Isti's Blog » Graphics

Mirror an Object in Blender

Isti — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 11:23:22 +0000

While I was playing with character modeling I needed to duplicate and mirror an object. I quickly googled around and found the following:

SHIFT-D
SX
ENTER

OK. I tried. Nothing happened apart from the duplication. It took me a while until I noticed I actually have to move the object after SX.

I made a series of screenshots about this:

This is the default scene in Blender:

Put your 3d cursor where you want to have the mirror:

I modify the default cube a bit to demonstrate the mirroring.
We will move the upper right vertex a bit:

Here is the modified cube:

Change the pivot to the 3D cursor:

In object mode select the object. Type:

SHIFT-D
SX
-1
ENTER

Instead of typing -1 you can just move the object, but blender will scale it X size.

Here is the result:

Blender Character Animation

Isti — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 13:27:13 +0000

I started to read the character animation tutorial at Blender mediawiki. My original plan was to read the whole document and start modeling after that while reading the tutorial second time. I couldn’t wait to finish the doq. So I started modeling I’m still modeling the head. It is much more difficult (for me at least) than I thought. I had a hard time to get a somewhat smooth surface. It is still not perfect, but I will go on hehe. Here is a screenshot:

Playing with Blender Lighting

Isti — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 06:44:56 +0000

In the former post I wrote I was not 100% satisfied with the lights in my former setup. So, I set up a similar rig from scratch. Now, this one is cool. Or at least I like it. It is much more flexible and gives better results. I can control the darkness of the shadows. Positioning the light is much easier. The former setup also had a drawback that the shadow gradients were not smooth at large resolution images. I simulate area light with a bunch of spots distributed on a plane. In the former setup the distance between the vertexes of the plane was too big. Now it is better. Here is an example (Click this image for 3200×2000 resolution):

Maybe the shadows could be a bit darker in this image.

Yesterday I have found a really cool tutorial about character animation at Blender mediawiki. It is also available in pdf format. I’m planning to read this trough and also do it in practice.

Blender Lighting

Isti — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 12:44:26 +0000

At the beginning I had huge problems with lighting in Blender. First of all it was very strange that only spots made shadows. Eventually I got shadows from somewhere else, too which confused me even more. Did I had some hidden spots? God knows. Finally I found some usable tutorials from blender.org. E.g.:

http://www.blender.org/documentation/htmlI/x5888.html

After reading this I managed to setup my own “studio” in blender and I have got satisfactory results with shadows.

I’m still not 100% satisfied but it is not bad for beginning. Here is an example:

Blender

Isti — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 06:57:22 +0000

Here is my new learning project. I will learn to make 3D images with Blender. I made 3D graphics before and I enjoyed it very much. I have used various tools in Windows environment. Last year I decided to use Linux and open source SW for my personal projects, so I had to find some alternatives. It didn’t take too much time to find Blender with Google hehe. So I installed it with the good old apt on my Ubuntu PC:

sudo apt-get install blender

It took me Blender 2.44. I started it and surprised. WTF is it?! Starting to use the interface without help is hopeless. I was really disappointed. I just closed it and started to look for something else. Google, Google, Google. Blender, blender, blender. Eat shit! 100 000 000 flies cannot be wrong. So I got back to Blender and did what I hate the most. I started to RFM. Or actually to watch tutorials. Do not misunderstand me. There is nothing wrong with tutorials, but I like to figure out most of the things myself. I simply learn better that way. This time it didn’t work. Fortunately there are some good video tutorials at blender.org:

http://www.blender.org/education-help/video-tutorials/

I watched the first 6 tutorials under “Getting started” and “Model/Material.Light”. Then hope came back I’m not convinced yet, but I didn’t give up!

Here is my first Blender rendered picture:

Well, I admit it is not a good picture at all. I was just playing around with basic objects. Creation, moving, sizing, etc. I also tried materials. Lighting is really bad on this image. I have to improve a lot on that. I also suffered quite much with the camera. I have to improve on that, too. Anyway, it is already an achievement that I managed to render something

A QT Project – Fractal generator – Getting started

Isti — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 13:02:33 +0000

Recently I just started to learn programming with QT. To be honest I actually already wrote lots of code with QT but I mainly modified or developed further existing programs. Now, I want to fully understand the development of QT GUI applications from scratch. I also like to play with fractal generators, so I thought it would be a good idea to write a fractal generator in QT. The end product is not really useful since there are lots of good fractal generators available for free, but it will be fun to write one for sure. I haven’t decided yet whether it will be just a simple Mandelbrot generator or something more sophisticated. We will see. First I will just concentrate on the UI. Anyway, I downloaded Tierazon sources from here, just in case I want to go further

OK. Lets start. First of all we will need QT environment. I’m using Ubuntu Linux. I set up QT from sources. It is really easy. Download the newest sources from Trolltech .

Then the usual stuff follows:

configure
make
make install

OK. if everything went fine so far we are almost done.

To be able to compile anywhere in my directory structure I had to add some QT environment variables.

So I added the followings to the end of my .bashrc

export QTDIR=’/usr/local/Trolltech/Qt-4.4.3′
export PATH=$QTDIR/bin:$PATH
export QMAKESPEC=$QTDIR/mkspecs/linux-g++

Here are some fractals I have generated with Tierazon

Banner

Isti — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 14:00:49 +0000

This post is about how I created the banner of this site. As I mentioned in the first post,
I use a lot of open source software. One of my favorites is GIMP
It is an image manipulation program, similar to
Photoshop. Someone might claim that Photoshop is more advanced, but I rarely face image manipulation
problems I couldn’t solve with GIMP. In this case I used GIMP 2.4.5 in Ubuntu Linux environment. It is also available
on other platforms like MS Windows.

In this demo I will not create exactly the same banner, but you will get the idea. If you have problem with reading the text on the images, just click on them and the full size image will open.

Open GIMP.
Select File/New
The banner is 770×100 pixels. Set these values in the opening dialog and click OK.

This creates you a new image with the given width and height
Click on the front color, and select something you want to be the dominant color.

In this case I selected some dark red. Click OK.
Select the bucket fill tool

and click anywhere on the picture you are editing. Now your whole banner should be dark red.
Similarly to Step 4, change the front color again. This time, select some lighter red.
Select the Brush tool.
Change the brush to “Circle Fuzzy (19)”
Make some random brush strokes on the image
Change the color to a different red and continue making random strokes
Repeat the former step couple of times. Use also white color. Now, your image should look like this
In this step we will apply motion blur to blur the image.
Open Filters/Blur/Motion Blur
In the opening dialog set the blur length and angle to something like 50 and 40 and click OK. It does not matter what are the exact values, just blur the image.

Now your image should look like this:
Open Filters/Distorts/Whirl and Pinch
In the opening dialog set whirl angle to 360, pinch amount to -1, and radius to 2 and click OK.

The resulting image looks like this:
Open Filters/Artistic/Cubism
In the opening dialog do not change anything just click OK
And your banner is ready: