollies. I designed the brollies all by myself!
Three different brollies for the tumbling animation. Not sure how much detail is needed for the animation, but they certainly look brolly-ish.
I really think Blender is like a language, you don’t understand a lot of what is going on for the first years but you can quickly make up your own sentences.
I may set up another channel of unsettling animations, because people like all sorts of things. A cycled tune in a disturbing key accompanied by melted figures falling into a fire. That sort of nonsense.
While I looking at ways to morph objects to create soothing animations, I came across a way to make a less-soothing, but still fun, way of morphing any two objects.
For the base models I’ve used some resource that are in an ‘add-on’ in Blender. Not sure why I chose a banana and a monster truck, you’ll have to ask my brain about that and it’s not talking to me.
Once you have the two models there’s some animation to be added to make the objects spin. The changeover happens at maximum spin speed at which point the banana becomes invisible and the truck appears.
This is how the truck and banana look without any rendering. The floor and wall are also just grey objects waiting to be coloured in.
Once I’d done that, I realised I’d set the banana quite high above the floor, so I animated the truck falling and bouncing.
Setting the scene was next. I thought it would be nice to have it look like the morph was happening in a car showroom. I made a chequered floor1 and a wall at the back with windows. Getting the window glass to look convincing needed a bit of fiddling around with various settings, but in the end I got it so you can see through the windows to the scenery behind. A couple of blue-tinted backlights add an extra dimension to the objects.
Once the animation had been rendered, I used the video editing suite to add two sound effects that I downloaded from Pixabay, where I also got music for the ambient videos. The swoosh and the thump could be positioned in time to get them synced with the animation. This is one of those things that’s easy when you know how, but I had a hell of a job finding how to even start video editing.
Video editor in Blender. The videos and the sound effects can be moved and cued up to happen at the right time. It’s a click and drag system, so pretty easy to use.
So the ‘swoosh’ in Channel 2 reaches its peak as the banana speeds up and there’s a ‘thump’ in Channel3 timed to coincide with the truck hitting the floor. I did search for a sound effect of a monster truck hitting a tiled floor, but couldn’t find one. Surprisingly.
This is one of the many presets for the Shader editor in Blender, so easy when you know what to look for. ↩︎
So I fixed his fingers somewhat – still not perfect, I can’t get a good fist, but the fingers no longer twist in an awkward way.
After a bit of fiddling around, I got Steve’s hand to look a lot better. The fingers are straight, at least.
Stand-up comedian
As mentioned in a previous post, I’m a fan of comedy. Also, I’m a fan of Stewart Lee1. To my mind, he elevates stand-up to an art form2 and is also hilarious. To Mrs S he just drones on about stuff3. Anyway, I have a picture of the man in full flow.
Stewart Lee in action.
This photo was the inspiration for Steve’s new job as a stand-up comedian. But to make it more obvious that Steve is in a comedy club, rather than giving a lecture (on the use of Lammas bread in recipes for hobbit), I thought it was necessary to add comedy club trappings. This means a curtain and lights such as Stew has and a neon sign so we know he’s in a comedy club. And a microphone, mike stand and a suitable pose.
The sort of thing I was thinking of for the Mordor Improv stage. Sadly, Aisling Bea was not available for comment.
The mike stand was the easiest part. A cylinder for the upright and another, cut in half lengthways, for the clip.
The microphone was also fairly simple. I decided to just show the top of Steve’s hand, so I didn’t need to model the flex, mainly because the right arm looks a bit weird when it’s bent. So a cylinder, tapered a bit, a sphere as the inner part of the microphone and another sphere given a wireframe look as the input bit. And a flat cylinder as the metal ring around the bit you speak into4.
Posing Steve wasn’t too hard since I’d done a bit of this already. Getting the hands to look reasonably realistic depended on getting the curl of the fingers right, which I had done already.
Now I just needed to set the scene.
Blender can add physics to an object, and the physics I needed for the curtain is the Cloth Modifier. Using this, an otherwise flat object can be made to act like cotton, silk, leather whatever you like. You can drop it, drape it or pin it in place to react to gravity and other forces.
Cloth can be pinned in place to drape. You can also change how many faces are in the cloth. From left to right, there are 400, 4000 and 50000 faces. More faces means more drapable cloth.
For this, I followed a tutorial to make a curtain which would hang behind Steve. And I decided that the Mordor Improv is a slightly down-at-heel establishment, so the curtain is drooping a bit.
More interesting is the neon sign behind Steve. I had to go through a couple of tutorials to get from ‘I have this idea’ to ‘I can do this now’. Two fonts are in this – Bauhaus (Mordor) and Freestyle Script (Improv). The Eye of Sauron was originally the O of Mordor, pulled around a bit and given a different colour to look more evil eye-like.
