It’s that time again!
The glorious conclusion to our book promo is available! The Blender Survival Guide is online, at Creative COW.
I’m particularly pleased by this episode because it highlights a series of tricks that are at the same time simple and useful.
In setting up a scene or animation one of the most important features of the program is how you manipulate the objects, how you change their position, how you move them in the right spot. This week’s episode addresses all that.
Blender includes a bona-fide Non-Linear Editor (NLE). Nothing to threaten Adobe or Apple but a very handy tool that can be used at any time, on any machine, and that handles sequences of images with extreme ease. BSG #8 shows you how to enable it to add music to your Blender animation.
Lastly you might wonder how to set up a shot that uses two or more cameras. All covered in this episode of the Guide.
We are approaching the end of what I call a “Survival Guide” but more Blender tutorials, more topic-oriented, are scheduled to be released, here at Creative COW. The development of Blender 2.5 is finally reaching Beta status, and soon I’ll be busy planning a new set of video tutorials using the new version of Blender. It’s gonna be fun!
The Blender Survival Guide #8 is available here.
Thanks to the great feedback received for the AEE we caught a few bugs. Bartek Skorupa found a workaround for some rounding that was happening at the Python/JavaScript level, hopefully the fix will make the dimensions of those Planes/Solids more accurate. Give it a try a let me know in this thread. Bartek also pointed out that the Empties/Nulls were not exported. That one is also fixed. Other things that are in there: the name of the Null created for tan Empty or an Object was not set correctly, it’s now preserved as expected. I also added a simple filter for those cases where Blender generates object names like “Plane.002″, which is an invalid name in the AE script. It’s now converted to the legal “Plane_002″ so you don’t have to worry about renaming those objects.
Version 1.04 of the AEE is available here: After Effects Exporter for Blender v.1.04 (zip)
Hi.
It’s just two days after releasing the AEE but I got a new version that fixes a couple of issues. Thanks to the great sleuthing by Bartek Skorupa, we found a couple of bugs that escaped my testing. Here is what’s been fixed in version 1.03:
- Camera lens animation. Animating the focal length is not something that should be done lightly and even when you need it, Blender 2.49 makes it very hard to do. Nevertheless it’s now working and After Effects will work with the new data.
- Parented objects not animating. The AEE tries to write an optimized AE script. In doing that it checks if an object has been animated. If not, the AEE will not write keyframes for that object, avoiding wreiting the same position/rotation for the length of the animation. Well, but what if the object has been parented? Version 1.03 addresses this and now parented objects work as expected. If you have a plane that you use as a placeholder and that plane doesn’t animate by itself bu instead follows another object, the AEE will export the keyframes correctly.
- Windows paths. When exporting an animation that has been rendered the AEE tries to connect the rendered footage to your comp. Unfortunately Windows uses the “\” backslash for file separator and that breaks every string exported to JSX. Version 1.03 addresses that problem so now you Windows folks can enjoy all the features of the AEE.
The new AEE version 1.03 is available here: After Effects Exporter v.1.03 (zip)
