The Blog

Subscribe to this blog

Subscribe to this blog

Know Jesus?

Blog Archive

About Me

Marius Oberholster

Marius Oberholster

Hey! I'm having an incredible learning experience, not only learning how Blender works (yes, still learning), but also about Open-Source and the incredible software available. Stick around!

Showing Tag: " a" (Show all posts)

The Alternates

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, January 26, 2022, In : General

Hey all!

Image by digital designer from Pixabay

I have come across a situation that I'm really not used to, but seems to be a common thing - a lot more common than you'd think.

About a year ago, I joined instagram. Fairly early on, I came across an account for freelancers and he spoke about objections and a few other things, related to price. He advised coming up with some kind of discount to get a project done, if they don't have experience with something specific.

In addition, I've also seen a ...

Continue reading ...

Anime Impact Frames - Product and Why

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, January 19, 2022, In : General

Hey all!

Recently, Marquis Miller messaged me on Facebook with a suggestion for my CGT - Impact Frames!

Initially, I wasn't too excited about it, until I actually got into it! It was such a challenge. I'm starting to see a trend here - what I'm not too excited to get into, turns out to be the most useful, LOL!! The last time this happened, I created the NPR shaders, based on a lot of work between myself and Wasili Novratidis. I like to give credit where it's due.

Anyway, moving on, I started wor...

Continue reading ...

Throwback To The Future

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, December 15, 2021, In : General

Hey all!

Throwbacks are not something I typically do, but with a very productive year, I think it's good to think on what was and what can be - a throwback to the future, hehe. I'd like to invite you to take a moment, and just consider everything you got done and that happened over the past year - and I mean the whole lot and consider what your plans/hopes/aspirations are.

Now, consider how many obstacles there were and how much you persevered and guess what - you're still here!

So, since this i...

Continue reading ...

For Anime - Post Outlines

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, December 7, 2021, In : Tutorials

Hey all!

So after all the posting about the motion smear stuff, there came a bit of a side tangent - how I process my outlines.

Because my system can't really deal with the heavy methods that blender has for outlines, the LORD gave me some workaround over the years and they have kinda come together into this neat little package for you guys.

I kinda threw a bone out there with one of the posts and it wasn't long before I got a nibble and it was set - as quickly as possible a new tutorial will be...

Continue reading ...

For Anime - Motion Smear - Nodegroup Dev

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, December 1, 2021, In : News

Hey all!

I'd like to share a journey of filmmaking history! Yes, not al history is worth noting, but I think this one might just be the next, uhm, medium to big thing, hehe.

NPR has always been very popular, especially with children, but there are people, like myself and many others, who think of NPR as more of a medium than a genre. In a lot of western thinking, anime is classified as "cartoons" which also says "for children" and let me just say, if you think all anime is for children, perhaps...

Continue reading ...

Anime Motion Blur techniques

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, November 24, 2021, In : General

Hey all!

So, yesterday's video in the BNPR group on Facebook was an interesting result and I'd like to kinda share the process a bit and what I'm thinking. I uploaded it to YT unlisted for you:

https://youtu.be/qrPb7b3VEps

The image below shows how to create a very simple sub for slow parent. It does not have a falloff - it is a 1:1 vector delay. You can think of it as the old Nokia3310 version of Snake. For a huge share of animation sequences that don't depend on the NLA, this method should be ...

Continue reading ...

Be realistic about where you are and how to finish

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, November 17, 2021, In : Learning

Hey all!! :D

I love this topic, because it always comes down to budget and I love finding solutions, instead of focusing on problems!

Image by sasanqua camellia from Pixabay

So, let's say you have a billion different projects going on, then you can cherry pick now! Yay for you! :D

What I'd recommend here would be to analyze which project has the least amount of work do finish it and to complete that one first. This is similar to tackling debt - knock the smallest ones out first and use those paym...

Continue reading ...

Perform Perform Perform!

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, November 3, 2021, In : Learning

Your performance must soar - if it just kinda hovers, it's not gonna... wait for it... fly, lol.

Image by Clint Post from Pixabay

Jokes aside, a really solid performance comes in various forms. I remember a short video from Finding Nemo's BHS (behind the scenes) and the animator that did Dori's animation for the shot where they think Nemo's gone and Marlin leaves her to go home, he pulled out all the stops to make it as personal as he can and the director still wanted more. I was like, REALLY?...

Continue reading ...

Audio must make sense

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, October 27, 2021, In : General

Hey all!

Image by pencil parker from Pixabay

I really love writing these posts about film making! It's kinda a dream to do some videos on film making to branch out more about these topics. There are so many things that pop up, it's a treasure trove!

So, for today's post, we're checking out Audio! ooooh! lol.

Audio is a very broad topic, so I'm gonna narrow it down to the title - it has to make sense. This applies to every category of audio in film.

Let's talk about foley. Foley is a broad term tha...

Continue reading ...

Violet Evergarden: The Movie review

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Sunday, October 24, 2021, In : Just for fun

Hey all!!

Now, I know what you're thinking!

"OH NO, HE'S GONNA DO ANIME REVIEWS NOW!!!!! NNNNOOOOOOoooooo.........."

No, no I'm not planning on doing that at all, BUT, this is one that I think needs some perspective.

SPOILERS!!!!!

I've read a few reviews about it before it ever surfaced here in South Africa, btw, huge thank you Netflix - I really appreciate getting to see it! No, that's totally serious, not being sarcastic at all.

The reviews were overwhelmingly negative and I was quite taken aback...

Continue reading ...

Always start on paper!

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, October 20, 2021, In : Learning

You hate the planet!! You're awful! HOW COULD YOU?!

It's quite simple really [tearing sound], see? lol.

There is a classic saying that says if you fail to plan, you plan to fail! While I do not agree with this 100%, I have seen the MASSIVE difference that comes from planning - not just in quality at the end, but also the time savings!

Image by Bruno_Germany from Pixabay

I've been playing around with probability in number sequences for the passed few weeks and I have to say, it is so so so importa...

Continue reading ...

Explore different styles and incorporate the best fits

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, October 13, 2021, In : Learning

Hey all!!

Sometimes we can find ourselves in an echo chamber of sorts and it can mean we get locked into certain norms, expectations, formulas, etc. This is why we always need to, as they say, broaden our horizons, look at different things and find inspiration in unlikely places, if you will.

Image by Engin Akyurt from Pixabay

Let me give you an example I saw recently. I recently saw Ready Player One and it has a very strong point in that it has it's own grounded world, but it contains many worl...

Continue reading ...

1 - Interesting Developments

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, September 21, 2021, In : News

Hey all!

I hope you're all doing well! I have had covid, if some of you don't know. If you were curious about whether it's real, OH YEAH, it is VERY real, lol, and not pleasant. While being fit does help you A LOT (I have been sicker), it is by no means a protection against it and if you are not, it can kill you much more easily. DO NOT give it that chance. If you're a self-proclaimed couch potato, I really wanna encourage you to just start going for a walk everyday - or find some other physic...

Continue reading ...

New Tutorial - For Anime Adoration Sparks

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, March 25, 2021, In : Tutorials

Hey all!

It was so good to be able to tackle a new tutorial again! I hope I get to make more going forward. I'm still on another much bigger video, but I'm struggling to put together footage for it. May just pull pixabay in for it, lol.

Anyhow, NEW TUTORIAL!

Adoration Sparks/Sparkles, are nothing new to anime, but not something that is often captured. As with other anime visuals, it's the characters that matter and the visual language simply tells us more about the characters on-screen, their re...

Continue reading ...

How to ensure quality audio

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, January 21, 2020, In : Tips

Listen To The Post

Many of you know I absolutely love singing and film making and general content production. You do too, or you won't be reading this in the first place! lol.

Since we're on the same page, I want to share with you a few really crucial things that will help you always produce the best possible audio for your projects. For this post, we're ignoring the hardware aspects of it, like what mic to buy.

1) High Hz and large file sizes does not a quality file make

I've worked with audio...

Continue reading ...

An approach to shading

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, December 30, 2019, In : Tips

Hey all!

So a few months ago, before all the COPPA stuff cropped up, I asked you guys what you do when you do NPR or toon shading - specifically related to shading. I did get one response, so holla to you! lol. I said I would share it, but unfortunately, with how YouTube decided to comply with COPPA, it's up to creators to identify who their content is for and not how old the users are - this means I will lose comments and already lost the community tab... Sorry... It's just because I do tutor...

Continue reading ...

New tutorial Smoke and fire

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, October 7, 2019, In : Tutorials

Hey all!

Update

It's so nice to be able to make another tutorial. I'm still working on the other video I talked about, but the reason it's taking so long is that it is fairly lengthy, but I have almost no footage for it, so I have to make all sorts of animations to fill in the time - it's more about the audio, so consider most of what you will see in it filler footage, lol.

Anyway, moving on.

New tutorial

I really wanted to make a tutorial and felt led to, but I had no idea what and I felt the...

Continue reading ...

Major Node Groups Update and news

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Saturday, August 10, 2019, In : News

Hey all!!

A few things in this post:

- Bring Gerco Home

- Node groups - one update and a few new features

- Update on Exodus and YouTube

Bring Gerco Home is a campaign to fund the money to pay the ransom for Gerco's release. Gerco is was a paramedic at the time of capture and is currently held hostage to the small amount of $1.5mil. I have no idea who they think they've kidnapped, but the family simply doesn't have that kind of money. Not even close. The exchange rate isn't friendly here either...

Continue reading ...

NPR Shaders Update v5 video

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, April 24, 2019, In : Tutorials

Hey everyone!

This is a quick video to show you guys the new NPR shaders in v5!

GOD is so beyond amazing!!

There is a bit of news that will be added to this one. I have mentioned it in passing that the older shaders will be going away.

I'm not removing them immediately, because I still need to deal with the sharpness sensitivity. Once that is sorted out, the older shaders can be removed without anyone losing any sleep over it. If you still want the older ones or just to archive them, make sure yo...

Continue reading ...

NPR Shaders

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, April 15, 2019, In : News

Hey all!

As you all know, Wasili and I started a thing in the Blender community at the end of 2017. He and I had spent a few months leading up to that December, building NPR shaders for Eevee - which was really rough in it's phases back then, hehe.

Anyway, since then, I've been working really hard off and on on these and since last month, we've had shaders that don't need to know it's light source, thanx to the incredible work put into the Shader to RGB node.

Today, I am super jazzed to announce...
Continue reading ...

Common Compositing

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Friday, March 29, 2019, In : Tutorials

Hey all!

Brand new video - and wow was it cutting it close this month! hehe. Here it is! You are gonna love it!

GOD is so amazing!

The idea for this video was literally just given. I had asked the LORD what to cover and was led to ask the community and I got very few responses. The clearest request was for character creation. While that isn't bad and definitely on the list to get an update, these just didn't fit.

For some reason, compositing and the processes involved with it, kept coming up and ...

Continue reading ...

Blender 2.8 - Eevee - Action Backgrounds

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, December 18, 2018, In : Tutorials

Hey all!

Tutorial time again and here it is:

GOD is so great!

Why a redo? Well, with the addition of Eevee and the major differences with how Blender Render functions and Eevee does, there are some people that struggle to adapt the same techniques into different render engines.

I remember how frustrated I was when LuxRender wouldn't do toon shading, only to find out it can't, hahaha! Thankfully, this is not a situation like that! There is a lot that can be done and through this tutorial, I really...

Continue reading ...

5.1 Surround in Blender - Stereo to 5.1 in Audacity

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, November 26, 2018, In : Tutorials

Hey all!

This is a bit of an oddball tutorial as it contains two tutorials in one. Blender does an amazing job of surround sound, but in addition I get to share with you guys another solution that just really helps you deal with the problem of working with stereo when you really want surround - conversion!

So without ado, here is the tutorial itself:

GOD is so awesome!! (^^,)

- So how good is Blender at 5.1?

Well, surprisingly, really really good! The only downside, as mentioned in the tutorial a...

Continue reading ...

Tutorial for the node groups

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Saturday, October 27, 2018, In : Tutorials

Hey all!

Recently I got to share some seriously awesome node groups with you guys and today I get to share a tutorial about how some of them work (based on how a few works, you'll get how I was led to build them and be able to use them easily).

GOD is so amazing!! (^^,)

Because I know a lot of you are new to nodes, I would like to make a short FAQ here about what they are and why they are what they are. There was a time in my life when I opened the node editor and promptly closed it, hahaha, so ...

Continue reading ...

Node Groups mean New Features

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, October 2, 2018, In : General

Hey all!

Today I get to release a new video - that feels like it took forever to make, hahaha.

GOD is so amazing!!!!!! (^^,) <3

This video comprises pretty much all the node groups that I currently have available for download. Sorry, they don't come with content to test them on, but you are more than welcome to check out Pond5. Their public domain collection has really expanded over the last year. And no, this is not sponsored, hehe.

I endeavored to show you guys what these nodes can do in as ent...

Continue reading ...

For Anime - Fountain

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, August 15, 2018, In : Tutorials

Hey all!

Tutorial time again and today is kinda like a follow up on previous tutorials. For those of you who have thought about combining these and doing something new, this is gonna be a favorite!

I really like this tutorial and the bonus at the end, so check it out!

GOD is beyond words awesome!

In case you were wondering where you can watch the previous tutorials mentioned, you can check out these or check the description:

- Water Reflections

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-QyCsWwPa8

- Garden Sp...

Continue reading ...

For Anime - Garden Sprinkler

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, July 17, 2018, In : Tutorials

Hey all!!

About a month ago, I uploaded the last tutorial which was also about a specific kind of sprinkler. This one, quite different in approach, is one of my absolute favorites (see the applied example in the tutorial).

GOD is so awesome!! (^^,)

Again, there was no reference for this online, since sprinklers are either a background element in anime or completely ignored as far as art is concerned. So, finding reference didn't happen. I looked, again, at how water is handled and how I've handl...

Continue reading ...

For anime - Course sprinkler

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, June 19, 2018, In : Tutorials

Hey everyone!

Yes! It's tutorial time again and this time we get to cover something that is rarely seen in anime (at least from what I've watched)! Sprinklers! Not just any, but those gholf course type from the 80's and 90's mixed with what we have today. I am so grateful for the result!

Without further ado, check this out:

GOD is so great!

- Difficulty

Because sprinklers are so rare or so much a background feature, there is little to no attention given to it. I looked on image searches and I jus...

Continue reading ...

2D to 3D conversion - Proposal

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, April 9, 2018, In : proposals

Hey all!

I had the amazing priviledge of being able to write another proposal on Right-Click Select! Shockingly, I didn't actually blog about it, so that is what this is! Yay, hahaha!

So the basic idea is that you use the existing depth information (mist pass) to slice up the scene in as many slices as possible, causing something like this:

This means that you can now shift these slices and create what your eyes will see. I was extremely opposed to it, but it actually does make more sense to do ...

Continue reading ...

Epilogue

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, January 3, 2018, In : News

Hey all!

Don't you just love that title?! Sounds so epic! It was from a concentration standpoint. Goodness! hahaha.

With all the work said and done, we have:

Normal and Bump Mapping

Works with averaging what is there with the map itself. Gives a nicely balanced result. Bump maps are also converted to normal maps, but purely based on a flattened version that is connected to all three axes.

Ambient Light

For this feature, I simply added an emission shader and fed it, based on circumstances, either th...

Continue reading ...

Building a formula with nodes

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, January 3, 2018, In : News

Hey all!

Building a formula with nodes is not as hard as it seams, but it can certainly be harder than you think as well.

You have to take quite a few things into account and these make it confusing:

- Order of operations (will affect result)

- Vector math functions available

- Vector math output appropriacy (which output from vector math to use and when)

- Vector transforms required

- Vector separation and joinings required (available math functions dependent)

- Math node functionality

- Math ...

Continue reading ...

Blinn vs Phong

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, January 3, 2018, In : News

Hey all!

Believe it or not, the Blinn and Phong models are not all that different. The goal with Blinn is to have specularity that is similar to Phong, but without it's sensitivity to proximity. This give many advantages within NPR, because it gives yet another thing you can manipulate - the size of the specularity. Source links will be at the end of this post.

Let's look at their formulas (don't worry, this doesn't get very technical) and the variables.

R = Reflected direction to the light sour...

Continue reading ...

Happy new shaders

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, January 3, 2018, In : News

Hey all!

Happy new year!! May GOD bless you in all you lay your hands to for HIS Name's sake!!

I have to say that 2017 certainly came with a lot of unexpected things. I was hoping to finish Exodus by June (haha, hilarious! haha). I was certainly not planning on working on toon shaders for Eevee and honestly, by this time I was expecting a finished Eevee (can someone say super unrealistic, hahaha).

On the plus side - the animation for Exodus has progressed to where chapter 7 is visually complete....

Continue reading ...

Uploading 3DSBS content to YouTube

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Friday, September 22, 2017, In : Tutorials

Hey all!

Without ado, here is the video! (Below for more details on why this way)

GOD is so great!

For more on Exodus 7-12, KJV:
BibleAnimations blog

Production Vlog playlist

3D content comes in various forms and like audio, for stereo, comes in 2 streams or more. YouTube supports
- 3D Side By Side
- 3D Top and Bottom
- 360'
- VR (2 streams of 360 - for Google Glass or other headmounted VR gear)

The old way of making YouTube videos 3D:

http://yt3dblog.blogspot.com/p/upload-3d-video.html

For most of the ab...

Continue reading ...

For Anime - Defocus

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Friday, August 18, 2017, In : Tutorials

Hey all!

Finally, after a while, I am able to upload another tutorial for you all to enjoy! I am so thankful to have been blessed and enabled to share this one with you guys!

GOD is so good!

- Why another Defocus node
While Blender already has a defocus node, there are problems with it that I just can't seem to get over. The primary problem is that it blurs the inside of a shape, but not the outside of it when it is out of focus. This is physically incorrect and makes the result hideous (s...

Continue reading ...

Text ablaze

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Saturday, June 10, 2017, In : Tutorials

Hey all!

I have quite a few tutorials in line, waiting to be done, but really felt led to do Mvr blaze's request and make a tutorial about animated fire on text. It was quite a unique challenge, which you will see when you watch the tutorial! The approach was super unique and in total opposition to my usual approach. GOD's ideas are always always always better!

Here is the video:

GOD is super!!!

- Why Volume?
Initially, I didn't want to use volume. I prefer meshes and empties, because it is ju...

Continue reading ...

Toon Shading - Cycles Caustics

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, March 30, 2017, In : Tutorials

Hey all!

Super glad to be able to get this video done. I have quite a story behind this one that I know you are gonna luv reading, so to prevent the temptation of watching first, the tutorial is at the bottom of the post.

Why cover caustics in Cycles when it was done in Blender Render already?
A fairly obvious question to those who use Cycles, but not to everyone. Cycles is a newer engine in Blender and is built for realism. This makes things like toon-style NPR extremely difficult. Styles li...
Continue reading ...

Eevee and the coming render

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Saturday, March 25, 2017, In : News

Hey all!

Yesterday, there was a very very interesting blog post shared, concerning Blender's upcoming new realtime engine called Eevee. While the posts states that this is the nickname, I kinda like the sound of it. Kinda suits the idea, because to me it sounds quick and speedy, and fast, and prompt, haha, you get the point.

I read through it and I am super happy with what they are planning, to say the least. I was hoping that they would have it already done and functioning by now. While the PB...
Continue reading ...

Bible Animations - Exodus

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, March 21, 2017, In : General

Hey all!!

This blog is profoundly quiet for the main reason that I'm working on an animation about Exodus 7-12, KJV. For clarity, that means chapters 7-12. These cover the 10 plagues and their exit after the first Passover, but stops before the read sea,

Just to give you a reminder, check out this playlist:

GOD is super great!!

If you want to continue seeing steady posts, for the moment, that will be the most active blog for the time being. I totally recommend stopping by beyond checking out the...
Continue reading ...

For anime - New Style Candle

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, January 19, 2017, In : Tutorials

Hey all!

Oh yes! Finally got to do another tutorial - PRAISE GOD!! :D

Thank YOU LORD!

Another one in the sub-series on fire, I get to show you how to create a more modern style, and more animated style, of candle flame that you can use in your animations. Thankfully, we now have three in the series! I definitely need to make a subsection in the tutorial sections! haha.

You may recall that this candle style features in Esther 6:

(GOD is awesome!!)

While this is not exactly the same method, in that t...

Continue reading ...

For Anime - Camp Fire

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Saturday, November 19, 2016, In : Tutorials

Hey all!

Here is the video!! :D

GOD is so beyond words!! :D

This is by no means a new technique to me. A long time, about two years ago, GOD gave me this method as I was assigned by HIM to figure it out. Since then, I got to use it in Esther 6, KJV, some verse images and currently in Exodus 7-12, KJV, which is still a wip.

I'm so thrilled to finally be able to share this wonderfully flexible technique with you guys as part of a series on anime style fire! I'm sure you are gonna luv every video HE...

Continue reading ...

For anime - Water ripples

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, September 21, 2016, In : Tutorials

Hey all!

Yey, another one! I'm so thrilled when I get to do videos. It is really a passion to do tutorials and I believe one of the gifts that the HOLY SPIRIT really imparts. HE teaches me and then I get to pass it on! So cool!! :D

With that, here is the video:

GOD is so gracious!!!

This one is really a bonus! Earlier, I got to upload another video about doing caustics in Blender Render for an anime style, which you can watch here. This video came as a result of having to learn that, like I menti...

Continue reading ...

Speed Mesh

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Saturday, August 20, 2016, In : Tutorials

Hey all!

