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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: "blender" (Show all posts)

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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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Take responsibility for your project

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, November 10, 2021, In : General 
Now, the second you hear that kind of thing, I'm sure you feel what I do: "Buzzkill" or "Partypooper" or "That sucks the fun out of it!"


Image by Colin Behrens from Pixabay 

Haha, no, that's not my intention at all, but it does sorta lean that way a bit - like having a walk-through when you first play a game or join a new platform.

So let's rip off that band aid, welcome Clippy with open arms and click those heels to get home, cause we all know there ain't no place like it! lol. Gosh that makes ...

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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...

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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...

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Still here and hard at work

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, November 16, 2020, In : General 
Hey all!

Just wanted to let you guys know that I am still here and that this site hasn't been abandoned, lol.

I've been working on a lot of different things lately and will share on those later. For the timebeing, just wanted to pop in and tell you about 2 specific things that has really been super awesome:

1) The outline branch

There is a build for Blender that contains a very special new node that has not been merged into master yet - the outline node.

This is basically exactly the same as the e...

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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...

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Rendering - Expectation vs Reality

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, January 13, 2020, In : Learning 
Whenever we do rendering, we have a massive selection of options to choose from. We can choose to do most of the work in pure rendering, or we can do a lot of the work in post (lol, not like "we'll fix it in post"). For example, you can actually generate glares within the viewport, like with the Flared add-on.

We can also choose to do most of the work within the shaders themselves (my preferred method).

Many things can be defined with masks and separated out and so on, so you can find a large v...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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Interpreting A Tutorial [Blender]

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, February 20, 2019, In : Learning 
Hey all!

Yay, third video of 2019!! GOD is so good!

Here it is:
GOD is so good!!!

The aim of this video is really to get you into the frame of mind to learn what it takes to take any tutorial that might prove useful to you and use it in any engine in Blender (to some extent obviously). Since all engines are not the same, results will vary between engines, but you can still get a lot of value out of old tutorials while you switch to 2.8! It'll get you over that educational learning curve and not o...

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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...

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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...

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Optimizing Node Groups

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, October 31, 2018, In : Tips 
Hey all!

NOTE: Don't just skim the headings - they are not clear enough for you to know what I mean.

I got to share with you all a special set of group nodes affectionately called 2Depth. These cover 2D to 3D conversion and some other depth based nodes. One in particular is called the parallax 3D node and this one was known mostly for it's slowness and secondly for it's sharp 3D results. Now, it's going to be the other way around!

The LORD helped me take the processing time down to 5 seconds fro...

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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 ...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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Water Surface and Sun Rays tutorial - For Anime

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, April 19, 2018, In : Tutorials 
Hey all!

Tutorial time again!

Today we talk about the water surface and getting those beautiful sun rays (of course compositing). Continue reading - there's more!

JESUS rules!!! (^^,)


 - Sound
   I had major sound quality issues over the past year or so. It has been a nightmare to get clean audio! I was frustrated to the max! Everytime though, GOD did come through and I got okay audio, but there has always been a significant amount of noise - at least to the point where I couldn't remove most of i...

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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 ...

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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...

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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 ...

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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...

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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....

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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:

For most of the ab...

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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...

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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...

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Quick Tip - VSE Green Screen

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, April 24, 2017, In : Tips 
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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Quick Tip for VSE Transitions

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Saturday, April 15, 2017, In : Tutorials 
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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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...
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Workflow - Node Groups

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, March 27, 2017, In : Tutorials 
Hey all!

About a week ago, I got some comment on YouTube from a user called: CNR Games. He was very excited about the Node Groups I was using in the Compositing: Toon Shading with Soft Shadows tutorial. As many of you know, Node Groups are a way of putting together sets of nodes that just make your setup look cleaner and function better. You could say it is a form of logic visual programming.

Anyway, in my projects, I usually use a very specific set of nodes that I use in pretty much every rend...
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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...
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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...
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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...

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Cycles toon shading tips

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, November 22, 2016, In : Tips 
Hey all!

What a busy few days!! Goodness! I am so thankful that GOD gave me the efficiency to be able to produce so many videos so quickly!! :D

I received a comment on the Camp Fire tutorial from a Cycles user and that he had a fair idea on how to produce it in Cycles and I kinda of felt a little tug from GOD that I need to do a little bit more towards the Cycles side of thing and I couldn't shake the sense to do it and felt lead to start doing more towards toon shading in Cycles, so this is th...
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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...

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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...

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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...
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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...

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SSS and realism

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, June 21, 2016, In : Learning 
Hey all!

For a while I've wanted to try making a Make Human character look real, but never really got to it. We're not talking years here, but a month or so, until a specific verse image about three weeks ago:



Ever since this one was made, I've really wanted to make a post about it, but I felt like GOD wanted it to publish on the ministry page first, before putting it out here. I don't know why, but I trust HIM and today is the day I get to share it with you guys.

> SSS - Sub-Surface Scattering
 ...

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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...

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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 ...

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Brass

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, May 12, 2016, In : General 
Hey all!


Brass

Last week I looked at a brass material for a project I'm working on, and through the references I got, I could not tell the difference between brass and gold, except by context! I must not know them very well, but I was really surprised. I even ask some other people if they could and still they were as perplexed as I was.

What I did find out is that brass is sometimes a more pale yellow than gold is. Gold can often be an almost orange-y color. Not completely, but you get the point...

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...

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Unofficial Viewport Branch

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, April 19, 2016, In : News 
Hey all!

I first heard of this project in February this year. I was quite surprised at it, I must say, but also, I expected this to come from the official build by this time (a bit hasty, I know, hahaha). Having said that, I am very impressed with what he has been enabled to do this far:





I played around with these a bit and honestly, I needed to re-watch the last video. Cycles' materials, imo, are more complicated than Blender Render's and he had to do some work-arounds. Very impressed nonethel...

