Female Facial Shapes with Blender 2.83

Featured

Posted on July 22, 2020 by James Monteath

Exploring realistic facial shapes with Blender – WIP.
Checkout out the showcase !

Raw mesh, color map, facial compression shape in Blender.

Raw processed results using R3DS Wrap. Series of morph target expressions on mesh with respective 8k color maps.

Blender v2.83.2 LTS
R3DS Wrap 3.4.8
GIMP 2.10.20
Bundle purchased from 3D Scan Store

Pet Project: Hugo – Base Mesh Turnaround

Posted on September 26, 2017 by James Monteath

Reduced render time by 50% and removed banding on background by using combination of Blender’s 2.79 new features:
– denoising
– preview rather than final sampling
– limited rather than full global illumination
– shadow catcher plate with composited background rather than usual studio floor setup, effectively not generating banding.

Project Showcase

Pet project: Hugo, a Jack Russell Terrier – WIP

Posted on September 20, 2017 by James Monteath

The purpose of this project is to explore the giclée printed medium.
View full showcase.

ZBrush sculpt, screen capture – WIP.

Blenderella, Advanced Character Modeling Workflow on YouTube!

Posted on September 7, 2017 by James Monteath

Blenderella, Advanced Character Modeling, originally released in 2011 as a training DVD for Blender Institute.

Get the complete tutorial at:
Blender Cloud
Blender Store

Attributions:
Blenderella, Advanced Character Modeling by Blender Foundation (CC-BY-3.0)
Human Reference Photos from 3d.sk (used with permission)

Check out the showcase!

Monitoring blender cycles render

Posted on July 23, 2017 by James Monteath

We finally moved our rendering pipeline over to cloud providers.

Here was the render setup:

240 frames at 1920×1080 with cycles, split into 20 regions per frame.
Total machines: 49
Rendered files stored using Google Cloud Storage.

Render result summary:

Total time: 5h 45m
Average per frame: 1m 26s
Average time per frame would be better if “aws” machines performed normally while using free tier instance. More details below.

VM instance provider summary:

bx – IBM Bluemix – 1 month trial ?!

Only provided a Kubernetes cluster with 1 worker node in their free trial.
Since we required access to many VM instances, integration to render pipeline was postponed for now.

aws – Amazon Web Services – free tier – EC2 instance 750 hours

15x t2.micro
1 core w/ 1Gb ram
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2676 v3
Average time per pixel = 12.46 ms
@ 0:15 seconds, we can see the CPU taking 9-10 more time than all other providers.

az – Azure – 1 month trial – $250 CAD credit