News

Charge what its worth! 5 things artists NEED to know.

Posted by David

Let’s face it, doing 3D modeling, Sculpting, making movies….. ITS FUN!! So, I’m supposed to charge for this?

This stuff is so much fun in fact that I’ve said on many occasions: “If I was independently wealthy and all my bills were paid, I would still do 3D…. I would do it for free right now if room and board were covered”. I do it for myself: because I love to create art, I love to learn, and I love to share my knowledge with the world. Here’s the cold hard facts: Nobody REALLY has the luxury of just sitting around all day creating artwork for free without a care in the world. Ok, so there may be the few wealthy kids out there who are afforded a few years after grad school to “Find themselves” by doing whatever they want for a couple years before they have to grow up and uphold the family name (ie: get a job and pay their own bills). But that’s not reality, at least not for most of us. Artwork, and especially GCI/Animation, is all around us. We see it every single day no matter where we look. It’s not just the multi-million dollar Hollywood blockbusters and video games. It’s in everything from the Zoloft commercials on TV to the wallpaper on your cell phone to the new iPhone billboard and the IKEA catalog (Seriously, 75% of the “photos” in the ikea catalog are CGI now). It’s so intertwined in our daily lives that we don’t even notice it anymore. But what so many up-and-coming artists fail to realize is that art is actually worth something. This is a big deal, it’s huge, and nobody seems to REALLY get it. Continue reading →

Blender render node prefab.

Posted by David

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of network rendering and often running one slave on my workstation as well. I can’t count the number of times I’ve accidentally killed the slave on my workstation because the interfaces all look almost the same. So I’ve taken the time to configure a simple UI layout specifically for slave nodes when network rendering. I’ve left the info pane at the top for easy viewing of the render bar, immediately below is a sliver of the image viewer with just enough space to see the info text that appears at the top (This displays connection status to master, current scene etc). Then on the bottom is the primary node settings. The only configuration needed is the IP address of the computer running the master node. I know its not much, but I hope some people find this helpful!

Download: RenderNode.blend

Realtime Subsurface Scattering in Blender 2.56

Posted by David

Here is a test screen of a realtime SSS shader I’m developing for Blender. This screen grab is from the game engine with no post production. Although the method I’m using is not TRUE subsurface scattering (as in, no glow with light behind the ears) it still yields outstanding results.

[singlepic id=12 w=200 h=150 float=center]

Surface shader created by me, with collaboration and information from Morten Mikkelsen of NaughtyDog.