Tutorial: Faking Stop Motion

In this Blender Cookie tutorial, Dave Ward explains how to properly lower the frame rate of your animation as a first step towards a stop-motion effect.

Dave Ward writes:

In this quick blender video tutorial, I go over a quick easy way of achieving a stop-motion look to a pre-setup animation by adjusting the Frame Rate settings in the Render panel.

To add more levels to this, you could try and adding longer random frames to simulate the error of the human ways. Moving an arm too much in one frame, then not as much the second frame. Have some fun with it! Post any youtube, or examples below in the comments.

In an interesting comment PLyczkowski (maker of the Suzanne Award winning animation ‘Lista’) writes:

Just lowering the frame rate or flickering the light (not a good idea) is not enough to achieve the stop motion look – you just achieve the low fps look. The key to a stop motion look is a little randomness in the character’s position in each shot. There are two ways in doing this – a clever script, which I don’t know how to make, and would be so happy to have it – or this: In Blender 2.49 leave framerate as is, go to curve editor, and ctrl-rmb click each animation channel every two frames, where there is animation, and when you’re done, change the interpolation to constant. Thanks to the by-hand clicking you get randomness, and only the character gets the low-fps (5 or 6 fps is way too low, in this way we get 12 or 15). This is how I made the stop motion look for “The List”. Cheers.

Link

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Snowblind Special Effects

Blender was used for some special effects in the movie ‘Snowblind’, a Wreckamovie project.

Hannu Hoffrén writes;

I work as a video editor and a 3d&vfx artist in my daytime job, but the customer base and the projects over there are focused more on the educational side.

About the movie: I think it is a digital reincarnation of spaghetti western – as in those days, European low budget filmmakers couldn’t afford to film in the U.S., so they used Italy instead – today, budget is even lower so Italy gets replaced by a green wall. ;) It has many of the nuances that the old spaghetti westerns have, quite in all aspects of the movie, but I guess the old film looking visual style is the most recognizable for the viewer.

Snowblind used Wreckamovie to gather people to work on the movie and at one point there was a task about rotoscoping and particles and that got me interested joining in the project. At that time I had just started to make myself available more to the movie world instead of my normal freelance stuff, which basically included creating websites and 3d visualizations. Snowblind was a great way to build movie vfx reel as I hadn’t had any experience working in any movie before that. Also, Wreckamovie appeared to be a very good tool for networking and I’ve already met many from there in person, including Kalle Max Hofmann who is such a great person to work with, but also hang around with too.

Even though I didn’t get any salary (but some cool Wii-games!! ;) ) from working in Snowblind I already got a _very_ cool movie contact (which I don’t want to jinx by telling about it as everything is on early stage ;) ) by showing the material I made in the movie.

- Hannu

Links

Watch Snow Blind:

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Blender Masterclass in Machynlleth, Nov 27-28

A two-day Blender workshop, by Colin Litster with remote appearances of members of the Durian team.

Lorraine Turner writes:

Film 15  are pleased to announce a special masterclass with the makers of extremely popular animations Big Buck Bunny and Sintel. Using collaborative software to interact with other members of the Blender foundation, Colin Litster (Cogfilms) will train budding animators in the use of the open source Blender 3D suite so that they are able to continue making professional-looking animations at home for free.

The course will provide an introduction into various components of Blender such as 3D modelling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback. It is a great CPD opportunity for both professional and amateur animators, students, teachers and members of the community who wish to expand their skills base.

The course runs 10am-4pm on 27th-28th November at Bro Ddyfi High School in Machynlleth and costs £70.  There is a early bird discount for people booking before 12th November. We also have a limited number of bursaries available. Please contact Lorraineturner2004@yahoo.co.uk for more information and to book your place.

This masterclass is kindly sponsored by The Cooperative Membership Fund as part of the Pink Snowball Film Awards and Festival.

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Soft Editing

From the weird-but-interesting department: an experimental mesh editing script by Wahooney:

Wahooney writes:

This is the result of about 30 minutes of python and a loose understanding of Jacobson’s Verlet Integrator. A method that allows for soft editing of organic meshes. Not sure if I’ll take this further, some changes might need to be made to Blender to make this easier.

Link

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Work like Pablo Vazquez!

Well, not really, but you can make your Blender theme look like his ;-) Lots of black and pink, great for working at night. Enjoy!

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Blender at CAVA 3D Conference, Leipzig, November 25th

Sebastian König will be hosting a presentation on Blender at the German CAVA conference in Leipzig on November 25th. Admission is free, but you are requested to register on the website.

Sebastian writes:

On November 25th I’ll be presenting Blender 2.5 on a 3D Conference here in Leipzig.

CAVA, the “Conference for Animation and Video Artists” is a new bi-annual event to gather 3D Artists and people working with CG in the area of eastern Germany and give them a platform to connect and get together. This time there will be 3 presentations, of which the first one will be about Blender and how you can take advantage of it by integrating it into your production pipeline. Hopefully I can convince one or two people there that Blender might in fact be something to consider as an option for their studio toolset. It takes place in the new Leipzig School of Design, which I can hopefully infiltrate with some Blender courses ;-)

Here’s a translation of what they write on the website (in German) about it:

“By now everbody working in the field of CG art should at least have heard of the open source software “Blender”. But how professional and versatile is this free tool in reality?

After Sebastian König has given you a brief overview over the history of Blender he’ll be demonstrating with some examples how a production workflow in Blender can look like. With the new python interface the ambitious blenderuser has now lots of new possibilities of extending Blender and integrating external render-engines. The graphical interface of the application has been revised and provides more comfort when operating the tool.”

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PlainTextures.com: over 4000 textures

PlainTextures.com: over 4000 textures

Here’s a good resource of over 4000 free texures. They’re not tileable but the quality looks rather good.

The terms of use are:

All pictures are property of Plaintextures. You can use any of these pictures for private or comercial use except of selling and redistributing.

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