Tutorial time again! For a while now, the BlenderNPR group has been testing and testing to achieve certain anime results in blender and so far, I have to say, GOD has really given some amazing results! Very thankful for that!

Today I get to share something that everyone kinda left alone after GOD helped me achieve a good result for a single object, using animation nodes. It's not that it was a bad result, but the problem was that it was dependent on it being only a single object with a...
Continue reading ...

Anne Frank in color

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, July 25, 2016, In : Colored

Hey all!

I'm sure most of you have heard of Anne Frank, even if you don't know who she is. Well, I'm definitely not the Anne Frank expert, but I was really touched by her family's story during the second world war, especially on how she kept a diary and only just didn't make it out of that horrible situation... I wanted to color her picture, but GOD didn't release me to do that, until this morning. Almost as soon as I was properly awake, I was commanded to do so, so here it is in color:

Anne Fr...

Continue reading ...

Motion Blur for Anime

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, June 28, 2016, In : Tutorials

Hey all!

Yey, tutorial time again!

Today's tutorial is about motion blur for anime. While it is not often seen, it is definitely used in various ways, from distortion drawing, to blurring to action lines, you find various techniques of highlighting or fleshing out certain movements. In this short video, JESUS enabled me to show you how to do a partial, or distorted, motion blur using the Vector Blur node in Blender's compositor. Check it out!

GOD is so cool!!

I am so thankful that GOD had me do t...

Continue reading ...

Sun glare time

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Friday, May 27, 2016, In : Tutorials

Hey everyone!

GOD is good! Last night, when I got to my room, GOD had me record a new tutorial. During the passed week HE showed me how to make this and I was thrilled about it, but didn't know when HE wanted it done, well I think we can consider that one answered, haha. Here it is:

I strongly encourage you to check out the description for finer details, such as a road-map of the tutorial and the Gospel (good news) of CHRIST! And it is! It is amazing news, beyond measure better than any new tut...

Continue reading ...

Expressive Elements

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, May 18, 2016, In : Tutorials

Hey all!

(Praise GOD!! This one was so much work and got done so fast! Wow!)

As you can clearly see, haha, there is a new tutorial! Like the thumbnail suggests, I get to show you 9 expressive elements found in anime today that really does set it apart.

For a short while (say a few weeks), I've increasingly felt a strong desire to do a tutorial, but nothing on the list GOD gave me, really stood out. Until this particular video list came about. I knew that I knew, this was the next video and I am ...

Continue reading ...

Anime style dust cloud

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, April 20, 2016, In : Tutorials

Hey all!

In some anime shows, there is a dust cloud that follows some explosions that looks a lot like this. I've wanted to do it for a while, but only got the release to give it a shot last night, after downloading Animation Nodes. I don't know 100% how Animation Nodes work, but I have to say, that it does take some getting used to and there is definitely a need for tutorials, hahaha. Having said that, you don't need animation nodes for this tutorial, though they do make things a lot easier!

S...

Continue reading ...

Clouds

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Friday, March 25, 2016, In : Tutorials

Good day everyone!

This week went mostly to clouds! haha. Not a bad thing, because I really do like the results.

If you have every struggle with clouds or didn't know how to, checking out mine and Andrew Price's you'll be able to skip lots of headaches!

You can watch mine here:

(GOD is awesome!!)

You can watch Andrew's here - he's also the one GOD referred me to for modelling clouds better:

Have a great day and GOD bless!!

Know JESUS yet?

Continue reading ...

Action lines

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, March 17, 2016, In : Tutorials

Hey all!

Super excited about another tutorial!! GOD has given me a gift for teaching and oh wow, if I don't get to express it for HIS Glory in some way often enough, I feel antsy and I started to feel antsy this week and I am so thankful I get to share this with you.

GOD gave me this last night! Last night and wanted it up today. Naturally, I tried recording it last night, but ran into so many roadblocks. I went to sleep and this morning, I was awake earlier and I got started on it and HE helpe...
Continue reading ...

Make Human to chibi WIP

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, March 3, 2016, In : wip

Hey all!

Recently, I've had someone comment on the Make Human to anime tutorial, asking how far the geometry edits can be pushed in Blender. The answer is: "Surprisingly far". Of course, this means he wants to keep the rig intact and that does mean your edits are limited, a lot more so than if you were to model and rig it yourself - one of the advantages of Make Human is that most of the work is already done.

Now, for the tutorial, I got this result:

(I still luv this result!!! :D)

For some, it i...

Continue reading ...

For Anime tutorial series 3 - Fixing eyes

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, February 17, 2016, In : Tutorials

Hey all!

(see - the gap is restored to the eye's surround)

Welcome to part 3 of the For Anime series. This one is an appendix to the Make Human to Anime tutorial GOD gave me last year, around this time:

Male version in this tutorial:

Now, the problem I have encountered was nuts - the eye-outline thing annoyed me to no end, because as it would render, I would be like: "YEAH! It looks awesome!!" and when the eyes get outlined, my bubble would mercilessly burst,... hahaha. So, here is how to fix tha...

Continue reading ...

For Anime tutorial series 2 - Tree Technique

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, February 9, 2016, In : Tutorials

Hey all!

Yey, second tutorial for the week! hahaha. GOD is awesome!

Today I get to share with you a technique GOD showed me quite a while back and the coolest part about it, is that it turned out to work very well for anime style renders! :D
Check it out!:

Just to show you a much stronger example:

Made from McLelun's tutorial, which you can check out here.
To composite toons and smooth shadows, check this video.

I have also included another example in the video itself, along with the result from ...

Continue reading ...

For Anime tutorial series 1 - Water reflections

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, February 8, 2016, In : Tutorials

Hey all!

I have had this on my heart for quite a while, to do a series on modelling for anime style backgrounds. In this one, we look at Water Reflections:

(Very short and very straight forward)

Now, this is also a very simplistic way of doing these sort of reflections. In fact, this is just when water flows in a straight line. If you have water that goes around bends, you need to adapt this and unwrap your river and toss out the empty and use the texture offset options. To show you how this wor...

Continue reading ...

Mesh hair tutorials

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, January 21, 2016, In : News

Hey all!

A while ago, I saw a tutorial by a guy named Alimayo Arango on modelling a character. Specifically, the way he modeled hair was of interest to me. This was a two part tutorial, but felt lead to watch the second part first and guess what it started with?! Yes, modelling mesh hair. This has been such a struggle for me, because I always wanted to try and model the hair as tubes, because that is essentially what they look like in 2D animations. I was so excited!! I'm first showing you the...
Continue reading ...

Motion Blur

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, January 5, 2016, In : Learning

Hey all!

I feel lead to talk to you guys about Motion Blur. Most of you know what it is, so I don't have to go into that, but in Blender there are a few ways of doing this, so I want to tell you what I do, why I do it and what I believe GOD has shown me is the best for, at least, 2D Work that you want to add motion blur to.

In Blender, you know we have three options for rendering and they all have motion blur options:
> Blender Render
- Sampled Motion blur (takes forever, so not even remotely ...
Continue reading ...

IndySpotlight

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, November 25, 2015, In : News

Hey all!

There is a website out there that markets independent (aka, unsigned) Christian Artists of various trades in multi-media. It's called IndySpotlight. The lady who is the steward thereof, posted in Christian Animators (a facebook group) on Sunday about this website, but I basically glanced over it. Later that night, I felt GOD wanted me to share this video on that same group:

So I did, under internal protest, because I hate, for lack of better term, to shove my work down people's throats...