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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?

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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...
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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...

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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...

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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 ...

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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...

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ZTransparency Edge fix

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, February 3, 2016, In : Tips 
Hey all!

A while ago, I posted an article about the edge that ZTransparency (in Blender Render) creates around solid faces in front of it and sometimes possibly even behind it. Just as a reminder, here is the image:


That white line is the background - it's not supposed to be there.

When you are doing a render that does not have many faces in front of ZTransparency planes, this is not an issue at all, but when you're talking trees or even city scapes, you have a serious issue on your hands.

The re...

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Speed up renders in Blender

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, February 1, 2016, In : Tips 
Hey all!

Last week, I briefly talked about this topic as part of the latest update on the Esther 6 project - which you can read here. The reason for this post is to particularly focus on this topic and share some engine specific tricks that GOD showed me through personal leading and from a few articles, so let's get into it.

This will be mostly focused on Blender Render, as that is my engine of choice for the time, but I will talk about Cycles Render as well in another post - GOD willing.

Blende...
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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...
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BibleAnimations

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, January 20, 2016, In : General 
Good day everyone!

Wow, almost a month since I last posted here! :D

This is gonna be a post that encourages you to go and check out the Bible Animations website GOD had me make a short while ago - and I mean like very short while ago, haha. I don't know how far I'll get in the making of these videos, but I'm being really honest when I say I want to do the whole Bible, from Genesis to Revelation and do it well. That will take time and a lot of effort and if you think about it, not gonna happen u...
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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 ...
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Advanced Cycles Toon Shading

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, December 28, 2015, In : Tutorials 
Hey all!

Last week, GOD had me on Cycles toon shading. I tell you, I was looking for a reason to use Cycles for the sake of faster renders. I have a huge project I want to complete and crunching the render numbers do not look promising, hahaha, that is, apart from a render farm, but that's not an option atm.

Anyway, I've found that despite all the turn offs and corners cut in Cycles, Blender Render, at least on my PC, is still faster on CPU than Cycles is on GPU and I can get a more complex res...
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Faster testing when compositing

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, December 22, 2015, In : Tips 
Hey all!

GOD challenged me to try something today and I'm glad I listened. Basically, HE challenged me to use OpenEXR to export a clean animation to, to work on compositing afterward. Let me explain why.

OpenEXR is a format released by Industrial Light and Magic a while ago (source). It is by no means a format I would recommend you export to on a regular basis, simply because I don't believe that was why it was made. I believe, because it was made as a High Dynamic Range format, it was, at leas...
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Toon shading soft shadows

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, December 16, 2015, In : Tutorials 
Hey all!

Yes, you heard that right! It took a while, but GOD finally released me to make this tutorial and helped me make it and keep it short! HE is so good!!

Before getting into the technical aspects of it, this is the tutorial:



As you can imagine, this scene took a little while to stick together, but it's not about the scene - it's only there to illustrate a point. That point is:
You can have cell shading with soft shadows and even ambient occlusion, in Blender

In essence, this is one area wher...

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Vintage tutorials and palm update

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Saturday, December 12, 2015, In : News 
Hey all!

Today's post is a bit nostalgic with something a little new as well! :D
Quite a while back (like start and middle 2014), I made two tutorials on using unwrapping to your advantage when texturing. Both of those, GOD did not permit me to upload to YouTube back then, but today I felt lead to upload both of them and here they are:





And the new part of today's post is an update on the palm tree I posted on the 9th:


(Tropical storms are regular around these trees, that's why it doesn't seem pha...

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Palm curves

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, December 9, 2015, In : Learning 
Hey all!

I have been using curves a while and I knew they could be tapered, but I thought that you would always only be able to do so through another curve or through programming (and I looked - though looking back when I did, I didn't even check youtube, hahaha). Anyway, GOD knew I wanted to know and lo and behold, like this or last week, there was the answer, in the beginning of a video I could not seem to find!! Thankfully GOD knows how to stay on me about things and HE helped me locate it....
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GOD is awesome!!

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Saturday, December 5, 2015, In : News 
Hey all!

While that may be like stating the obvious, I have to say, I am amazed that GOD uses me every day to reach out to the CG industry with educational material in the form of tutorials. I never run out of material, because GOD never stops teaching me and I need to learn so much!! Wow!

Anyway, this post is about being grateful for this - a feature on BlenderNation!!

I could just freak out and scream from excitement!! Not because I think it's such a wonderful website (which it is), but becaus...

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Film look in Blender

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, November 26, 2015, In : Tutorials 
Hey all!!

Tutorial time again!! :D

I really luv doing video tutorials, especially when it's something that GOD showed me and then I get to pass on. I do have to say, I was quite surprised to see how many people did something along the same lines already, that focused on a much stronger effect, instead of the more authentic things that I was going for. Eh, feel free to mix and match and have fun! haha

Anyhow, here is the tutorial!!



Biggest thanx to GOD for helping me with this. Without HIM, none o...

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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...

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Genesis 1

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, November 18, 2015, In : Teaching and prayer 
Hey all!

Today I get to share with you something I was working on last year. I finished around December and can you believe it, it's almost December again, hahaha. Anyway, it is a short film on Genesis 1, the creation of everything, so I really hope and pray that it is a blessing to you!!

Check it out:


When GOD asked me to do this, I was not sure how it would come out, because I needed people characters and I was not experienced in modelling people... I of course knew about Make Human, and GOD g...

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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...
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Weird outline

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, October 8, 2015, In : Tips 
Hey all!

This morning again, I came across a very familiar problem, that typically doesn't bother me, but today it really did bug me and it is an outline that forms when you use transparency in Blender Render. It looks like this:


(Simply scaling up doesn't help - the outline scales too and it's always the color of the sky)

The reason for this, I don't know, but I do know when it does it; when using Z-Transparency. Usually the fastest method and compatible with the mist feature, it does have it's...
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Water

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, October 6, 2015, In : Just for fun 
Hey all!!

