IanHubert posts
Posts: 303
Files: 339
Asset: Pigeons (and also the poo)
PUTTING PIGEONS ON STUFF! I've been wanting to do this for years.They're obviously designed to be background assets, but they still hold up fairly close.Should I have tried to figure out how to make some of them flapping? Aaaabsolutely- but for now I figured it was better to have them err on the side of subtlety.There are 20 pigeons in the file, since I wasn't able to figure out a way to automatically offset the animation values (Blender's still not great at that sort of thing). I tried to keep them lightweight, but it starts to...
Reworking old Dynamo Dream shots
First: an apology- I am SO behind on messages. But yes! I'm still indulging in the decadence of updating old VFX shots, which I know I shouldn't do, release-schedule-wise, but it feels so good; instead of staring at a blank scene and thinking, "okay lets build everything from scratch" I get to pop in and give younger me's work a once-over of that last 10% using stuff I've learned in the past year.BEFOREAFTER. Cleaning up the composite, swapped the sun angle to match the edit, and I totally reworked the monorail car. I di...
Making a Skater Boy out of a Photoscan
A few tricks for cleaning up photoscans, and some rigging! I think a fun project could be compositing this guy into some live action footage, maybe?Also, I'll be uploading the skater guy as an asset in a bit here, in case anyone needs a flying skater dude. A few links: This video talks about how I use blender to convert a video into an image sequence I can dump into a photoscan program. And This is my original video talking about how to create photoscanned characters.
Motion Tracking Shenanigans
I've been working on a bunch of stuff, but nothing that's lent itself perfectly to a tutorial, so I decided to go easy on myself and say it's okay if tutorials cover ground I've already covered before, and here we are! This was fun :DHere's the waterfall footage if you want to do anything with it on your end. I also have a folder of other greenscreen/motiontracking shots, if you ever want to experiment (some of the shots are straight up from Dynamo, so it'd be a little weird if you used them in your own projects, but I m...
Ride the Ox
The last few days have been pretty wild here in the US, so I kind of intentionally let myself check out to greeble city for a bit (between checking twitter every few minutes). Oldton (and Waterworks Market) are separated from the rest of the city by some industrial areas, so most folks take the train, but I wanted a more touristy method, so there's THE OX, a leisurely paddlewheel boat that makes the twice-daily trip down the coast from a northern neighborhood. I figured it was mostly an old barge that folks had built a steamboat-esque super...
Asset: Rocks/Leaves/Creepy Zone
Went on a hike along the Dosewallips river last week, and did some scans! They were going to be for a halloween video I ended up not doing (I thought it'd be fun to put on the rokoko suit and be like a ghost or an eerie prospector or something), but I liked how the environment turned out.I used proportional editing for all the assets to ease down the edges and make sure they can all easily blend into each other- should work real nice! Be sure to use Alt+D to duplicate (instead of Shift+D), so it stays nice and lightweight in RAM. Should wor...
Piston Rigging
H'okay! Here's a bunch of different piston rigging techniques! Dependency loops are one of the biggest issues when trying to set up a piston rig (you typically target each half to just point at the other half, but blender hates it when two things are dependent on each other). For that reason I like doing it with an IK chain, which maybe seems like overkill, but it's quick to set up, and incorporates into other parts of the rig really flexibly. I think these are probably the easiest ways to rig up a piston, but I'd definitely lov...
Asset: Merchants!
Just a quick upload of the merchants from that shot I was posting the other day (Download Below)They're maybe a bit specific to be particularly useful, but I know I'll be raiding it a bunch in the future for small little parts to put on shelves and such, even if not the merchants themselves. They're a kind of interesting aesthetic. On one hand, I'm not the biggest fan of this sort of photoscan, since they're just kinda messy, but at the same time, when the light hits them right, there's this texture and organic randomnes...
Robot Arm pt 1 - Basic Rigging
Alright! I'm going to be getting a little granular with these videos for a bit, because hopefully there's a lot of info in there that's useful in contexts outside of creating CG robot arm (let me know- would you rather have a lot of shorter videos, or fewer longer videos?) Later bits will probably be, like, "Advanced Rigging (featuring special guest Nathan Vegdah!l)", "Modeling Die Cast/machined Parts" and "Modeling Stamped Steel" and maybe... animation? Oh and animating vegetables. Because this robot hand is...
Talkin' TERD (Waterworks Breakdown/Ramblings)
Mostly I just made this video because I'm really jazzed about a new shot (just woke up and got to see it rendered!) and felt like talking about some stuff. Definitely things I could tweak, but I love how the photoscans integrate with the environment (if you feel like seeing it minus YouTube compression, you can here.)Huge thanks again to Nate for spending a day making all these little photoscannable environments with me (and for being, like, half the people in this scene, hahaha (along with me, Selena, Sean, and Kaitlin)). Also, I'm goi...
