OMEGA is a stop-motion epic animated short movie that combines traditional puppet animation with computer imagery to create a breathtakingly vibrant visual experience. Richly textured real-life models interleave with virtual environments, creating a complex world of machine creatures. The toolset used is based around open source software, with Blender providing the core. One of the project's targets is to evaluate, use, and develop Blender as a formidable tool for stop-motion animation and image processing, as well as integrating model photography with CG animation.
In this brain-melting teaser session we will share our progress with you, as well as giving detailed insights into our production pipeline. Travel with us from the deepest, darkest trenches of stop motion all the way to the bright cosy warmth of glowing computer screens. Hear about materials that miraculously never glue together - not even in a billion years - and about ones that you can't even shoot off your clothes with a death ray.
Visualization is "normally" used for art, games, movies, architectural presentations or "just for fun". In road or tunnel design visualization was not seen relevant for many years. In the past years research came to the conclusion that a mayor problem of unsafe rural roads lies in poor visibility or
misleading situations. At the Institute of Road and Traffic Engineering Aachen
(ISAC) there are two projects concerning safety and sight. Both projects are realized with blender. The first project deals with tunnel safety and the optimization of escape routes in tunnels. An existing tunnel of 2 km length was rebuilt in blender and implemented in the so called CAVE, a 20m^2 room with surround projection, provided by the Center for Computing and Communication of the RWTH Aachen University. The second project deals with road safety and is part of the education concept of the ISAC. Since 2 years the ISAC develops and builds up a driving simulator to show students the effects of poor or wrong road-design. Amongst other reasons the ISAC decided to use Blender to realize this project because of the build-in game-engine. This presentation will show the strategies and the status quo of both projects focused on the driving simulator.
Blender is growing more and more towards the (semi-) professional animation industry. This growth comes with an opportunity for Blender to demonstrate its potentials. A big challenge in (semi-) professional animation industry is management of content during the realization of a production. Especially when working in (large) teams. As an example, Big Buck Bunny used over 200 blend files, almost 500 scenes, 950 materials and 2000 meshes and more, created by a team of 9 people. A lot of content, used by team members at the same time. How can you manage this load of content, especially when changes come into play?
We work on a simulation application that allow users to interactively interact with objects in 3D virtual environments. The manipulations include picking, moving, placing, switching interrupters and transforming objects. We have designed a library that allows us to implement precise and simple manipulations. The design of these many-objects environments can be very tedious. We have designed a set of tools that help designers to automatically place and duplicate object instances at precise locations. These tools can be used to create 3D environments for simulation, social interaction and game applications.
Predicting fire evolution and the movement of its effluents, heat and smoke, inside civil buildings is of critical importance for life safety.
The numerical prediction of fire is performed with tools like NIST Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS, www.fire.nist.gov/fds/), a computational fluid dynamics model of fire-driven fluid flow developed by a worldwide community as an open source project.
The Corpo Nazionale dei Vigili del Fuoco (Italian national fire service), the Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell Innovazione dell Universita del Salento (Department of Innovation Engineering of University of Salento), and the Industrial Design Studies Course of Politecnico di Torino are cooperating on a project on 3D data exchange between Blender and FDS:
Blender gains the ability of visualizing scientifically meaningful flames and smoke.
FDS acquires a new platform for visualization, verification and validation of 3D fire data.
The 3D visualization of flames and smoke from simulated fires can be profitably used for fire risk communication to civilians, fire training, and generally in all those situations in which the correctness of the visualization of the risk is mandatory.
Phatch is an user friendly, cross-platform Photo Batch Processor and Exif Renamer with a nice graphical user interface. It allows anyone (even without graphical knowledge) to manipulate any amount of images with a few clicks. Phatch 0.1 was a succesfull release and was adopted by all major linux distributions (ubuntu, fedora, suse, debian, ...).
Phatch 0.1 was totally based on the Python Image Library (PIL). We're currently developing Phatch 0.2 which supports multiple backends, such as imagemagick, exiftran, jpegtran (lossless jpeg transformations), dcraw, gimp, inkscape and ... Blender! It allows anyone to render any image as a texture on a 3d model with Blender. Even if this person has never used Blender before, he will be able to perform an action in Blender with one click. As a start we will provide a simple box (great for creating software boxes), lcd screen (good for screenshots), CD in a box and a book. We want to extend it so the user can use its own models and we hope to get free licensed models from Blenderheads. Phatch provides a polished user interface and runs Blender invisibly in the background. The Blender action can be combined with any other phatch actions (PIL, imagemagick, ...).
http://photobatch.stani.be/download/index.html
The purpose of the workshop is to provide an introduction to Blender's newest and exciting feature: Smoke Simulation. The workshop will show the audience step-by-step, how to achieve realistic smoke using Blender 2.5.