The theme for the Make Human competition this month (October 2015) is Supernatural. Below is my entry and the post with it :D


Theme:
The entry for October is called "Water". I thought it would be a clever title, because people will definitely wonder "Water?! What did he do?" haha.
This one is of JESUS walking on the water, specifically from Matthew 14. That has to be one of the coolest supernatural things HE did, apart from going to the cross on purpose.

Process:
In the initial render, I ...
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Underwater compositing

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, September 2, 2015, In : Tutorials 
Hey all!

As you all know, I've covered this topic quite extensively, but after the Anime Style Sea tutorials, I asked GOD what HE wanted me to do next and quite a few videos resulted, but this one is the only full tutorial that resulted so far:


(I think the thumbnail says it all, hahaha)

I have been working on an underwater result in compositing and design for quite some time and only this year really got the look down when GOD had me write a few posts on the various elements it takes to make th...

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File could not be loaded

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Friday, August 28, 2015, In : Tips 
Hey all!

No, it was not failure on my part to load a file here, haha. No, this is much much worse [not really]. Blender sometimes has trouble loading audio and video files into the VSE. This is not always a reflections on format, as I was shown today. I believe GOD wanted me to share this solution immediately, so check it out!

I'm working on a small project (relatively small) and it requires sound baking as well as importing sound and Blender just kept saying the file could not be loaded. And t...
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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!!!!!!

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Channel trailer

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, August 13, 2015, In : General 
Hey all!!

Super happy that GOD had me make this and I'm very happy with the result! :D Check it out:


While you're at it, don't forget to subscribe! :D

Have a great one!! GOD bless!!

Know JESUS yet?

Thank YOU!!!!


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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...

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Quick tip on video editing

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, July 22, 2015, In : Tips 
Hey all!

If you have ever done any video editing with Blender's Video Sequence Editor, or VSE, then you know the issues involved with frame rates! For those who don't know what a frame is:
A frame is a single image in a sequence of images that is flashed to a viewer at a certain rate that enables you to see movement as a video. These images all flash at the same pace and the most common today are 24 frames per second (fps), 30fps, 25fps and of course, 60fps.

Now, in Blender, this causes a proble...
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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...
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RUN

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Saturday, July 11, 2015, In : General 
Hey all!

Most of you know I use Make Human to make characters in an anime style and I really really like the program. Well, they recently, like as in June 2015, started hosting competitions. Nothing fancy, but it's a nice way to push yourself to actually finish something and do something with what you've learned. So, I've entered for June and I'm also entering for July. Just for the sake of posting it, here is my July Entry - the theme word is Action:


If it weren't obvious yet, the name of the ...
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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 ...

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Compositing - Glaring Reflections [TUTORIAL]

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, June 25, 2015, In : Tutorials 
Hey all!

I have a tutorial for you today!! This one is on glaring items that are in reflections, using the compositor and material index to isolate, glare and add them to the final image. I know this one you'll luv!


(Click to open video in new window/tab)

A little more info:
    I seem to be making more video tutorials lately. I initially wanted to write it here as a QBT, but really felt lead to do it as a video tutorial on YouTube, so here it is. I was working on a scene where I had to make a ro...
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Comic Style in Blender

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, June 11, 2015, In : Tutorials 
Hey all!!

Time for another video tutorial!! I'm really enjoying making these and I'm glad to see that you guys still enjoy watching them. The Make Human to Anime one is almost at a 1000 views! GOD is awesome!! Thank you for watching!

Today, we cover something a little different, comic shading! Oh yes! I don't know about you guys, but I really like the look that some comics have. Some have really smooth shading while others have a more flat approach. May have something to do with budget and time...
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Compositor only render

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, June 2, 2015, In : Tips 
Hey all!

Yesterday, I did a post about this on the portfolio blog and today I got to finally record it as a video quick tip for you guys! :D

So, for those of you who prefer the video:



And for those of you who prefer the text version.

Have a great one!!!

Thank YOU!!!!
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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...
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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!!!!!!

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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...

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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...
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Procedural wood progress

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, April 21, 2015, In : Tips 
Hey all!

This has been a challenge for quite a few years now - creating good looking wood with procedural textures. Only these last two months have I really been given the results I wanted. Below are a few exampls on how this has progressed:







While the above ones are not horrible, they still don't quite get the look I really want. No, that is below:


(Fence from a current project)

The grass isn't even close to being done, but the fence is and I am very very pleased with it. GOD is so good!!
The wood...

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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...
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A few compositing tips - Toons

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, March 17, 2015, In : Tips 
Hey all!

As you all know, I am a huge fan of the cartoon looks out there and especially how the style is approached. After a while, I realized, by GOD's grace, that essentially, you can treat a finished animation as raw footage from a camera. That allows you to get a very distinct look. This is a very very basic scene, but it illustrates my point:


(Everything rendered and composited in one project)

Okay, now, this also works for video, especially if you have access to render layers, like in Blen...
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Underwater Compositing - Softness

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, February 9, 2015, In : Quick Blog Tutorial 
Hey all!!

Today we cover the last in the series on underwater compositing! There may still come future posts on certain features that still apply, but as far as compositing goes for a basic underwater scene, we're ending today :D.

As you've seen, we're covering softness today. While this is not always required, there is a certain presence to water that to most often presents itself as a softness. You'll find it even out of water in very humid conditions, but really makes most underwater scenes ...
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Underwater compositing - Mist

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, January 28, 2015, In : Quick Blog Tutorial 
Hey all!

Been a while since the last post, but this one is something I've learned a little bit on, so I hope this helps you tons! :D

Something that can easily be missed when it comes to underwater compositing is mist or a cloudiness. This comes from the way light bounces in the water, as well as other particles in the waters. Just think of a misty day. You can only see so far. Depending on the kind of water you are in, you will have varying decrees of clarity.