Asset: Humanoid Robot Arm and Robot Pieces
Robot arm!! [download below] I learned so much doing this, both about rigging and anatomy. I loved the learning curve of getting started in rigging; it's really easy to get your feet wet, and just keep getting in deeper without even noticing. I still have a ton to learn but it feel good to know I could probably figure out most basic mechanic stuff that I might want to do. Here's some test animations (looks best downloaded). It's designed to work with a Rokoko mocap rig, because it can track hands, now (more on that later)!!, So it s...
Quickly Animating Complex Neon Signs
MOOOORE neon, seriously Ian? YES! So I have a bazillion other things I should wrap up (robot arms and merchants and HyperBoles), but I wanted to see if this would work and it did, so I made a video because I'm jazzed.Here's the flicker controller image, although it'd also be super easy to come up with your own on your end with custom animations, if you wanted. I can imagine, say, a flourescent light that flickers and turns off or- OH! If you animated a DIFFERENT axis, too, you could have it scrolling through every possible loop over...
Photoscanned Vendors [Re-working the WaterWorks]
Heeyyyy- want to know a secret technique to never finish a film? Take so long to finish it that eventually you begin looking at the first VFX shots you did a couple years before and start wanting to re-do them. Cause that's a slippery slope. It's full-blown BICMIB syndrome [But I Could Make It Better]. When you're trying to worldbuild with CG, there's always that question of when to model new assets, and when to just copy-and-paste an old one. Copying-and-pasting lets you finish stuff a lot faster, but it can make things look a ...
JELLYFISH! (asset, breakdown)
After years of tweaking, I finally made a jellyfish I'm happy with!*The above isn't really a full tutorial, because I haven't found a way to make them consistently good, but the technique is very straightforward (basically just: "wave modifier"), so feel free to check out the video above!Here's the blend file, if you want to use it for anything, or go poking around in the nodes (they're... nonsense). It's under a megabyte, which is wild, but I guess makes sense? Or something went wrong and the file will be empty....
Quickly Add Dust in Blender
It's a 7 minute video, but the basic node setup only takes a few seconds. Very simple, and a surprisingly effective way to add some cohesion/age to a scene! Personally I think it works best when you leave it subtle, but I cranked it pretty high for visibility purposes. You COULD mix in a different texture into the mix factor, too, like fingerprints or whatnot, or into the color channel of the diffuse texture, with larger 'clumps"- but this'll work for me as-is in most cases. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go back and re-...
Making a Robot Theater (lasercutting pt. 2)
This isn't a tutorial because I don't really have any idea what I'm doing, and yet, I'm documenting it anyways. This is just something I've wanted to do for a few years. I feel a little bad starting this project when I have so many others I need to wrap up (HyperBole, so I can wrap up Dynamo Dream), but alsoooo sometimes you gotta follow your interests. In my head, this is all going to go really quick, but I imagine there are a few parts that might become a bit of a time hole.The biggest things I want to get out of this proj...
Gizmo Week - Lasercut Models with Blender and Inkscape - pt.1
Part 2 tomorrow! Or the day after!So- as I mention in the video, I was going REALLY hard in the cg department for a bit there, and while I'm super amped to finish up the HyperBole sequence (and the Dynamo Dream episode!!!), I wanted to take a moment to stretch my legs with some other stuff, so I'm going to take a few days to try and refamiliarize myself with arduinos/electronics/projectors, and various things that might be useful to micro-budget filmmakers, and documenting it for anyone who might be interested.I suspect it'll be fai...
Animating a Chase Camera
I've been slow to make this video 1.) because I'm not a particularly great animator and 2.) because anything regarding animation is mostly just going to devolve into a bunch of graph editor tweaking (cause that's how you do it). Final animation at 25:30. I'm reasonably happy with it, but what would REALLY make it work is secondary motion- wheels/suspension bouncing, the driver looking around, leaning into the turns (and, honestly, a little more camera shake wouldn't hurt). It's kinda cheating, but if you get enough secon...
Asset: Neon Sign elements (every letter)
WHEW! This took significantly longer than I expected. Higher detail neon signs (64 total), every letter, upper/lower case and the numbers.I know I made a tutorial about this, but now youuuu don't have to spend a day doing it!HERE'S AN EXPLANATORY VIDEODoesn't need much explanation, but there are some tips in there for working with (and wiring up) the letters, changing colors/brightness, and switching between eevee and cycles.Oh also, if you want, you can slap a subsurf modifier on there and everything'll get nice and smooth (the...
oh also- I'm Engaged!
Love-Of-My-Life-Kaitlin and I went on a last-bit-of-summer trip around the Gifford Pinchot forest the past few days, and I snuck in a little Bower-Bird-esque proposal- she said yes! :DWe're really excited to have the wedding with all of our friends, but given the current state of things, we'll probably be waiting a while until it's safe. Gives us more time to plan!ALSO- Washington State is full of amazing places, and it's kind of an obsession of mine to try to find as many as possible (I should post about it at some point- I hav...
