Hey all!

I am so excited that I get to share this with you guys so soon! Since working on the transitions, I've also been working on getting a green screen effect using only the VSE and GOD has been super gracious to me in that this morning HE showed me how to "formulate" the process to where you only need adjust the effect.

I had just uploaded the test when I felt led to record it and get it online using the example footage, as it really is a good example. Remember though, if you want to do co...
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Hey all!

Today I get to share with you guys a brand new Quick Tip video. In this one, we talk about transitions. Whether we do tutorials, animations or even tests, we will eventually come to the point where we would need to edit something, and that is where transitions come in. I believe the simpler they are, the better, because fancy effects are more for showing off, not really everyday use. This video, will show you a way that allows you to go a little over the top, while also allowing your ...
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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...
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Hey all!

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

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Hey all!

Now what in the world is with that title? Well, it sounds like a conversion of one format to another, and in a sense, you would be correct if that were the initial thought that you get.

Conversion simply means, to me, to change one thing into another, yet still retain most of it's original properties. For example, going from an image sequence to a video.

So, what is SVG then? For those who don't know, it simply means Scalable Vector Graphic, in other words - clip art. Yey.

I'm very glad ...
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Hey all!

Quick Blog Tutorial time again!

Recently, I saw someone having done their own brick texture and immediately I was wowed, because they did not use the typical brick texture, except maybe to color, but, the bricks were nicely rounded and so, yesterday, GOD challenged me to make one for the verse image below, showing a before and after of compositing for a post on the portfolio blog:


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Hey all!

Been a long time since I've put up a QBT and I think we're due for one!

Today's QBT is about compositing and finally, saving that result. See, recently, Andrew Price, from Blender Guru, reported what he and possibly a lot of other users, thought was a bug. Honestly, I didn't, but I did think it was odd. Basically, it does not refresh the compositing results to the UV/Image editor, unless you keep it open the whole time.

There is, however, a solution. When you composite, you typically us...
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Hey all!!

Today I made something I've been wanting to make for quite some time and that is water with splashes on it, in the game engine. Granted, I could not get it to react the way I wanted it to, but, I got very close to what I wanted, and I'd like to show you:

Making this is very simple. All you need to do is make rain like in the tutorial already posted and just duplicate those fast moving planes and place them on the water surface with actions for both a ripple and a splash. That means yo...
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Hey all!

Today we talk about lamps in BGE. Now, for all intensive purposes, this does cover some functions of lamps, but this is about what you can accomplish with lamps in BGE.

Now, you will find that I've already done a post on making sure that you don't lose your shadow in game and this you can find here.

In games, you see the following on lamps:
 - Point Lamp, no shadow projection
 - Sun Lamp, limited shadow projection

 - Spot Lamp, shadow projection and no volume yet (hopefully the improvement...
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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:
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 ...
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Good day there everyone!

Today I'm coming at you with another QBT! Still on BGE; that page is really growing! JESUS is so good to us with all this free content! Just amazing!

We are covering, mouse control!
This is a bit of an off-topic of what I thought I was going to do, but this is also quite crucial to some games, so this may just surprise you.
   When using the mouse for control, we can do pretty much anything with it with logic bricks, except use it as a looking point. In other words, there...
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Hey all!

Yes indeed, they are making another appearance, but this time in QBT form!
You may remember them from an earlier post, but today I used them for one purpose; particles! Check out these simple examples:


As you all know, this is what you see in BGE when you click on particles:


Not very fun to see, but, there is a way to make particles happen in BGE and it is so simple, you are going to luv it. Of course it goes broader than below, but for the sake of letting you know, I want to post an adv...
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Hey all!

I was given the idea for this one, but I wasn't sure if it was going to work. Experience should've eased my mind on this one already. GOD has never shown me anything to write here that didn't work.

HE showed me that you can literally paint in your normal influence and I was like: "Really?! No..." and tried it on Saturday night and sure enough! You can!

Here's a video of what it looks like in action:

Now, basically, you do exactly what you would, when you want to paint a text...
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Hey all!

Back with another QBT. Possibly the last one for the year, but we'll see what GOD decides on this.

Okay, so, if you're new to the Game Engine, but not Blender, you would've probably done rigging using the armature modifier. Unfortunately, most of the modifiers, have 0 effect or influence as soon as you press P to start the game.