Curtain, original neon work, added plastic backing and as the sign appears in the final render after some bashing around.
So now Steve has a job. He’s struggling to keep Sauron’s minions entertained at the Mordor Improv.
“Two hobbits walk into a bar. Must have been a low bar.”
If you have any Middle Earth jokes, let me know!
Some would say the two are mutually exclusive. Mrs S, for one. ↩︎
Now that I have Steve the orc, what can I do with him?
Orc with Balloon
One of the best-known British artists is Banksy. Best known, even if we don’t know who they are1. Most of the works attributed to Banksy are stencil-based, the work is in the preparation of the stencil, rather than the application of the paint which was done stealthily and quickly.
Here, I’m redoing their ‘Girl with Balloon’, which first appeared on Waterloo Bridge in London in 2004.
Blender allows you to add a reference image to the work so that you can use guides to pose or build the model you’re making. This was used in a couple of the earlier lessons, building the spitfire and also the original modelling of Steve was done using an outline provided as part of the lesson plan.
Adding a version of Girl with Balloon, I used this to get the pose of the orc similar to the original. Not exact – Steve has longer arms and I wanted the balloon to be a bit closer.
Original image of Steve with the balloon. The wall behind has been lit to look a bit like a wall – Banksy’s work appeared on several walls around the world, one of them must have looked like this.
Modelling the heart-shaped balloon was done by using a Webding heart as the base. Text in Blender is treated as an editable object with access to all the fonts you have on your computer. For the caffeine molecule mug design, I had used Berlin and Bauhaus fonts and added a bit of a curve to the text. Here, I coloured the heart and added a curve to the top surface so it would look a bit more balloon-like.
For the trailing ribbons I used Grease Pencil to draw black lines. I’d used grease pencil before in the caffeine molecule, adding lines automatically. This time they were hand drawn.
The cartoon effect I used on the caffeine molecule was repurposed to give a stencil look to the posed orc. Instead of using one colour for the light parts and another for dark, I just used black and white. Shading in black and white wasn’t difficult, but getting the lighting right so that the finished figure would look like a stencil and be recognisable as an orc took a bit of fiddling around.
Orc with Balloon. Final image of Steve with his balloon.
And finally, a short video of the transition from live orc to stencil.
The transition of Steve from rendered to stencilled in four seconds.
Next up, Steve has a go at stand-up comedy.
According to Wikipedia, his name is Robin Gunningham, he’s from Yate near Bristol. ↩︎
Now that the GameDev course is complete – I even got a certificate! – I can have a look at other tutorials and find out more about what can be done with Blender.
Don’t forget about Steve. He will be back! I just need to fix his fingers.
Textures featured in the previous course, not only in getting Steve’s skin and clothes looking good, but also in the mech when I added glitter. More interesting textures can be downloaded for use from several websites and the uses for these are only limited by your imagination.
To keep this blog post short and to show some of the things you can do with textures, below are a few spheres with added textures. Despite their appearance in the rendered image, they are just spheres and can be edited and shifted around as such. Using these textures instead of trying to sculpt your own lava flow or mossy stone reduces the load on the computer and is a lot quicker. The downside is that you are restricted by what is available.
Five textured spheres. Two types of rock and a hollow plastic ball (back) and snakeskin and leather (front).
You can make your own textures, but that’s way too advanced for me. What’s interesting is that the shadows agree with the textures. The jagged rock (middle back) casts a jagged shadow. And also the hollow plastic red ball is see-through, the holes act as they would in real life.
For further mucking around, I downloaded an anvil model and decided that it would be nice if the blacksmiths didn’t have to put up with all the noise of hammering metal all day. So I made an anvil with a soft furnishing texture – a Chesterfield anvil.
Anvil with a Chesterfield texture. I don’t know why nobody thought of this before. Think how quiet forges would be with soft anvils to work on.
You could also have a glass anvil, for those extra-delicate jobs. Or as the focus for a strokey-beard discussion about the juxtaposition of use and material as a Dadaist/surrealist concept1 , or as a satire on the impermanence of the permanent and the transparency of the solid.
Anvil with a textured glass appearance. Add your own philosophical musings in the comments.
Or an inflatable anvil, for the blacksmith on the move.
Just because it looks like metal, doesn’t mean it has to behave like metal.
I think I’ll step away from the artistic discussions, it’s well above my pay grade and makes my head hurt. I’m only a simple scientist!
Next, more work with Steve, trying to get him to earn a living.
See also Man Ray’s “Cadeau”, an iron with 14 nails glued to the base. ↩︎
The next stage was quite complex and not very visual for blogging purposes, except that the end result was obviously an image. It involved baking textures and it’s why we spent time on getting the musculature and the facial features right. It’s all to do with poly count.
