CG Channel/cmiVFX Tutorial .blend File Released!
December 7th, 2007 by JasonDue to the high demand for the compositing tutorial I announced a few days ago, I’m releasing the .blend file that was used to create that tutorial. When the tutorial was announced here as well as the forums at blenderartists.org and then on Blender Nation, the Blender community swamped the on-demand video player at cmiVFX. As a community, we created the highest demand for a tutorial on their system to date. We actually filled their database!
Because of this, of course, it was proving difficult for some people to view the tutorial. To help alleviate this situation (and because it was requested) the .blend file is being released into the wild.
A couple important notes:
First, this .blend was created with a development version of Blender. This is important because the revision that was used is before the ‘infamous’ Jahka particle branch was merged with the main development trunk. So if you desire for this .blend file to render as it is in the tutorial, you’ll need to use Revision 12676 (or one near to it). BF-Builds that that you can find on graphicall.org that are dated before (but near) 26 November 2007 should work well. The biggest new features that this .blend file uses are Edit-mode UV unwrap, object selectability in the Outliner, and the Glare node in the compositor.
The other thing to note is that this file is being released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. This means you can use it for whatever purpose you like, so long as you give credit to Hand Turkey Studios for creating the original .blend and animation. I appreciate that the good folks at cmiVFX agreed that releasing this .blend would be a good idea.
And with that, here’s what you’re actually looking for (or what you’ve skipped ahead and when directly to click on). It’s a 36MB file with the textures packed into it. Right-click and save as… also, please be kind to my webhost and take advantage of the kind people willing to mirror this file:
Additional mirrors (and perhaps a torrent) will be added here. If anyone else is willing to mirror this file, please contact me via email at jason (at) handturkeystudios (dot) com.
Have fun!
more at misaligned.net
December 8th, 2007 at 9:18 pm
It is definitely worth the registration!
I learned a lot, for the first time I understand the power of the composite node system. Thank you Fweeb for this early Christmas present
I think the node system was explained very well and I understood everything about it - even I never used it. But I was not able to understand for what the curve guides are good? Or how create the mask layer, what modeling technics were used and how to map this to the camera? Yes, I’m a beginner. Maybe someone can post a short answer… thank you in advance.
cu markus
December 9th, 2007 at 2:10 pm
Hello Markus!
I’m glad you got so much out of the the tutorial. To answer your question, the purpose of the curve guides were to help lining up the panoramic photograph as it was mapped within the sphere. The stitched panorama didn’t perfectly map to the inside of the sphere and there was quite a bit of ‘massaging’ necessary with the UV coordinates. It was a time-consuming process, but by going though it, I was able to model a proxy scene as my mask.
I matched the curves to landmarks in the photo that I knew roughly how they related to each other. The center of the road was in the same plane and parallel to the road side and the top of the railroad tracks was roughly in the same plane and parallel to the road side. And there was the added benefit of all three of those references being generally straight.
With that taken care of, I could more easily model my mask scene.
Hope that answers your question. Thanks again for checking out the tutorial!
December 9th, 2007 at 4:18 pm
Thank you Jason… now I understand - this sounds like a lot of work!
cu Markus
PS: I just want to let everybody know that if Blender crashed when you render you forgot like me to change the render output directory…
February 16th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Hello Jason,
I bought your perfect fluid dynamics tutorial on cmivfx. They put also your tutorial of that bird. Now it is gone. Where can I find it? Is it no more on cmivfx?