I was wondering then, well how in the world do people then rig a character if you can't rig a character, until I was shown in a tutorial how to do it. It wasn't...
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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...
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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...
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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 ...
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Hey all!

What is Vector Blur? Simply stated, it is quick way of adding motion blur to your Blender projects. When you move your arm quickly, you basically only see a blur, you don't see the pores, fine hairs, watch (if you wear one) etc. If you do see those details (in a video), it is because there is no motion blur. It behaves like a single high-speed photograph.

Back on point though, I was given the idea for this one while working on the tutorial from the other day; the one on camera shaking....
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Hey all!

First off, have a fantastic new week!
Secondly, I'm coming at ya with another QBT! Modifiers in the graph editor!

I like exclamation points, haha. Anywho, there are various uses for these modifiers, like looping a short animation sequence, like a walk cycles or editing one like making a camera shake as-if handheld, like in the examples below.

This one is of the camera animation without the modifiers:

This one is ...
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Hey all!

Today I bring you a QBT that I find incredibly useful and yet it works for you, passively; the default project in Blender.

When you open Blender, it opens with "factory" settings, which is usually a camera, cube and a light with either Cycles Render or Blender Render as the default engine. Also, most of the Add-ons are turned off, so your functionality is a lot less varied.

Here's where it becomes helpful; you can change this default project.

It is very simple and here's how:
- Open Blend...
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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...
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Hey all!

Today I can give you a tip. While I mentioned it earlier, I wanna reiterate this:
- Warping is not a solid state influencer, in other words, as the camera moves, so does the warping. This plays to your advantage, as it can be used for various ice effects without having to use reflections.

Here are two examples:

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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, ...
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Hey all!!

Today is a bit more lengthy, but it's still a very very quick technique; unwrapping a fountain!

This is a very quick example of what you can do with this:

> Clean up your unwrap. Usually, in ...
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Hey all!

I'm sure many of you have heard of this feature, but you have absolutely no clue as to how to use it. I was there and I'm still learning some cool stuff about it; even today (the day I started writing this post; yes, sometimes it takes more than a day per post due to render times for examples)!

Now, just to show you some examples (click on them for the videos), I rendered some more practical projects and listed them below:

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Hey all!

That message is a distinct "Ooo". What does Ooo mean? Out of order, haha! There are two solutions, but first some background.

Since a few official releases ago, the world in Blender Render has gotten real squirrely for my projects and I don't know whether when it worked right it was a bug or whether they want it to do this? It'd certainly be strange if it were broken before, hahaha! I set up a basic scene to deal with this problem, which, to my surprise, wasn't a problem at all; my met...
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Hey all!

I was given this assignment and I did not know how to approach this. I had an idea of how I would've like to do it, but that didn't workout at all the way I wanted it to. What am I talking about? Check this out first and I'll tell you:


That's right!! You can make rain drops have a splash in Blender without having reactor particles. How? Dynamic paint!
Unfortunately, this is a feature that is a bit much for an easy QBT, so for th...
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Hey everyone!

Comin' at ya with another Quick Blog Tutorial, or QBT :).

I've been sharing a little on the compositor, but this one is part of texturing, so you don't need the node editor to test this one out! Feel free to, but you don't need to.

Here's just a little example that it works (a plane with 5 faces):


I don't know if you knew this or not, but you can have more than one active UV on a single object in Blender Render too. I didn't know it and I'm sure most of you didn't think it impossibl...
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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...
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Hey peoples!

During a tutorial I found that in some cases, it is actually better (and faster) to use physical detail than it is to use textures.

It works a bit like this:
____________________________________________________
small object------>------>------>------>------>------>---Big object
physical>physical>physical<mix>texture>texture>texture

So when you are doing something like trees or bushes, try physical detail first and see if that works for you.

Here is a mix of physical detail and textures:...
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Hey all!

Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas time and a great new year. I wish everyone a very blessed and happy 2013 and even beyond!

Getting back to work has not been hard. In fact, thankfully, I am almost finished with another part of the book. I am really hoping to get it done before my birthday this year. That would rock!!

As a sneak peak, I screen-capped this little low-poly log I made as decor for the section mentioned above. While I don't explain in the book how to make the log (I lea...
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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...
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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...
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