Continue reading ...

Background tests

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Friday, October 30, 2015, In : wip

Hey all!

Recently, I was prompted by GOD to look into making stronger backgrounds for toon objects and that meant higher sample rates and smooth shading - none of these are good for toon-shading, because they all produce smooth colors and areas, not hard ones, but through about an afternoon's scene building and a night's compositing, HE helped me get it done, so now you can get a result like this:

Now, this may not look like much, because it seems like a silly example, but you have to look beyo...
Continue reading ...

Quick Tip: Animation Speed Adjustment

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, August 24, 2015, In : Tips

Hey all!

Yey for a new video, check it out:

(Character was made using Make Human)

Know JESUS yet?

http://www.crossallegiance.org/knowJesus.html

Have a great one!!!

Thank YOU!!!!!!

Continue reading ...

Anime Style Sea Tutorial series

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, July 29, 2015, In : Tutorials

Hey all!!

Been working on these for quite some time and I really pray they bless you guys!!

(Click images to watch on YouTube)

Now I am seriously ready for a break from making tutorials! hahaha. We'll see what GOD has to say about the time it takes before I make more, but for now, I am really tired, hahaha. May these bring GOD glory to the utmost!!

Biggest thanx!
Huge thanks to GOD for helping me with this. YOU have helped me put this together, helped me polish it and package it so others can lear...

Continue reading ...

Teeth but no nails

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, July 16, 2015, In : Learning

Hey all!

This post has an interesting story. I was kinda excited when GOD told me to post this, but I did not really get to it when I wanted to - HE does that so I'll write things down. But guess what I did not do - write it down, haha. Progress is hard..., but so worth it! So I was sitting at my desk yesterday or the day before and I wanted to write you guys something and I sat here and went: "Nothin'! I got nothing!" hahaha. All I knew was GOD gave me something to write and I could not remem...
Continue reading ...

Lip-syncing in Blender

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, June 30, 2015, In : Tutorials

Hey all!

This is the big one that GOD wanted me to make shortly after the Make Human to Anime one. Unfortunately, I didn't do it in a timely fashion, and I am hugely grateful for the help HE gave on the others, but I am happy to say it's here and now and done!

(Click to view on YouTube - opens in a new tab or window depending on browser)

I am very happy with this video for a few reasons. The biggest of which is that this one kinda forms part two and three of the Make Human to Anime tutorial, by ...

Continue reading ...

Tutorials_Make it your own

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Saturday, May 30, 2015, In : Tutorials

Hey all!!

I was amazed today! Those of you who follow me online, know about my recent tutorial about using Make Human to make Anime characters in Blender, well, this just thrilled me!

This morning I woke up as usual, and I checked my e-mail shortly after and I saw that Alimayo had posted a new video and the title in the e-mail that was visible was approx.:
"How to make a character look like..." and I was immediately saying to GOD, "No!" (as in amazement "no way, this can't be, this would be sooo...
Continue reading ...

Material Reference

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, May 26, 2015, In : Tutorials

Hey all!

I didn't think people made such things, but eh, haha. Anyway, here is a Material Reference for those of you who would like to study the materials for the Make Human to Anime in Blender tutorial:

Thanx to The Intelligence Division on YouTube for requesting this! I hope this helps you and many others too! :D

Have a great one!

Thank YOU!!!!!!

Continue reading ...

Make Human to Anime in Blender

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, May 20, 2015, In : Tutorials

Hey all!

A tutorial covering how to model using Make Human, so your rig and your modifications in Blender are minimal and you still get that anime look you are after. Not only that, I also show you how to composite a background in so you have that painterly feel as well. Go all out with your own art pieces! :D

Check the description for more information
(Advanced tutorial - I go fast and I didn't have screen cast keys, so this does require good knowledge of the interface)

Tutorial result with your...

Continue reading ...

Lipsyncing simplified

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, April 30, 2015, In : Tips

Hey all!

This is one I am very excited about writing! A while ago, I did a test in lipsyncing and I used a vector based method of doing it, not vector as in the PC does everything, but like hard vector, as in cell animation. That went fine, but it was not accurate to the level that I really wanted it to be, but I saw an amazing experiment a while back in the Blender community on Google+. Someone there did lipsyncing by backing audio to F-curves. Not a new concept to me, but the idea to use it...
Continue reading ...

Anime with Make Human + Blender

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Friday, April 17, 2015, In : Learning

Hey all!

Firstly, wow, this was a challenge! Still is a huge one, because I am yet to accomplish a proper hair result. Not to mention that I've only gotten one good eye, hahaha.

Now, not knocking Make Human at all. It is a fantastic program, but it is not yet suited for anime creation natively, but they do want to add it and need all the help they can get. Unfortunately, I'm nowhere close to that. What GOD helped me do here, was simply make a model and modify it in Blender to have the fe...
Continue reading ...

Yay, it's up

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, September 17, 2014, In : General

Hey all!

The last post I did was on the other blog - about cast approx in the material options. Check it out!

Today I want to share with you something of an experiment for me - writing sound effects as well as music!
This is a fairly recent video I did for Cross Allegiance:

(Check out the rest of our videos on our YouTube channel - Editing done by Sterling C Franklin)

I was going for a spacy look with this one, because this is an abstract concept that translates into the natural. Basically, it com...

Continue reading ...

2D animation in 3D software

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, June 2, 2014, In : Tips

Hey all

Today I'd like to take a look at a previous image I had made, also toon shading, but reveal a clever trick I don't think you may know yet, and if you do, it's a great reminder! :D

First, the image:

This message is paramount to you having a peaceful mind and heart - basically, garbage in, garbage out. What that means is, if you think on sinful things, lustful things and you keep exposing yourself to that, you produce toxicity in your mind and heart. Sin is physically and spiritually bad f...

Continue reading ...

Animation is fluid

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, May 8, 2014, In : Tips

Hey all!

I found this video very interesting and it actually only occurred to me right now, thanks to GOD :D, that most of the stretching and effects shown here, have to do with a motion blur and the basic distortion of shapes when they move, ie displacement of fluid and flexible materials, the rest have to do with physics and timing and some exaggeration to help tell the story:

The illusion of life from cento lodigiani on Vimeo.

I luv that Vimeo's embed code included the text above, so cool!

De...
Continue reading ...

Toon Shading_an improvement

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Friday, April 25, 2014, In : Quick Blog Tutorial

Hey there everyone!

Firstly, I want to say thanx to the people from the Blender Facebook group here and more precisely, here.

I found out a lot about toon shading here, though it did not produce what I wanted - it did however bring me a heck of a lot closer, haha. I would never have thought of using full oversampling nor about turn the auto ray bias off, so huge thanx there!

Though these methods are great, there are issues here. If you leave on the auto ray bias, you get this (see the collar are...
Continue reading ...

Moving onto video

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, March 27, 2014, In : Teaching and prayer

Heya everyone!

Today I get to share a recent project. Now, I'm not new to video, yet I still feel like a total amateur, haha. Evenso, I'm rather thankful with how this turned out:

While I know GOD helped me make most of what you see, I'm not the only one who put the final together, that was Sterling. I only made the pieces, he stuck them together. Be sure to check out his SCF Mobile for his programming work and Cross Allegiance.org and Djsterf.Net for his ministry work.