The number of faces (polygons) in a model is an important factor in 3D modelling. The more faces you have, the better your model will look. The drawback is that these polygons take some time for the computer to calculate. This slows down your work and can result in the computer crashing.
By way of illustrating this, the face count for the model shown at the end of the last section and below was 14.5 million and a file size of 160 MB. By baking the textures onto a lower poly duplicate of the original, this comes down to 47,000 faces and a 64 MB file.
The unpainted orc on the left as 16 million polygons, the painted one on the right has 47,000 and more detail. The down side is that I can’t easily change anything about this model.
Baking is the process where details from a highly detailed model, such as shadows from clothes and weird veins and scars, get painted onto a lower poly mesh. The details aren’t there, but look like they are.
Baking textures allows you to use a low poly mesh that looks like a high poly mesh. The disadvantage is that you can’t change you mind about, for example, the position of the clothes once the bake is done. You can always repeat the bake, which takes a bit of time and isn’t very exciting.
Now that the rigging is in place, I can move the orc to give it an action pose. Might need to move the loincloth, it looks like it’s digging into the thigh.
In the end, I’m happy with how Steve turned out. There are a few mistakes with the painting, but if you can see them keep it to yourself. I should go back and re-do where I went wrong as an exercise.
So I had an orc with bones that I could manipulate and pose in a threatening manner. But the hands were wrong – the fingers looked awful when I tried to make them grab anything. That was the next thing, because I wanted to make Steve grab things and make a fist. That was for another time, though.
Two views of the orc’s right hand. The rigging allows you to move body parts and the controls for curling the fingers are simple enough. However, I did something wrong when I set the fingers up because the fingers don’t move properly.
So that was the course finished. Next up, I’ll have a look at getting realistic textures onto objects and then I’ll try and get those hands looking right so I can pose and animate Steve. And don’t forget to look for science-related opportunities for Blender.
When I made Bob the non-demon (see below) I was introduced to sculpting in Blender. Virtual clay you manipulate with a mouse without having to consider gravity and then paint any colour you like offers huge opportunity for creativity.
After lighting and colouring, here’s Bob.
This promised to be a longer sculpt, since we were making not only a head, but a body and some rudimentary clothes – boots and a loincloth. I’ll split into three parts. Second part will look at the finishing of the sculpt, the third will look at some of the other stuff we can do with posable figures.
We used squashed spheres to block out the main shape of the head, body and hands. It’s the hands that proved the most tricky to get looking good. Later, the hands were to cause quite a lot of frustration when it came to rigging. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Progression of the orc sculpt. From blobs, to a bit of shape, to rough definition of muscles and hand. We only did one half because we can apply a mirror to the sculpt once we’d done fiddly stuff.
The body was the first part that got any proper attention. We added clay to the spheres and built up the main muscle groups. For much of the lessons I wasn’t sure what the end goal was, other than the final orc. So we spent some hours adding and refining the musculature, getting the boots right and sculpting a loincloth and belt shield.
Progress of the sculpt. The face was a detailed task, since we want to give the orc some personality. Then adding detail to the body muscles and then adding clothes to cover such bits as an orc feels it necessary to cover.
I’m not sure why, but I didn’t save any of the progress during the face sculpt; it followed a similar path to the work we did to create Bob, but adding tusks and shaping the mouth around them was different.
Next was to make the basic figure a bit more characterful. As with Bob, this involved adding asymmetry, scars and general wonkiness to the face. Further, this time we added ugly lumps and diseased parts to the orc. It was a shame to do this, I’d spent some time getting the musculature of the shoulders right and they were covered by the shoulder plate and the hideous growth that I added.
To make the orc a bit more interesting and to seem like he’d had a bit of a life, we added unsightly lumps and a horrible growth to his left shoulder. That’s what happens when you mess with wizards.
Raised veins were added using a texture brush – basically paint on a texture and it makes whatever shape is on the brush. I’d need to go back and be reminded how to do that again.
As part of the messification of the sculpt, we had added some detail to the belt boss and bashed the metal bits around because this orc has seen action.
It was about here that I showed the sculpt to our daughter, who named him ‘Steve’.
So I had an orc ready to colour in and use to learn about animating characters. But that’s for next time.
This is another paid-for course, again with Grant Abbitt as the tutor. This took me a while to complete, there was a lot to learn. But, again, Grant took us through everything and explained why things were being done. I got the course through Gamedev.tv, there are quite few other courses to look at, mainly for game design.
First we learned how to add shapes (mainly blocks) to a scene and add textures to the blocks. This is the sort of thing that familiarises the user with the setup of Blender and how to change things. It’s also useful if you’ve already done a course covering these things but forget quite easily.