BUT! This is not a white mist. Ther...
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Underwater compositing - Brightest boost

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, December 11, 2014, In : Quick Blog Tutorial 
Hey all!

Now we're on to part two of the series on underwater compositing. Obviously, I'm no expert at this, but what I do know I do like to share, so I hope you find this helpful.

Personally, I used Blender Render a lot. It is the old render engine in Blender and it does not support caustic light. I remember when I started out with Blender, I really really tried to figure out how to make it make that light, but nothing, haha.

In compositing, you have, in situations like Blender, values that go ...
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SVG to 3D

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, October 9, 2014, In : Tips 
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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Finished eagle! Well, almost

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, In : wip 
Hey all!

Wow! We're really getting quite a few posts this week, hahaha. Okay, so, yesterday I showed you guys a progress on the eagle here and the eagle's materials almost done on the portfolio blog at this post. Now, you get to see it rigged to a useful part (except for the beak):


(made for Cross Allegiance - see more here)

I really like this image, because it was extremely difficult to make, but GOD helped me, but secondly, because it turned out to be a serious image and not cute (which it was...

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Progress a white eagle

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, August 25, 2014, In : The Gospel 
Hey all!

I recently asked permission to use a fantastic song for a music video that I felt GOD put on my heart to do.
I was practicing on Saturday when I felt like GOD told me I should message this singer to use his song and I didn't do it immediately, because I don't just jump on a massive project, unless I'm sure that this could really be GOD. So, after the unction didn't go away after a few hours, I finally messaged him and he was incredibly kind and generous, however he could not give me pe...
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A few tips on Freestyle rendering

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, August 19, 2014, In : Tutorials 
Hey all!

Firstly, thanx to all those who visit regularly. I hope you find the information here useful!

Anyway, getting on today's post; Freestyle! :D

Just to show you I know a little about it, I put together a collage of renders:



Freestyle, as you all know, is that feature (now in Cycles too), that allows you to add outlines to 3D shapes, like cartoons.

I've been working with freestyle for a while now and have it to the point, where I just adjust line thickness and then that's it, so, today, I wan...

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New video tutorial

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, July 9, 2014, In : Tutorials 
Hey all!

Super excited about today! I get to share my second video tutorial for Blender! Just a little taste-test:



I just loved doing this, but as a noob on video tutorials, I only saw after recording it that I didn't have the cursor visible, so sorry about that. Regardless, if you're familiar with Blender, this should not overwhelm you, so enjoy! :D

In this lovely tutorial, I cover how to do grass. Note that this is not typical grass. This is about lawn grass that you can actually zoom in on an...

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Water caustics in BGE

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Friday, June 13, 2014, In : Quick Blog Tutorial 
Hey all!

Yey for another BGE tutorial, I would say, haha.

Today, like the title says, we're talking about caustics in BGE. As you all know, there are some incredible projects for this, and one that particularly stands out, but these, at least for me, has never been an option without scripting, so, I needed to find another way and this is it:

(Focus on the back wall and on the floor)

Doing this is incredibly easy. In the same way that you would add an animated texture to a plane for water, you add...

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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...

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A take on toon shading_Compositing

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, May 27, 2014, In : Tips 
Hey all!

When I saw I hadn't shared this yet, I was really surprised. Must be because I'm so tired, hahaha. No worries, here we go:

(complete scene - Blender Render + Freestyle + Compositing)

When GOD gave me the idea for this image, I really felt fear creep onto me that it would not look good and oh snap! I am very happy with this one's result. It did not come out at all like I imagined it would. It is always such a blessing when that happens, so this one will be making it to the Home page.

Anyw...

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Things

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, May 22, 2014, In : General 
Hey all!

Been very busy, but thankfully, I have gotten to verse images and updating the portfolio. So, for today, I have two things to share!

(screen shot of but a small part of the portfolio - this page only represents the tip of the iceberg, so I added links to more works. Find out more about how this portfolio selection had been approached in this post)

The second item of the day is, of course, a new verse image.

Today's verse image share is again about creation. I firmly side with AiG (Answer...

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Volumetrics in BGE

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, May 12, 2014, In : Quick Blog Tutorial 
Hey all!

Yesterday, I went looking for a post I thought I had done on volumetrics in the game engine and I was shocked to see that it is nowhere to be found! Nowhere!!! I did find that I had included the volumetrics example in a different post, which you can check out here.

So, today's QBT is on, you guessed it, volumetrics in BGE! :D

Okay, so just for example's sake, go check out the post linked to above -- it'll open in a new tab or window, so you won't need to click back and reload. Also, thi...
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Style watch

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, April 29, 2014, In : Quick Blog Tutorial 
Hey all!

I totally encourage you all to check out this post.

When you do research on how anime's are made (and any old cartoons), you find that the backgrounds are almost always hand painted. As far as Blender work goes, there's no way (unless GOD tells me to), that I'm going to hand paint every background for a project I'm currently working on. This is a test of an environment with a painterly look to the background and foreground that would make up part of the same elements:

Now, Picture to pe...
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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...
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Normal something

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, April 23, 2014, In : Quick Blog Tutorial 
Hey all!!

Finally back with another QBT and today's is about a topic that bugged me for a while. Nothing wrong with Blender, I just didn't get it until today.

Now, I've been a huge fan of node textures for a while and I've noticed that on node textures they don't always come out right in the normal department. For those who don't know what normal maps and normal influence and depth maps are, here you go:


These are created for the simple purpose of not having to use physical detail, while the sur...
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Some news

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, April 22, 2014, In : General 
Hey all!

