Sprite Fright – Open Movie

Featured

Produced by Blender Studio. Made in Blender. Rated PG-13.

Character retopology work I did on Sprite Fright.
Checkout the showcase !

Female Facial Shapes with Blender 2.83

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

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

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

ZBrush sculpt, screen capture - WIP.

ZBrush sculpt, screen capture – WIP.

Blenderella, Advanced Character Modeling Workflow on YouTube!

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

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

  • 16x Standard_F1s
  • 1 core w/ 2Gb ram
  • Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2673 v3
  • Average time per pixel = 1.76 ms

gcp – Google Cloud Platform – 1 year trial – $410.24 CAD credit ($300 USD)

  • 16x Custom preemptive instance
  • 1 core w/ 2Gb ram
  • Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU @ 2.30GHz
  • Average time per pixel = 1.38 ms

vgt – Vagrant (free) / Virtualbox (free) running on Windows 10 (not free) – internal cluster

  • 2x Virtualbox VM
  • 4 HT cores w/ 3Gb ram
  • Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz
  • Average time per pixel = 0.86 ms

Dragon baby Scales silver pendant.

Dragon Baby Scales, blanketed by his wings.

Sintel & Scales 3D print

Sintel & Scales models created with Blender.

Sad Sintel 3D print

Sad Sintel model created with Blender.

Seated Male Figure 3D print

Model created with  ZBrush and Blender