Secondly, we made a ‘mech’. This was a stylised all-terrain mobile gun and sort of a cross between ED 209 from Robocop and the two-legged transports in Star Wars.
A comparison of the two-legged all terrain walker from Star Wars (left) and ED 209, the enforcement droid from Robocop. The mech we designed is inspired by these machines.
The build was an exercise in hard-body modelling, one of the things I wanted to learn so that I could design things for 3D printing. Hard-body modelling is one of those things that you learn by doing. This became apparent as Grant guided us through the build and showed how to get from a cube to the cockpit by cutting and shaping in a particular order.
A chassis and legs came next, then the guns.
How the mech was assembled. The cockpit came first, then the chassis and legs, and finally the guns
It’s a very angular look, this is done on purpose to achieve a ‘low poly’ aesthetic. The number of polygons (individual faces) affects how quickly a computer running a game can operate. You want the computer to be able to present good gameplay without a fiddly, highly detailed object slowing the computer down. The ‘low poly well’ I made earlier in this series is another example of this idea.
A low poly well made using as few ‘faces’ as possible to get a nice-looking but quick to render object.
The artistic side is the painting. We can add colours and textures to any ‘face’ in the model, so that the guns have a range of colours and glowing parts and there’s a green glow around the windscreen.
Completed mech with colouring and glowing guns. The green glow around the windscreen is a classy touch.
Setting the scene is another arty part and it’s best to get it right to show off the work. I changed the colours, because the sort-of camouflage was a bit dull, so I thought some vibrant colours would work well1.
An alternative to the original mech, this one is pink and yellow and standing in a spotlight.
Finally, I made a more fabulous version, with glitter (which took a while to learn how to do). I added a camera circle so that the true magnificence of the final design can be appreciated.
Fly-round of the glittery mech.
The next parts of the course leads up to sculpting, colouring and animating an orc. This took a few weeks to complete, I’ll post the progress in a couple of separate posts.
Grant Abbitt, the tutor for the course I’m doing, and the orc that we will spend the next few weeks sculpting.
Work well for image purposes. Maybe not so well on a battlefield. ↩︎
Sculpting is the name of the game for the final part of the Udemy course.
It’s like virtual clay with the advantage that if you muck up, you can just press ctrl-z to go back.
We start with a blob of virtual clay that we use various tools (with exciting names like ‘Grab’ and ‘Clay’) to pull and push the material around.
Got some personality now. The eyes help.
The idea is to get an exaggerated face, suggestive of a creature not of this world. Grant shied away from the word ‘demon’, but there is something demonic about the face that’s emerging.
The lips are made by pinching the clay and the philtrum similarly, but also pressing into the clay to give a more realistic look.
The eyes are just spheres. Getting them in the correct place needed a bit of reference to real figures. I never knew that the average face is 5 to 6 eyeballs wide.
Adding and shaping the ears was fun.
Ears are essential, of course. These started out as discs but grabbing, pushing and pinching yielded Spock-like ears for that authentic demonic / otherworldly appearance.
Some final additions include giving Bob (as he was now called) a cleft chin and horns. Warts, too – a nice double set, just like Lemmy out and off of Motörhead had. And horns, which Lemmy never had.
Fully coloured Bob, with a dimple in his chin, Lemmy warts, horns and some back lighting.
The clay can be painted on directly, using a variety of brushes and all the colours you can wish for.
An important part of the visual set-up is lighting. Grant didn’t shy away from this part, which too many tutors do. There are four lights1 for this image, two back lights an area light and a main light.
Lighting setup around Bob for the final render. Four lights in all of varying power and size. the little black triangle at half past four is the camera.
Unlike a real studio, you’re not restricted in how many lights, what colours and how bright you want the lights. Virtual clay doesn’t melt under your 3000 W spotlight.
The finished Bob. I didn’t know how to get the camera to to a 360 around the object, so I had him rotate instead.
I also gave Bob a nick in his right ear. I’ve had the same mark since I was five (or so), when I ran into a door frame and gashed my ear. There was much blood.
I tried adding an earring, but that didn’t look right somehow. Although I can make a gold-looking thing with no problem, the earring sat in the lobe like a toad on a drum.
The whole thing took me about 5 days, a couple of hours a day.
If I think on, I might tweak a couple of things. The back of his jaw is a bit odd. I might give him a head tattoo, I think Snaggletooth would work well.
Motörhead’s ‘Snaggletooth, the War-Pig’ logo, designed by Joe Petagno for their first album, Motörhead. It featured the song ‘Mötörhead’, a cover of the song ‘Motorhead’ by Hawkwind.
So that’s the first paid-for course done. I’ve not really covered much in the way of Blender for 3D printing, or decided what it is I want to do with the app. I had in mind doing fluid simulations, as a visual aid to rheology training.
Grim up North Heath 