On the post today:
> New competition - What really happened
> New images
> A brilliant tutorial
> Blender news in one place on Facebook
> The panther dynamics facebook page and portfolio blog

> New Competitions are sometimes exciting and sometimes they can really take you by surprise. I was very surprised by Andrew's latest competition on his site, Blender Guru, and the theme is: What really happened. At first you're thrown for a loop and you think: "Wha'?!", but this actually has some very...
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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...
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Compositing solution

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, March 24, 2014, In : Quick Blog Tutorial 
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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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...

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Lamps in BGE

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, January 28, 2014, In : Quick Blog Tutorial 
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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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 ...
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Mouse control

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, January 13, 2014, In : Quick Blog Tutorial 
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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UV solution

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Friday, January 10, 2014, In : Tips 
Hey all!

Recently I was working on a tile example and I found something weird (this is in Cycles). I'm very used to Blender unwrapping well and having no problems with it's unwrapping, but there is one:

When your shape is too simple, with originally too few coordinates,
your unwrapping will not stretch or distort your textures along the unwrapping.

What I did find, very thankfully from above, is that if you subdivide it a bit, at least once, Blender has more points of reference and your UV will n...

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New tutorial

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, January 8, 2014, In : Tutorials 
Hey all!

A special day indeed. A new game engine tutorial:

Particles

As you know, I did a QBT version of this earlier this week, but this is much more in depth than that one. I replaced that one with this tutorial on the game engine page. The scene is of course not included, because this tutorial is about a method, not modeling, or texturing or whatever.

This short 10 page tutorial, cover to cover, is here to tell you how to figure out how to add particles for your particular situation.

I just kno...
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The return of the butterflies

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, January 7, 2014, In : Quick Blog Tutorial 
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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Volumetric simulation

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, January 6, 2014, In : wip 
Hey all!

Let me just clarify that simulation here is literally meant. The game engine so far, does not contain volumetrics, but it does contain some things that can help you fake it, if you will, ie, simulate it.

I'm currently working on clouds and it looks great so far, but I think it can stretch far beyond just clouds. I would say that this method does require either a time lapse for a new scene or manual inserts to close the gap, at least initially.

For the moment, I only have this to show yo...
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Painting sculptural detail

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Sunday, December 29, 2013, In : Quick Blog Tutorial 
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:

(~89 MB, Ogg)

Now, basically, you do exactly what you would, when you want to paint a text...
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Parental Rigging

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Friday, December 27, 2013, In : Quick Blog Tutorial 
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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Keep your shadow on

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, December 17, 2013, In : Quick Blog Tutorial 
Good day all!

Coming at you with another QBT today and yes, we're sticking to the BGE theme! Hey, soon we may have all the stuff set-up to make an entire game, front to back! haha

Now, I know a lot of you are very familiar with texture baking and have learned that you can even bake other things, like shadows and ambient occlusion, but this is not always practical. For example, if your game requires real-time shadows, then you need a sun lamp with shadows enabled, in order to have them.

This pres...
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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! ...
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Paper and art

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Friday, December 6, 2013, In : Just for fun 
Hey there everyone!

Today's post is one kind I have not been able to do for a while! So very excited!

Yesterday, a friend and I was talking about doing crumpled paper. Now, I was thinking he was talking about those balls of paper you make when you try to form an idea, then you don't like it, so you tear it off, crumple it and put it aside. But, he meant like paper that was crumpled then folded open again. Haha, anyway, so I said I would try it (before the misunderstanding was cleared up) and th...
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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...
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Quick notice and a big something

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, November 28, 2013, In : Tutorials 
Good day all!

I haven't been able to make many posts these past week and there are various reasons for it; from weather to connection upgrades. You name it, haha. Currently, I am very very thankful to be able to let you know that there is another BGE (Blender Game Engine) tutorial up! This one, on the toon shading from a few weeks ago.

I was given this name for it: Toon Style Made Simple
Sounds like it has to do with dressing cartoon characters, but I think it's very clever. This is the cover:

Ob...
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Caves, how are they made

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Saturday, November 23, 2013, In : General 
Hey all!

I watched and did (for a change) one of Andrew's tutorials yesterday and it was a blast. I struggle intensely in getting the crystal how I wanted, but through a lot of leading, it is how I want it and, I hope you give it a try as well. Naturally, I just finished a book on Procedural Textures, very appropriately named, Procedural textures, and so I was not about to download the textures. Instead, I did the whole thing, from displacement to color, etc, all procedural textures in Cycles....
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Toons, the conclusion_haha

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Friday, November 22, 2013, In : Blender News 
Hey all!

Looks like we're 5 for 5 this week!! Amazing!! Huge blessing! Only 3 posts on tooning though.

Now, today is a really special day in regards to tooning, because, we have been working on this fantastic topic all week. With a lot of grace and teamwork, we got a spectacular result and learned quite a bit. So, let's recap.

When we started the week, I shared a very comic-like style with you all, focused on normal influence of the ramp in both Diffuse and Specular options. It looks fantastic, ...
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Continuation: The toons

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, November 21, 2013, In : Quick Blog Tutorial 
Hey all!!

Today is a bit of a follow-up / QBT post based on yesterday's with the tooned monkeys. After yesterday's post, I worked on doing a final monkey (no textures, so the lines are limited) and this was the result:


(there are three lights in the scene, the monkey isn't crazy, haha)

I like the result a lot! I do rather which that around his ears the lines were more prominent and that anti-aliasing actually responded on my PC (I think it's something set on my graphics card that is preventing i...

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2D without freestyle, for the Game Engine

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, November 20, 2013, In : General 
Hey all!!

3 for 3 this week so far, hahaha!

This week, I was on the Blender Game Engine group and I saw someone asking how to do a toon material for a game. I thought it would be insanely complex, requiring an extra mesh or whatever, but you can get a pretty cool look, is, just by using the material options:


As you can see, we have two very similar shapes. The one to the top left is low-poly and the one to the right is, high-poly. Naturally, the high-poly looks nicer, but with a little fine tuni...
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Camera object

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, November 18, 2013, In : Quick Blog Tutorial 
Good day there everyone!