> Sound is a lot harder t...
Continue reading ...

Abstract backgrounds and aliases

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, March 18, 2014, In : Tips

Hey all!

Last week, Andrew Price, released a new tutorial on creating abstract backgrounds. I followed this tutorial for Cycles, but in Blender Render and I think it's great that there has been one done on this, because there is such a vast use for such backgrounds, especially if you can think outside the box on these sorts of things. Here's mine:

(Didn't finish the tutorial to see his, because most of it was done in Photoshop and
Cycles has better DOF than Blender Render has, but I like this re...

Continue reading ...

Button crazy

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, February 26, 2014, In : Yola Features!!

Good day everyone!

Today I saw that Yola added a new widget; a button!

Now, considering that this is a new widget, it will be basic, but functional. The catch comes when resisting the temptation to place it everywhere to replace whatever it is you've already done.

I've personally been using the custom panel widget to create buttons and they've worked really well so far; considering of course that only the text inside is clickable, they look like this:

For the time being, the button itself, looks ...
Continue reading ...

Expressions

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, January 20, 2014, In : Quick Blog Tutorial

Hey all!!

Yes, expressions, but not as in:
:-)
[^^,]
('c ',)
or even
q^_^p

No, we're talking, the expressions we use in programming! Oh yes, we're going to get to grips with some of it today!

An expression is something that acts as a filter. It can be explained as follows:

I want something to go through, only when it is in a certain range, for example:

I have a speedometer, but the steering should have no effect on movement below a certain speed. Now, I'm going to write something like this in the expre...
Continue reading ...

Keyboard sensor and controls

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, January 15, 2014, In : Quick Blog Tutorial

Good day all!

Hope your week is going really well! Today's QBT is on using keyboard controls in BGE.

It is super simple and you're gonna luv it if you don't know it just yet:

(Pardon bad grammar, it is a very quick and rough example)

In order to control an object with the keyboard, you use the Keyboard Sensor and you set it up like this for example on a cube and add some things around it, so you'll be able to see motion:
Keyboard > And > Motion

Keyboard: set it for the up arrow
And: leave it as per ...
Continue reading ...

A new BGE Tutorial

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, December 9, 2013, In : Tutorials

Good day everyone!

I've been working on an amazing tool for the Blender Game Engine; a new tutorial! This one, is on Colours and Transparency in Actions!

- What does it talk about?
Kinda obviously just that, haha. I thought it was impossible to animate anything related to materials in actions until the code was added for it, but nope. It is very possible now!
Thank YOU JESUS for asking me to write this as well as giving a practical example in the tutorial below as well as for the one above! ...
Continue reading ...

A quick tip - progressive scaling

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, December 4, 2013, In : Quick Blog Tutorial

Good day everyone!

Before I get to the tip, I'd just like to remind you guys that shared and liked the BGE page (which I really appreciate btw), that the URL to it has changed. So if you'd like to share the knowledge there and help others get started, just go here and share.

Thank you again!

Now, onto the tip. In the Game Engine, you have what is known as an action actuator. This tool allows us to trigger separate animations on characters, like crouching, ducking, rolling, etc. But! This tool ca...
Continue reading ...

Anti-aliasing with NVidia and Blender

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, December 2, 2013, In : Quick Blog Tutorial

Hey all!

This post is a bit more toward the game developer than the gamer and that is anti-aliasing in Blender's Game Engine.
Nvidia has in it's control panel, something called: "Let the 3D application decide". While this may work for exe games, I found that on my PC, this does nothing with Blender and keeps it as aliased as the day is long, haha.

In order to fix this, you have to make the card's control panel decide the quality level, and from there, Blender can turn it off or on, however it is...
Continue reading ...

New Blender Guru Competition - Christmas

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, November 14, 2013, In : Blender Guru Competitions

Hey all!

This morning Andrew sent out the e-mail for the new Blender Guru competition; Christmas!

Super excited and I have currently pretty much no clue as to what to do, haha. Well, not no clue, I do know the theme, haha.

Anyway, check it out and hopefully we'll see your work there too!

Here is the link to the competition, rules, inspiration etc.

Have a great one and remember to watch the time zone Andrew uses. If at all possible for you, to be sure you are on time, submit at the latest your imag...
Continue reading ...

BGE - My actions went MIA

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, November 5, 2013, In : Quick Blog Tutorial

Hey everyone!

New week with a new QBT (Quick Blog Tutorial)! Yes, I know it's Tuesday, but a post a day is a bit intense, haha.

Anyhow, coming at ya with another QBT on BGE (Blender Game Engine) and today we're talking about Actions, yes.

Actions is a way we can use preset or predone animations sequences in games. A character doesn't crouch for a crouch modifier, no, it has to be animated so you can stick that animation to the sensor (like a key press or an event of some sort). But, in the newer...
Continue reading ...

BGE - Overlay scene

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Friday, November 1, 2013, In : Quick Blog Tutorial

Hey all!

Coming at ya with another QBT relating to the Blender Game Engine. This time, we're discussing a scriptless solution to the information mismatch we get when we have more than one scene on-screen. So here is something you may have tried and found out it didn't work (please let me know if this is a bug we can report).

In order to use a text object to display information, you use the property actuator to copy an attribute to the, writing space, if you will, of the text object, but, while ...
Continue reading ...

Game Engine - Animated textures

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, October 22, 2013, In : Quick Blog Tutorial

Hey all!

This is just so much fun! I was so surprised to find this out and I am super jazzed to share this QBT with you today!

These passed few weeks I've been blessed to be able to learn more about Blender's game engine or the BGE (Blender Game Engine) and on thing in particular that fascinated me. Also fairly puzzling, but cool nonetheless; animated textures. Basically it enables you to have constant movement throughout your games for things like water, grass, lava, etc. and even beyond that,...
Continue reading ...

Blender UI Proposal

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, October 17, 2013, In : Blender News

Hey everyone!

Here you go! Andrew's proposal for the Blender UI (user interface)! In the YouTube description there is a survey to answer, but to make it easier for you all, I will link to everything in this post. Just see the end of the post for a collection of links; a post-map if you will.

The proposal (not the movie, haha):

Description:

"Published on Oct 16, 2013
Read the post: http://www.blenderguru.com/new-blende...

This video outlines my proposed solutions to the current UI
problems addressed ...

Continue reading ...

New 3D Tutorial

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, October 15, 2013, In : Tutorials

Hey all,

Super excited to be sharing this with you today! The new 3D tutorial is finally up!!

Just to show you what it can do, I made a little reel:

You can get the tutorial here!

Remember that this is a speed method and far from perfect. It is strictly applied in the compositor and can produce a result in a matter of seconds (depending on your compositing complexity and resolution).

Origin of this method:
For a long time, I was being taught how to use procedural textures and through that, I learne...
Continue reading ...

30 Likes!!_

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, October 9, 2013, In : Social day

Hey all!

Today is a milestone for the Facebook page; 30 Likes. If you have liked the Facebook page or have ever shared, subscribed, liked, +1'ed or tweeted anything relating to Panther Dynamics:

It references specifically the Facebook likes, but it is a thanx to everyone who reads, subscribes, shares, +1's, tweets, likes, etc. Thank you!

Hope you all have a wonderful day and like Oliver always says: "Happy Blending!"
PS, he has a new tip online. Check it out!

Thank YOU!!!!!!

Continue reading ...