Designing a Beefy Iris Door
Whew!! Inadvertently signed myself up for way too many projects the past couple weeks, and while it's been fun, I'm really excited to get back to business as usual- but in the meantime, here's a video about making a big ol' Beefy Mechanical Iris Door™!Actually, the last couple weeks taught me a lot of little lessons. I keep taking on small gigs that I think I can blast out in an afternoon, and they keep on taking days, and at this point I don't really have an excuse to not know better?? Just gotta work a bit harder to keep...
LightBox Game Day Presentation (Continued Virtual Production Schemes)
This post is a continuation of this post hereSO! I did a presentation for Kitbash3d's "Game Day" for LightBox- feel free to watch it here! It's mostly stuff you've seen before if you've watched a lot of these patreon videos- but always fun to try to assemble a scene on a deadline :D. Honestly, the entire presentation mostly just gave me an impetus to do a first round of experiments figuring out what's possible with a projector- fairly promising! And huge thanks to Sean for continuing his recurring role as "Random...
HyperBole Update 9_5
Been letting myself enjoy the last few weeks of summer (I feel like Winter's going to be a tough one), but I've still been working hard on the HyperBole scene! Just finished the scene below. I was imagining compositing one of the HyperBole contestants into some sped-up drone footage, skimming over beaches and deserts, and it got me thinking about the old salt flats and other Prime Racing Landscapes , and how it'd probably be way more interesting to show all the training than the actual event itself (the whole, "since I was a kid...
More Advanced Neon Signs
H'OKAY SO yes, it's fairly easy to make a text outline glow and call it a day. But what if you want to make something that holds up to some sort of scrutiny?? I wanted to make a HyperBole neon sign with a few more polygons, so if you're interested in that, here's a video! Also, I was fairly proud of my "linear-gradient-to-separate-the-front-bits-from-the-back" solution, but on a dark whim I just decided to check out how Andrew Price did it and he tackled that specific issue the EXACT same way (and I suspect he explained ...
Getting Into Some Mechanical Rigging
I suppose this one's a little more oriented for beginners (since I'm fairly beginner in this area), and I figure anybody who knows constraints is probably already familiar with most all of this, but it's been really fun playing around with this stuff the past few weeks, and wanted to share the experiments!
Making Mocap Data Flexible
Proooobably should have held off on this video, and I suspect it's of limited use to anyone with even the most basic rigging knowledge, BUT, I've been having so much friggin' fun with this technique that I wanted to post a quick video about it! Oh and here's where I got with the shot as the video was uploading to youtube. Is it just a shot to show off these gauges? Definitely. I'm going to have to add little labels and animated needles now. I need to.
Tutorial: Modeling Little Tech Greebles from Images
A quick rundown of a bunch of the techniques I've been using lately for all these greebly (nonsense detail) bits! There's almost always a more efficient way to do what I'm doing at any given moment, but that's part of the fun of it :) Also, spent some time today and made this little control panel (with HEFTY ol' tubes coming off the back, haha)! I think it's going to work well for a few HyperBole POV/Helmet Cam shots. Actually- I want to model some motorcycle handlebars to add on there, and maybe make a standalone image,...
HyperBole Update 8_15
Halfway through August!! wooo! Finally getting a 95 degree day tomorrow, I'm ready for it.It's wild to me that August is the cold month for you folks in the southern hemisphere. August=Heat is just burned into my head.You know what else is wild? MAGELLANIC CLOUDS! Two dwarf galaxies orbiting the milky way that folks in the southern hemisphere CAN SEE WITH THEIR EYES. Like, I love space n' stuff, and I was like 27 before I knew these things existed! (The best we have up north is the Andromeda Galaxy, visible as a delightful little sm...
Asset: Hardware Greebles
In my new quest to make the HyperBole become my most overly-inflated side project, I've decided I need a bunch of distinct background combatants, so I made some modular bits for quickly bashing together new vehicles.I'm really happy with these guys. They're all based on actual aircraft modules, and I think I was able to kind of capture that grimey oiled-hardware feeling. I tried to keep the polycount as low as I could, too.The process of making these uses MOST of the same techniques as usual (lots of dirty unwrapping and such), but ...
Hyperbole: Characters
The Hyperbole isn't a good idea, but it's one I've wanted to do for a while, so I kind of want to put some effort into it? That said, I'm in a tricky zone right now, where I'm designing different characters, and I don't want to spend too much time on them, but I also want them all to be distinct. I think my aim should be to have a few "hero" combatants, then fill the rest out with slightly more general folks- maybe I can design a more ambiguous character/vehicle tonight, that I can just swap out textures on. All ...