Coming at you with another QBT. This one, is also on the Game Engine, but specifically, how to you make the camera follow a character, car, etc.


This is so simple, you're gonna luv it!

On your game-play scene, where the game takes place (haha), add to the camera there a setup like this:
Always > And > Camera

The Camera Actuator looks like this:
Nice and big, haha

- The Camera object, is what it will focus on (remember, you have to be in the camera view in order for this to w...
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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...
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New Blender website

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, November 7, 2013, In : Blender News 
Good day everyone!

The redesign of the Blender website has been going on for a while, but, it was posted recently and advertised through the Blender Institute's FB page.

I really like the re-design. It is a bit easier to navigate than before, imo, and I really like the white. The store seems to still look the same, but I'm sure there is a solid reason for that, as it is one of the Blender Foundations' sources of income.

I totally recommend you check it out!
The URL, written out is:
http://www.blen...
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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...
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Default project?_huh

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Friday, October 18, 2013, In : Quick Blog Tutorial 
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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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 ...

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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...
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Warning warp

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

Waterfall - Best example


Purposeful example


Without warping (see the difference)

Hope this tip showed you the solution to some of your projects' problems, if you've seen some odd stu...

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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, ...
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Point density, that great miss

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, September 30, 2013, In : Quick Blog Tutorial 
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:


(ignore the cliff material's moving; it's caused by the texture ...

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A little bright I would say

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, September 24, 2013, In : General 
That is, to stare into the sun, haha.

Hey everyone,

Today I get to share a little sun glare I've been working on last night. It's not exactly what I wanted to achieve, but very close and I am very happy with this as a sun glare (what I wanted would fit a shiney metal glare, not the sun)!


(Click image to see this in action, fast and slow)

This was quite a challenge to make, though I was shown the basic idea quite a while back. Only yesterday HE showed me how to do it properly. I am very very happy...

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Rain can splash

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, September 23, 2013, In : Quick Blog Tutorial 
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:


(Click image to see animation; opens to new tab in FireFox)

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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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...
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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...

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Some tips for added realism

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, September 16, 2013, In : Tips 
Hey all!

I'm not someone who specializes in realism, but I have noticed some features in Blender Render that I have been very happy with in getting me closer to realism and I'd like to share some of them with you. Remember, most of these apply to Cycles as well and also to traditional arts!

- Ambient Occlusion (AO)
A strange corner shadow phenomenon I've never really seen much of in real life on the intensity that Blender can produce, though it is a fantastic boost, even on a low setting, set on...
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Multiple unwraps

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Friday, September 13, 2013, In : Quick Blog Tutorial 
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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Texture baking, basically

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, September 5, 2013, In : Tutorials 
Hey all!

Today I am enabled to bring you yet another tutorial! Who's as excited as I am? lol

I'm gonna let the image intro this one:


That's right! Basic Texture Baking!

Texture baking, what's that?! Simple, in Blender, you have what is known as procedural textures, node textures and a feature called texture painting. These features all have one thing in common; Blender. I can't export a model to another 3D program, unless I bake my textures or make them externally. While texture painting is easil...
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Nasa is being very generous

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Saturday, August 24, 2013, In : General 
Hey all!

Today I would like to share a little something I got from one person that got it from another person, that apparently found it on NASA's website. What is this thing? Free 3D models of various spacey stuff!

Obviously, I just really wanted to give this a go and I believe GOD gave me a quick chance to try it and this was the result (after HE had me fix the textures, but more on that later):



Obviously, I'm no expert on these things and have never seen their bases...

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That's not snow lol

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Friday, August 23, 2013, In : The Gospel 
Hey all!

Today I believe GOD wants me to share a render and creative error on my part. I didn't ask for GOD's input on this and this is what happens when we don't, hahaha!

Back-story. As you all know, I am working on matching images for the sonnets from the 4 seasons. This one, is for the first sonnet of Winter. While quite a challenge to make a scene like this work, I thoroughly felt the challenge and wanted to through a tantrum. I wanted to add snow to the scene in the form of halo's. I belie...
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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...
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Time will be no more

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, August 8, 2013, In : The Gospel 
Hey all!

This one developed in a funny way. Not like ha-ha, just different than most works, which are planned pieces, not just growing into something.

I experimented with rigid body physics in Blender yesterday and while I got some okay results, I need to learn about the constraints for these kinds of physics options. While they are extremely useful, I don't know how to use them just yet, lol.

Anyway, after trying this and trying that, I just didn't get anywhere, until GOD suggested I use what I...
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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...
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Glossy Black

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, July 1, 2013, In : Tutorials 
Hey all!

A very much requested material (not requested from me, but definitely requested a lot) is a glossy black. And here is how you can make it in Blender Render as well as Cycles Render.

On Cycles Render, it is the easiest thing! Just add a new material to an object or area you want a glossy black and apply this to it:


(Thanx to Bizla from BA and other people who suggested the Mix node)



Blender Render is a bit more complex, since it is not as physically accurate as Cycles. So, I want you to c...
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Polar bear

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Friday, June 28, 2013, In : General 
Hey all!

Been working on some things and so haven't been posting as much as usual. But I know you'll luv this one!

A few weeks ago, I received the idea to make a polar bear, sitting on ice, with his paw in the water, but with a very painterly look. That, I believe, was just to show the image had to be simple.

Anyway, having the idea, I started off for MorgueFile to go get reference and there were some stunning shots!! Remember to always check the licenses of the photo's. Very important.

So I want...
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Blossoms

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Saturday, May 18, 2013, In : Tutorials 
Hey all!