The workshop will cover in detail:
How smoke simulation is different to the standard particle system
How smoke behaves
How to achieve impressive high resolution smoke
Rendering the smoke
As well as providing technical instructions, the workshop will also give practical tips for getting the most realistic smoke effects, by applying a pulsing wind, randomized particle settings and colored lamps to provide highlights and shadows. Upon completing the workshop the audience will have a clearer understanding of the new smoke simulator and have a completed smoke grenade scene ready to be rendered.
This presentation covers the use of the Blender Game Engine to generate interactive experiences in immersive domes. I will cover the theory, mathematics, the implementation, user evaluation, and demonstrations. This talk spans the technical aspects of the implementation to the rich visual demonstration of the final solution.
The immersive domes discussed here are half spheres with surfaces onto which digital images are projected in such a way that they present an undistorted image with a wide field of view (from 160 to potentially 360 degrees) to the human visual system. This technology is currently found in virtual reality centers and planetariums. The ability produce real-time presentations for these environments was implemented in Blender Game Engine source code and has been available since Blender 2.49.
In addition to the above I will introduce various application users from around the world, this includes Canada, England, Australia and Brazil.
* This work was developed with support, assistance and help from Paul Bourke - a research associate professor from the University of Western Australia.
* The original work was sponsored by SAT - Society for Arts and Technology within the SAT Metalab immersion research program.
* This work was already presented at Che Blender 2009, Seminars 2009 at IMPA, GNUGRAF 2009, Blender Day RJ 2009 and at Universidade Federal Fluminense as a graduation project in Architecture and Urban Studies .
For more information:
http://local.wasp.uwa.edu.au/~pbourke/miscellaneous/domemirror/BlenderiDome/Dalai
Quintanilha Felinto
http://blenderecia.orgfree.com
Paul Bourke
http://local.wasp.uwa.edu.au/~pbourke/
To watch the videos:
We will present some of the instruments that we developed and used to realize the video: import of proteins at atomic resolution, calculation of their motion using Blender Game Engine, elaboration of chemical and physical properties and the study of their expression (rendering techniques).
Building of the cellular environment and of structures composed of many thousands of proteins, and other tricks of modelling, animating and rendering microscopic entities.
A live demonstration of how to hook up Blender and Pure Data using Open Sound Control. The demonstration will go over simple modeling and texturing, specifying properties and logic bricks needed to connect to Pure Data, shape morphing, creating a Pure Data patcher to connect to the Blender Game Engine, and finally performing the patcher.
http://www.porcaro.org/blendnik/06-blendnik-demo-performance.m4v
Blender as a DCI standard film encoder
Thierry Jacquin, Jean-Pierre Chanod - Towards collaborative Blender design through annotation sharing
A case study of using Blender for development of an iPhone game and 3D-website game.
Cedric Pinson - Pokme Poker Client With Blender
Slides
Jean-Christophe Romain - Blender as a tool for Video Game Prototyping
Slides
This summer I took an interest in Blender's capabilities to receive controller inputs, and digital puppets, and wish to share my results while explaining to the rest of the community all the problems and solutions that I ran in to. First, I'll be showing off my digital puppet Raul who is controlled by a Playstation 3 SIXAXIS controller with sixteen analog inputs directing his facial expressions, head shift, tilt, and turn, and his mouth. After the brief performance segment, I'll spend some time explaining the differences between HID, MIDI, and OSC. Next, some time will be spent explaining the different existing programs that handle "input routing" such as MAX/msp, vvvv, Quartz Composer, TagTool, and Puredata. Finally I'll discuss concepts for the future of Blender including theoretical "input nodes," and a few more technical warnings about the obstacles in Python, Pygame, and UDP networking before the discussion segment.
Over the past year, Prophetic Sky cultivated many 3D Blender assets for a long-term gaming business strategy. However, we realized that our existing infrastructure could easily be converted toward a short-term project, and could lead to an early revenue stream in Prophetic Sky's history. In evaluating our options, we saw the iPhone marketplace as a way to quickly create a small but profitable game. The resulting 2D sprite-based game "Townrs Defender" brought a number of unforeseen pleasant surprises in both our production pipeline and business model. I intend to discuss the business benefits of such a side project, and to give examples from Prophetic Sky's process regarding Blender techniques we utilized.
Prophetic Sky's official website: www.propheticsky.com
Prophetic Sky's official blog: www.onstories.com
Townrs Defender's official website: www.townrsdefender.com
Townrs Defender's BlenderNation press release: BlenderNation post
In this paper we present a method for using Blender as a visualization and simulation tool for robot guided medical interventions. Visualization is an important part of medical robotics to prove the setup, avoid collisions and perform training. For this purpose the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) is used frequently which is typically programmed with C++ or Python. To increase the development speed Blender was investigated for a first prototype. It is used for a motion compensation scenario and as a test bed for the development of an inverse kinematics for a 7 DOF robot. We show how we established the communication between our robots and Blender. Blender is seamlessly integrated to a realtime CORBA and simulink environment running on Windows and Linux. This allows the fast exchange of the simulator with the hardware interface to allow simulation and real execution.
