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.
This week’s Newsletter by The COW is all about the Blender Survival Guide. It turns out that we just broke the 30,000 viewers barrier. Thank you very much to all of you for making this a great success. Obviously Blender is ready for Primetime, you demonstrated it. More episodes of the Survival Guide are coming up, part 6 will be online next Monday and more training is planned. Stay tuned.
The Oscars are a tough act to follow. Nevertheless I don’t let those low-budget productions scare me so a new episode of “the guide” is ready for your viewing pleasure.
Continuing from where we left off in part 4, this week’s Blender Survival Guide (BSG) unlocks the “secret” of creating animations in Blender and how to export said animations to the outside world.
Ever wondered why we called it “the outside world” while it’s still inside the same computer?
Anyway, bonus feature includes creating a clip with alpha channel while retaining your sanity. In other words,not being a victim of the “codec shuffle”. Since we have an alpha channel it’s now trivial to import such clip in After Effects and combine it with a background.
It’s all there, you just need to click on this link.
In what is now a weekly “tradition”, part 4 of the “Survival Guide” is now online. Expanding on the subject started last week, we work on making the 3D text look better by learning how to use additional fonts, how to create new materials and how to take advantage of optimized Ambient Occlusion.
These are all fairly dense topics but, as usual, I give you the condensed version of them so that you can start appreciating the features without being “clobbered” by the details.
I’m a big believer in “learn by doing” instead of “learn by endless list of features” 
so the BSG continues in giving you a non-linear, target-oriented, presentation of the amazing power of Blender.
We are approaching the end of the Guide, since I think that six or seven episodes should be enough to get people started. I will continue presenting Blender tutorials after the BSG is completed but they will be single-topic lessons.
If you have any specific topic that you would like to see covered in the guide or other videos please drop me a line here or at the COW and let me know.
Episode 4 of the guide is at: http://library.creativecow.net/articles/ciccone_paolo/blender-survival-guid…
Happy Blendering.
Part 3 of the “Survival Guide” is online. It’s finally time to stop messing around with the workspace and start working on a real scene. While traditional lessons about a 3D package would start with the principles of modeling I know that, as a AE user, one of the first things that you want to see is how to create 3D text. The Blender Survival Guide, only found here at the COW, is specifically tailored for the AE artists. It’s “Blender for After Effects”, in the shortest time possible. While we create the new 3D text we use the opportunity to learn all the essential survival tasks: how to move, scale, rotate objects and how to position the camera to frame the shot. Just before the end we see also how to add lights, how to change them and finally how to do a quick test render of the scene.
Episode 3 of the guide is here.
Happy Blendering.
The second part of the Blender Guide for AE artists is out. As usual you can find it at Creative COW.
In this episode we see how to complete the customization of the Blender desktop and how to save our preferences so that they become the application’s default.
Enjoy!
I just released the first part of a series of video tutorials dedicated to introduce Blender for the new comer, especially the After Effects artists who wants to add 3D to her comps but never used Blender before. This series is going to run for probably 4 or 5 episodes and can be considered the “Bear Grylls” of Blender: all the necessary stuff without the “geeky” bits.
We learn by doing and we work on real examples, drawn from everyday experience. The plan is to release a new episode each week.
The tutorial are hosted by the Creative COW. The first episode is 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)
For years the integration of 3D in the post-processing pipeline has been dominated by commercials applications. Today there is an alternative that I think is worth your attention. I just released the After Effects Exporter for Blender. This program integrates in the File/Export menu of Blender and it allows you to export an entire animation from Blender to After Effects. You can export the camera, lights, 3D meshes, planes, which will create corresponding After Effects 3D solids, and footage. The Exporter even supports multiple passes.
I prepared a 20-minute video tutorial on how to use it. You can find it here at Creative COW. Next to the tutorial there is a link to download the projects files. That link points to a zip archive with all that you need to get started. In the archive you can find the exporter itself, a Blender Python program, a handy user’s manual and the Blender file showcased in the tutorial.
The exporter, nicknamed AEE, is released as Open Source Software and I hope to have it included in the final release of Blender 2.5. While other solutions have been tried before, I believe this is the first time that Blender has such complete support for After Effects. This exporter should streamline your pipeline considerably and I’ll be very interested in hearing about your experience in using it.
Have fun!