Been almost an entire work week and nothing... tisk tisk, lol. No kidding. I'm sure you are all gonna luv this one and it includes a bit of a wallpaper that you can use as well.

Today's is about Andrew's latest tutorial on Cherry Blossoms. Absolutely beautiful stuff!

Even though it is an amazing tutorial and I still need to finish watching it, I really adore the slide version he adds these days below the video. Never replaces story time though :) !

Also, I wanted to take it further than ...
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Blender render still great!

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, April 4, 2013, In : Tips 
Hey everyone!

Today I want to give a free tip again. Many users may think that because development ceased on Blender Render, that it is now obsolete. While it doesn't have certain features, I really still enjoy this engine and find it surprisingly powerful when used with the compositor.

This tip is about transparency in Blender Render!
There are three types in this case and I have honestly never used the Mask one. Tried once soon after starting with Blender, but I don't really know how it works,...
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Two things

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Friday, March 15, 2013, In : General 
Hey all!

 - First South African Blender Meetup
So tonight was the first South African Blender meetup and I couldn't attend (didn't know it was happening until tonight, LOL). Anyway, the whole purpose of it, was to discuss what to do for a meetup over here that would make sense for locals (such as workshops, just hang out, creating a movie as a group, etc.). Whatever the outcome, I would really like to know. You can keep an eye on the Blender Nation feed found at Blender.org for updates on more ...
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Christmas 2012 Entry

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, December 24, 2012, In : Birthdays 
Hey all!

I always wait until the results before I post my image (since I can't post it in the thread). This year's entry is, imo, quite an improvement on last year's.

Here is last year's:


Here is this year's

Reference for the sharks' shape - NOAA:
http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/species/fish/scallopedhammerheadshark.htm

As usual, the entire scene was done using procedural textures in Cycles and it came out well, but most important was the concept; first Christmas as part of a sea colony.

You can go the ...

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Always learnin'

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, November 29, 2012, In : wip 
Hey all!

I just adore that HE has given me the chance to work in 3D and to be able to watch tutorials. Today I watched two in particular:
Sparks and motion blur in Cycles
Boid particles in Blender

Absolutely fantastic, but I didn't finish watching the one on the boid particles. Reason: he showed me what I wanted to know in that moment, but I do want to finish watching it tomorrow, if HE allows.

I definitely recommend both of these tutorials, especially the one on the sparks, because Andrew put tog...
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Getting it to not look generated

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, November 28, 2012, In : wip 
Hey all!

The title is easier said than done, especially with bad reference, but, I used what was at my disposal and it came out quite well:



If you know trees, you may (hopefully) recognize what I was aiming for here. While I do like the result as a sketch, so to speak, it is by no means a satisfactory result for a tutorial. It still looks too fake, although it does look very stylized.

Hope you like it!

Thank YOU!!!!!!!

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Been busy, but here's an update

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, November 26, 2012, In : wip 
Hey all!

It's been a while since my last post, but I am glad to reveal an update on the next tutorial. Hope you all like it!!:


This is not a very complicated scene, but it is one that has enough detail imo to show what the trees will look like in a scene.

There is no tree focal point. In fact, before adding another in the middle, the sky was the focal point; not good. Now, it begs the viewer to look for a spot. Sort of like you would when going to a park. Hopefully that's the effect here, lol.

An...
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A little prep

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, November 19, 2012, In : General 
Hey all!

As you all know, before you go ahead and do any kind of project, especially an art one, it is vitally important to do some research and do some practice runs (in the case of tutorials). They enable your project to not only be more creative and convincing, but of a much higher standard.

This is today's prep for another tutorial I am working on:


Not quite where I want them and still working out the kinks, but really happy with the overall result (the one on the far right needs a bit extra...

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Finished ruin!!!

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, November 14, 2012, In : General 
Heya!!

Here is an 8 image summary from start to finish on this project:

Right after modeling, this was the first look (obviously, this was pre-unwrapping)


Post unwrapping and finishing of the basic bricks, I added some dust. This dust was later edited and became close to invisible.


Of course, what ruin would be complete without run-off stains and muddy bases and so on? None. This was even after displacement was added (and before I knew of the texture bug in Cycles).


The ivies have finally been add...
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Progress render!

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, November 13, 2012, In : wip 
Hey all!

Really jazzed to get this one out today!



The entire list of things has changed a bit, as you can see, but, the main points remain, the most important of which was to get the ruin as the focal point.

The coordinates system is still a bit buggy with the ruin's textures (as you can see the floor's bump-mapping is gone and there are some black bricks), but the rest of the scene I am really jazzed about (though it's still not complete).

The background, makes it look as though there is DOF (de...
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First full render

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, November 12, 2012, In : wip 
Hey all!

Happy to share this one with you!
It is only rendered at 50 samples, which isn't much, but apparently more than enough for this scene, so yey! Here's the render, followed by things that need to change:



 - Currently, there is no focal point, because everything is practically evenly lit. So for that I want to use light to set focus on the ruin itself.
 - The texturing is a problem, because sometimes Cycles renders it right, sometimes it doesn't (bug they need to fix). So the goal is not to...
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Ivy is next!

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, November 1, 2012, In : wip 
Hey all!

What a mission! It was such a task to get this size of ivy in the scene. The generator works extremely well and it has nothing to do with the quality of the software. Blender rocks and the ivy generator too, but I was referring to getting it to render (Cycles is a bit more heavy duty than Blender Render, imo).

BUT! HE came through as usual and I added HIS suggestions to the book as well on how to get it going with a good look and proper detail.

For today's post, I made a clay render (fo...
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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...
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An update on the book

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, October 15, 2012, In : General 
Hey all!

Working hard to get it finished as soon as possible! The next section will be tutorials and after that a few more things and it should be ready for release! So looking forward to having it completed and I have really learned a huge amount in the writing of it!