In this poster there is used discrete model based on the idea of 3-D Ising model. It's interesting think about appropriate design of new materials for filtration with a required features made from nanofibers.
After construction of statistical model, a couple of computer simulations, optimalization of computed scientific data, there is need to visualize this one with possibility of feedback. It leads to apply Blender as visual instrument for this purposes. There is also mention in passing Ising approach versus another method used by us for simulation of liquid transport in fibrous materials (lattice gas).
We present a use of Blender for an innovative purpose: the remastering of traditional movie soundtracks into highly-immersive 3D audio soundtracks.
To that end we developed a complete workflow making use of Blender with Python extensions, Ardour (the Digital Audio Workstation) and audio plugins for 3D spatialization and room acoustics simulation. The workflow consists in two main stages: the authoring of a simplified scene and the audio rendering.
The first stage is done within Blender: taking advantage of the video sequence editor playing next to a 3D view, the operator recreates the animation of sound sources mimicking the original video. He then associates the objects in the scene with existing audio tracks of an Ardour session with the soundtrack mix and, optionally, adds acoustics properties to the scene prop materials (e.g. defining how a wooden room will sound) to render acoustics simulation using ray-tracing algorithms.
In the second stage, a specification of the loudspeakers positions used in the exhibition is given, and the Ardour session with the soundtrack is automatically modified incorporating all the Blender's edited sound scene, the necessary routing, and the 3D audio decoding plugins such as Ambisonics, VBAP and Binaural implemented with CLAM.
Short video illustrating the presented workflow
parumi.org/3d-audio_videos/3d-audio_remastering.m4v
Videos and slides of a related talk: "3D Audio with CLAM and Blender's
Game Engine" in the last Linux Audio Conference
http://lad.linuxaudio.org/events/2009_cdm/Thursday/05Arumi/index.html
In this workshop, I will present tools and strategies for designing user interfaces that people find powerful, intuitive, and elegant. This set of best practices is derived from recent research that examined how developers and contributors of 11 different FOSS projects (including Blender) address usability issues in their day-to-day work. The techniques are thus specifically tuned to FOSS development: they are lightweight, yet effective and extremely rewarding when put into practice.
The workshop will cover the following topics:
- Usability/UX myths
- Foundational principles of usability, user experience (UX), and design
- How to drive design using data from "reference users," micro-observations, and Wizard-of-Oz prototypes
- Fail-fast, rapid prototyping methods
- How to choose when multiple design choices exist
The workshop content is aimed at developers and contributors with no formal training in user interface/UX design, with an emphasis on methods that can be put into immediate use. Examples and live demonstrations of the techniques will be given, using Blender as an example when possible.
In this presentation we examine the suitability of Blender for 3D content creation in eLearning. We present a methodology as well as a case study, of using Blender to create eLearning content for Chemical Engineering Labs. The experiment selected is a Vapour Liquid Equilibrium process from the curriculum of undergraduate Chemical Engineering. This experiment is suitable for the usage of 3D animation because of three main factors: (i) The complex assembly of different components and (ii) The size of the actual apparatus varies from 4-16 feet and (iii) it is expensive for replication in smaller institutions.
We found that Blender has most of the desired features to create the eLearning 3D animation. Students who viewed the content found it useful and enjoyed working with it. We were also able to export the created 3D models to an open source repository (www.oscar.iitb.ac.in). We believe that the proposed methodology can be: (i) used to scale the 3D animated content creation of lab experiments, and (ii) adopted by other institutions elsewhere for similar purpose.
A short scientific case study where Blender is used like a visualizer of previously computed scientific data. Procedure is very simple otherwise efficient due to possibilities of Blender. After pretty much Monte-Carlo simulation steps are occupied elements of Ising model imported in layers into Blender as vertices. Then is apply halo effect on them (various color depending on fibre or liquid fluid element). Further is possible render or animate structures made by fibres with liquid interaction or even cut samples in desired positions with orthographic camera point of view.
The paper will be a presentation of what has been done until now using Blender with facial and speech recognition and some basic psychophysiological data used in real - time, focusing the attention of how to create interaction between the real world and the BGE, but also how to use cheap technology and an open - source approach to achieve this, making it accessible to a wide range of people in their everyday life.
The paper /presentation is going to describe and analyze the use of blender as a design tool during the open source days while projecting forward improvements that can be incorporated in 2.50 that facilitate design. Areas of blender that are going to be analyzed are : modeling, rigging, animation.
Discusses the principles of character rigging and how to do advanced character rigging in Blender.
A case study of using Blender for game prototyping.
Discusses Blender in the usage of the game pipeline of "Super Yum Yum" a digital download game for PC & Console
Marco Rapino - Creating immersive worlds using the BGE
Paper
Slides