Blender has an auto-save?!

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, October 8, 2013, In : Quick Blog Tutorial

Hey all!

I've seen that Blender has this option in the File button, but I've never known how to use it, until Andrew showed it in his second video on Blender's interface (please answer his surveys in the video descriptions on YouTube).

By default, from what I recall, this feature is turned on and does an auto-save every 5 minutes. These are, according to Andrew's video, stored in either your temporary files or the Blend1 and Blend2 files you see where you store the original project.

Thankfully, ...
Continue reading ...

Black light in Blender

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Friday, September 20, 2013, In : Quick Blog Tutorial

Hey all,

Coming at you with another Quick Blog Tutorial on black light in Blender Render! Here is the result:

Click the image to see it in motion; opens in a new tab on FireFox

I don't know how many know that you can actually do this in Blender, but I only found out while writing the book. GOD wanted me informed about where the textures apply and how to make them visible, but for this specifically, HE hadn't given me any practical application apart from possible caustics on stationary objects, l...
Continue reading ...

Boost a render

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, September 19, 2013, In : Tips

Hey all!

Writing these tips take a whole lot longer than I thought they would, hahaha. Today's is a quick one, but wow, can it boost a render!

Many times, we have a render that just does not cooperate. Though it looks cool, it still ends up being a bit too dark, like this one:

In these instances, we need a level boost of Brightness and Contrast, but there is a node for Hue Saturation and Value. Value is a great level booster of the Brightness and Contrast. You can find it under the Color categor...

Continue reading ...

Normalization

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, September 11, 2013, In : Quick Blog Tutorial

Hey there!

Good day and welcome to this Quick blog tutorial! (will make a logo later, so they'll be easily identifiable by more than just category)

Now, today's little tip applies again to the compositor (a place everyone seems to luv chromatic aberration, haha).

I'm sure many of you, if not all, have used a digital camera.
Everyone who has used one, knows that it's light sensor can adjust it's sensitivity to what it is seeing. For example, if you put it's focus on a lamp, it will darken the i...
Continue reading ...

4 Seasons - Spring and Summer

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, August 19, 2013, In : General

Hey all!

As you all know, sometimes weeks go by without me uploading any new pieces. Many times, I am actually quite active on work in that time and here is a post to show you some pieces I've been working on.

Everyone is familiar with Vivaldi's 4 seasons. I found on Wikipedia, that there are some sonnets that accompany every movement. I do not believe that Vivaldi wrote them, as there is a reference to Bacchus. If he did, that's between him and GOD, but I don't agree with it. Thankfully, there...
Continue reading ...

Blender Guru Competition time again!

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Friday, August 2, 2013, In : Blender Guru Competitions

Hey all!

It's been a while since Andrew posted a competition, but yesterday it was announced again! This time, he took to the social networks for a theme suggestion. While he has done this in the past, this was the first time I saw this too as a prevailing theme suggestion, along with sci-fi and a few others.

For this edition, we have a more historical approach; Ancient Civilizations! A very broad theme indeed and many many things can pertain to it, but the best part is, your work just has to r...
Continue reading ...

An example

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, January 10, 2013, In : wip

Hey all!

This post is sort of linked to the first in terms of what you can do with procedural textures (quite a bit to say the least). This one, is about a touch of realism mixed with formalism (in the sense of adhering to recognizable forms, not expression through form). Here is what I mean in English: the picture depicts something real that does exist, so it is recognizable, yet it is not photo-realistic, but more stylistic.

In this case, the moon:

This, like the previous posts, is all contain...

Continue reading ...

Another peek

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, January 8, 2013, In : wip

Hey all!

I've been working on another part of the book this morning and made this as a demo:

This part is all about art and being creative with procedural textures. So that is a yes, all three are made using procedural textures (^^,)! I like to call this set: Growth.

Remember, you can also go more literal on it:

This set is simply called: Stages (looks like some sort of planet or star in it's different stages of it's life cycle).

Anyway, I am not typically a fan of abstract, but since the photo-re...

Continue reading ...

Not gone, just working

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, December 10, 2012, In : General

Hey all!

Today's post is just to let you know that I haven't stopped working. Currently, I am focused on the current Blender Guru competition. The theme is CHRISTmas (I added the caps), and the closing date is the 21st. Considering that leaves only about a week and a work week at the most, it is hard so squeeze it in using Cycles as render engine, but I glad to report that the entry is going well.

Other than that, there isn't much blending going on atm.
Feel free to enter the CHRISTmas competiti...
Continue reading ...

The main animation has finished!

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, December 4, 2012, In : wip

Hey all!

Firstly, let me say that there is a new Blender Guru competition running this month; Christmas!! This marks a solid year of Blender Guru entries for me! So cool!! Already have a concept, but for those of you interested in participating this year, check it out!

Back to business though. Originally, I rendered the animation without having added a misty effect that you find underwater; the further you look, the more solid blue it becomes, so that needed to be added. It looks like the fish ...
Continue reading ...

Ivies now have some leaves

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, November 5, 2012, In : wip

Hey all!

This is what the current preview render looks like:

I adjusted the above a bit, because it's lighting isn't finished yet and so it was a bit on the dark side, environmentally speaking, haha. Anyway, just added some brightness and contrast.

The leaves themselves are the most difficult and personally, I have to admit I couldn't get them as close to the real thing as I had hoped, but, I am very happy with the leaf shape:

I've seen this three-point shape not nearly as often as I would like t...
Continue reading ...

Bricks now aged with recap

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, October 31, 2012, In : Tutorials

Hey all!

Can finally move on to something other than bricks, haha, sort of:

This is where I am leaving it alone from this point and moving on to the blocks' insides themselves, because as you can see, they are still as white as the day they were modeled, if not more so, hahaha.

Let's recap on how this went on (remember, all procedural textures, not even texture painting):

This was the firstly applying the bricks. It was a scale test before unwrapping the whole thing and separating the two section...
Continue reading ...

Node system art

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Friday, October 12, 2012, In : General

Hey all!

I have been working hard today, trying to figure out how to make an ivy leaf without a distort category in in Cycles's node system and oh snap was it hard!! HE helped me make two different shapes. One that looks more like a heart and the other that looks more like a weirdly shaped helmet. I think both shapes will look great for the Ivy Generator.

After finishing the shapes, I like looking at the surprise HE leaves in the node system. HE usually leaves some kind of image there to discov...
Continue reading ...

Rendering out an animation as an image sequence is good!

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, September 20, 2012, In : General

Was wondering what to post today and I believe this will be of great help to you if you are new to Blender or even been working with it a long time and need some tips.

A while ago, just after starting with Blender, I would always render out directly to video. I thought that was the best way of doing it, because I mean, after all, I wanted the final piece to be a video. Logic doesn't always apply when you are new to a program, especially not Blender.

Shortly after I was lead to Andrew Price's we...
Continue reading ...

Remember the Ogg

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, August 30, 2012, In : General

Hey all!

I've gotten some feedback where people have struggled to open the videos I upload and send them (not just one, so please don't think you are being singled out), so I am re-posting about the video and audio format I use.

For video and audio I use OGG (no audio on the site yet, but I'm really working on getting something up here).
To play the OGG files, you do need to do one of two things (or both):
- Download VLC and play the OGG files with that
- Download the DirectShow filters here and...
Continue reading ...

New method working right!!!!!!!!

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, August 8, 2012, In : wip

HE showed me how to remove the ghosting almost completely!!!!!

I am super excited to let you all in on this! Earlier today, I was busy with the 3D tutorial again and trying very hard to figure out what the problem was with the new method video in the previous post. It just seemed so flat, as though the 3D and shards were on a flat surface, suspended in mid-air. And after much fiddling with the system and trying to see what outputs look how where, HE pointed me to the Depth Map. So I looked at ...
Continue reading ...

The 3D tutorial applies to video too

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, August 8, 2012, In : Tutorials

Hey all!

I actually thought it was obvious that the 3D tutorial applied to video as well, but apparently I thought a little too much there, lol. A great friend of mine started asking me about it and was surprised when I mentioned it's for video as well (and this guy is more educated in PC's than I am), so if it wasn't obvious to him, it will most certainly not be obvious to most (possibly not even to Blender users), so here it is:

It works on video too; YEY!

Anyway, I have been working on a solu...
Continue reading ...

3D Tutorial is finally completed!!! OOOH!!!!

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, July 25, 2012, In : Tutorials

Hey all!

As you can see, I am very excited to announce the release of the 3D tutorial (you know, 3D with a single render). Anyway, you can find it here, under the Free Blender Tutorials section on the home page.

Here is the final cover of the tutorial:

I went for the blue and red line for obvious reasons, but the rest are images from experiments trying to get a good result.

Hope you enjoy the tutorial!

Thank YOU very very very very much for all the help and guidance! YOU rock JESUS!

Continue reading ...

Final node systems to be explained in the tutorial

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, July 16, 2012, In : Tutorials

Hey all!

I know it's been only maybe an hour since my last post, but from all the work on this, I really just don't see this getting any better from my side yet. However, I may still work on this after the tutorial and you're welcome to improve on it as well (^^,).

Here are the node systems (how they look), for the color side-by-side (squashed, unless you render your scene at the final full side-by-side resolution and use the crop node as well) and for the anaglyph (the anaglyph consists purely...
Continue reading ...

Progress on the output

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, July 16, 2012, In : Tutorials

Hey all!!

I've been working very hard to get some form of good result in depth and thankfully here it is:

Now, while the depth is great, it still only goes so far and then it doesn't go any further. In other words, if the object goes beyond a certain point, there is no more depth to give it and to you it will only be getting smaller.

The ideal is to get double the depth I have currently, but doing a two-step overlay (it helps focus a center of the scene), but there are many issues that still nee...
Continue reading ...

3D in Blender using only one render

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Friday, July 13, 2012, In : Tutorials

Last night before I went to bed inspiration hit and I just had to try and get this to work right and I tried and tried and tried until 'bout half past eleven and then I saw the render was just not working. No matter what combination of nodes I tried, it just wouldn't work, however, I knew it was possible.

So this morning after getting up and turning on my PC I just had to keep trying again and I think I finally have a good result in not only color mixing, but also overall depth. This is not pe...
Continue reading ...

Quick tips using the halo lamp

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, April 23, 2012, In : Tutorials

When you use the halo lamp in Blender to create some form of beams or solid light, you need to remember that Blender is still growing in it's alpha support and the halo lamp has only two settings when it comes to transparent objects: visible and invisible.

This means that you have to know that the light-beams are not going to shine through a transparent object, only the light itself:

Another thing you need to be careful of is reflective materials. When a halo lamps shines through a transparent ...
Continue reading ...

If you can sing, take proper care of your voice

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, March 20, 2012, In : Teaching and prayer

This was quite a scary morning. I really luv to sing and enjoy recording and I've even sung for family and it's great, but I've noticed when singing certain types of music (that I really enjoy doing) pushes my voice extremely hard and it gets super tired super fast. The danger is that if I don't listen to HIS guidance on when to be quiet and let it rest, I run the risk of losing my voice before HE even gets the chance to use it full on. It's a frightening prospect for any vocalist and ...
Continue reading ...

Finally getting some time!

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, March 14, 2012, In : Birthdays

Yey! Back at CA (Cross Allegiance) full-steam and working on the tutorial/guide!

Just wanted to pop in and say hi before getting to the rest of it.

Here's something to bless you with today. Earlier this week was another birthday and since he likes architecture, I made him this:

Happy Birthday Rikus!!!

Thank you for reading!
Thank YOU!!!!!

Continue reading ...

Sneak peak at the next possible tutorial's work

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, March 5, 2012, In : wip

I really want to start with a massive commercial tutorial for Blender Render and Cycles, focusing on procedural textures and what you can do with them. Like the one already done, except very very much expanded.

So, as I said, this is something I want to do, but can't make any promises yet.

Here is an image I made with Blender Render (aka Blender Internal) that I would like to use as a title page for the Blender Render section:

(for full res, right-click and 'view image')

This image took a day's ...
Continue reading ...

A bit of an announcement

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Friday, February 17, 2012, In : General

It seems BlenderArtists.org has a problem with the amount of images they are getting posted on the threads, so I'm forced to make this the main location for updates regarding progress on projects. That means, for the most info, check the threads and FB for notifications as to when I post or subscribe using the "Subscribe to this blog" widget on top of the page.

As a first update, I'd like to mention Cycles! The new render engine unique to and built into Blender. What makes it unique to Blender...
Continue reading ...

Business Warrior update (landscape addition).

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, February 15, 2012, In : wip

This is a rough post to show the overall composition in HD at 50% resolution. The clouds are gone, because of layer masking.

My brother (the one for who I'm doing this project) wanted me to add lightning so I watched Andrew Price's tutorial on lightning and here it is adapted for this project:

(the bolt is also cut on account of layer masking for the character sketch)

I have a problem with the lightning in the scene and I'm sure most of you will agree (feel free to comment via the Facebook page...
Continue reading ...

Music room (not a studio, there's a difference, lol)

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, January 10, 2012, In : wip

This is a work in progress. My cousin has a music room in his house, and it's a very long room and I wanted to do a redesign of the space and see how I would like such a room to look like and this was what I believe HE showed me (the start of it at least).

Usually when you have a very long space, you want to divide it up into sections, so the space doesn't seem so overwhelming and it creates two spaces then. Going from 'oh now, what are we gonna do with this huge room' to 'oh cool, open plan'....
Continue reading ...

What a week!! (^^,)

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, January 5, 2012, In : General

Finally got to a lot of things this week!! I got to mow the lawn again (it's been raining a bit, keeping me from it for about two weeks) and it was great exercise! That same morning I redid most of the site's organization and I like the way it looks now. It's a lot more organized and making better use of the space. Especially the home page.

Also got to write a musical piece for one of the CA (Cross Allegiance) videos!! Really excited about it being used for the Gospel!!!

This has really been a ...
Continue reading ...

Jaw-dropping Blender animations!

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, January 3, 2012, In : General

I'm a big fan of Andrew Price, the one HE places in stewardship of Blender Guru. On one of his posts (in the lists category), he added 27 animations he thought was of exceptional quality, showcasing what Blender can truly do. After watching Lighthouse, I just had to share the entire list. Yes, I don't support all of the videos, because I have certain standards as a Christian and there are things that are unacceptable to me, so use this list at your own discretion. I'm sure you'll be able to w...

Continue reading ...

« Back to posts

Social

(+27) 073 104 2834 | marius.oberholster@gmail.com | Contact

Make a free website with Yola