Today was a continuation of the displacement feature for Cycles. After getting this result, it was very important to find out how to fix it:

(the texture is not supposed to be a lot of thin blu stripes over a square sun's surface,...

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Quick ruin with procedural textures

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, October 9, 2012, In : wip 
Hey all!

While I was working yesterday and after watching Andrew Price's tutorial on creating a rundown warehouse, which can be found here, I wanted to find out how the Ivy Generator in Blender worked (I liked the results he got). So yesterday, after working some on the book, I started playing around with it.

Keep in mind though that this is not a small generator and contains a huge amount of faces (mostly the leaves) and that needs plenty of memory. Many of my attempts resulted in Blender free...
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Some book time!

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, October 4, 2012, In : General 
Hey all,

Today I got to work on the book again (can anyone say yey!), lol.

I am currently in the section that describes how you can layer them to get various effects and so on and this little image, is from that chapter. This one, specifically, deals with layering using procedural textures to mask, if you will, other textures:

(Cube with emission shader to show the texture/material exactly as it is)

For now, the Cycles part is more about the principle of what you do and how you do it, but not goi...

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Blender Render section (almost) complete!!!

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Monday, August 27, 2012, In : wip 
Whoohoo!!!! Blender render section of the tutorial is almost complete! It is incredible to say the least. At a practical advice packed level of 130+ pages so far, I am super excited about getting it finished and released!!

And, to celebrate it's almost completeness, here is the result from the flag tutorial when ropes are added. Ogg file as always (^^,).



Thank YOU soo much for all the help so far and especially all the guidance to get it to this point! YOU rock!!!!!!

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3D Portfolio section!

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Friday, July 6, 2012, In : General 
I recently applied for a job and needed a proper portfolio of my 3D work (and I made sure I added only what HE wanted in) and you can check it out using the navigation at the top (far right).

Obviously, they will not remain the best works and will be replaced by other pieces as I learn and grow in skill, but I like the work so far!

Hope you enjoy scrolling through it!

Oh, about the feature pic. I did a comparison a while back between Cycles Render and Blender Render for the book I'm still workin...
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New Covers

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Wednesday, June 20, 2012, In : wip 
It's been a while since I've shared anything creative here (feels like forever and yet it's only been about two weeks at the most, lol). So I've decided to post the new cover pages of the Snow tutorial and the new Orange in the book.
Hope you like 'em!!



The first one is extremely vague on modeling, because that needs to be the artist's job, but it is quite clear on the texturing, which is what it's about. Both include a FullHD render of the cover pic (without cropping) at the end of the tutoria...
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Still here and workin'!

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, June 12, 2012, In : wip 
Hey peoples!

I haven't dropped off the face of the earth the last week or so.

As you know it's the new Blender Guru Competition and the theme is Photo Realism (yey). I've been hard at work on my entry and because I don't want to give the idea away of what I'm doing, I haven't posted anything here.

I will say this though:
 - I'm using Blender Render,
 - The image only has techniques in that are in the book already and will be added (except for modeling and lighting, since it's a book about texturi...
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Texture painting!

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Thursday, May 17, 2012, In : Tutorials 
This is one of Blender's coolest feature imo. You can literally paint over objects in 3DView. So cool. Not overtly original or even that fancy, just the knowing you can is cool!

For this part of the book (now becoming a set of books, due to my PC's inability to handle the large file), I used the monkey mesh that comes with Blender. Very simple low res texture, but it definitely shows that you can achieve good results with this technique.

Here's the final:


I really had to up the contrast and brig...
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Blocks in Blender

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Friday, May 11, 2012, In : General 
There's a game out that mixes 2D and 3D and gives you these blocky characters that can rotate their 2D world 4 times (like a cube's sides). After seeing it, I remembered that Blender actually has a feature to remesh something into such a block figure and so I thought I'd give it a go on something simple.

This is the scene before some editing with Perspective view:


This is the same scene with minor editing set on Orthographic view:


Looks cool and works with animation, but there seems to be a snag...
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Quick Tip: A cloud texture with a cell noise basis

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, April 17, 2012, In : Tutorials 
This image is a custom colored version of a cloud procedural texture with a cell noise basis. What that means is that the procedural texture is made and written mainly for creating clouds or texturing them, either by deformation of a shape or just using color, or both. The basis is how the texture will be made, or put together. There are many options in Blender regarding basis, but this one is cool for a few reasons.
   I've been a fan of this kind of pattern for a long time, but I've always h...
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An example of one procedural texture

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Friday, April 13, 2012, In : General 
This is the Stucci procedural texture set to color and normals. It can be simpler and a lot more detailed and complex. As you can see, detail and resolution is not a problem when it comes to this texture type.


(for full res, right click > view image)

As an extra, I'm working on an entry for the new Blender Guru competition: The Perfect Holiday, and I plan to do the whole thing using only procedural textures. Whether I submit it or not, remains to be seen, but I really want to finish it with sup...
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Blender Render VS Cycles Render

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Friday, March 9, 2012, In : General 
I can see a massive difference between the two, but I don't want to call one better than the other, because one is more developed and the other works different. So I'll say this: I personally still prefer Blender Render (BI)

Here's why I do.
I've used the same project, creating first a Cycles Render version and then a Blender Render version. Out of the two I like the overall look of the Cycles Render one more, but the capabilities in procedural textures in Blender Render overshadows the quality...
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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 ...
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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...
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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 ...
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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...

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Ronel's birthday

Posted by Marius Oberholster on Friday, December 30, 2011, In : Birthdays 
This was a different challenge altogether. I've done plants before, but never anything this complex. I can see it still looks fake and that's fine, but it's about growing and this was definitely growth, lol.

This was made for my cousin's birthday. I believe she likes roses, so that was the idea here (I hope at first glance you will think it's a rose, lol)

Thank YOU for all YOUR help and enabling me to bless people with this gift!

PS, made with Blender.


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