The above video contains most of my Blender and GIMP work from March 2010 until May 2011. I am not looking for employment, so this showreel is less resume and more showing-off. Special thanks to all the folks at BlenderNewbies, BlenderCookie, BlenderArchitect, and countless other Blender tutors out there. Of course, thanks also goes to the Blender and GIMP developers for making these programs available. Music is called “They’ll Remember You” by John Ottman, copyright 2008 by Varèse Sarabande.
In the below Velvet setting example, you can see that both Sigma and Fresnel have a similar effect:
Glossy Setting example:
How to adjust the bump-map strength:
The bump map in Cycles is listed under the displacement tab.
As of right now (early May ’11) it doesn’t look like you can load an image as the displacement map, but you can use the standard Blender procedural materials (clouds, marble, ect).
You can adjust the map size using the “size” setting in the image above just as you would under normal Blender Internal, or using the nodes:
So on to the meat of this tip, how to adjust the strength.
Since there doesn’t seem to be a setting for strength, we’ll use a mix node with the displacement material on one noodle-entry and an empty slot on the other:
The ‘mix’ node can be found under the ‘add > color > mix’ option (shift+A). By moving the factor (“fac:”) we can set the strength of the bump map.
I wanted to show off my final Blender work. I was tasked by the Officer-in-charge of the Base Honor Guard to make a short 30-second video for use in briefings and commander calls. I went four times over the requested time length, but 30 seconds is a short time period to try to sell something.*
I went out and, holding a camera and tripod upside down to help steady it, recorded about 4GB worth of HD footage of them practicing. I combined that with an additional 4GB of SD footage from previous performances and three low-res YouTube screen-grabs of other base honor guards (the last three shots).
Here is the non Blender version:
*30 seconds: Okay, I know commercials are only 30 seconds long, there are lots of them, and they sell lots of stuff. I’m not good at making commercials.
Each commander has his or her own coin that the commander personally gives out as tokens of appreciation for outstanding job performance, exemplary service, or above-and-beyond actions. These are a little bit different from Squadron Coins which can be purchased by members of the squadron as proof of their service with that unit. Commander’s Coins cannot be bought, only given. (For more about Squadron Coins or Challange Coins, please see the wiki article here.
As soon as she was assigned to the 22d Intelligence Squadron (22 IS), my Commander gave me the task of creating her first Commander’s Coin. I initially created some ideas (below), but they were rejected for not having enough “22 IS” in them (I thought the 3 guys was kinda funny though).
I then set off to satisfy their requirements by researching the Squadron’s history, and found that we are the only Squadron in our Group (the 707 ISRG) to perform all three missions of ISR: Intelligence Collection, Surveillance operations, and aerial Reconnaissance. So I thought about a coin design that could incorporate all of those elements. I came up with the below concept by combining pieces of photographs or drawings that would represent those elements:
The different features are:
1. Biplanes representing our original mission of aerial reconnaissance that…
2. …continued into the jet age.
3. A satellite dish representing “silver age” of surveillance.
4. And an high-tech-looking data corner representing the intel collection portion.
The first step to creating the coin in Blender was to make the coins edge by making a 256-sided circle, extruding the outer edges along the x&y for just a short bit, then deleting the interior leaving me the outer edge which I could then extrude along the z axis. Then I took the top/bottom/left/right-most faces and extruded them into the center to make the edges for the four corners, or “cells”.
Next was to create the satellite dish. There are two different methods placed on top of each-other. For the bottom portion (grid mesh), I took a plane, used the loop cut tool to give me the right number of edges so I could extrude out the grid mesh lines. I then rotated them, stopping every 15 degrees or so. Those 15 degree increments were then welded together to give me the support bars going from the center to edge:
The upper portion (detail mesh) took a UVsphere with all but one of the rings deleted. That remaining ring was then duplicated and spun around. A triangular receiver boom was added using box modeling and flattened out using scaling:
Next I used a biplane mesh created by TurboSquid user pauljs75. I place the aircraft where I wanted them, tabbed into edit mode and S > Z > .01 to scale them down the z-axis to 1% of their original thickness:
Lastly was to create the jet cell:
The blade was created using a plane and the subsurface modifier. After setting the blade’s origin to the center of the coin, I spun-duplicated it to make the several blades required.
This portion was made by taking a torus and slicing it in half and shaping it for the outer portion, and using a circle+extruding for the inner portion.
The last portion for the back was to make the intelligence cell. For the network node map it was just planes and circles put into position. The wave form is two separate meshes, one white, one chrome in reverse. They were created with just a sub-divided plane with the edges pulled into position:
The front of the coin was created in Blender as a 2D image. I used text, circles and planes to create everything:
The final key was to sell the idea, so I made the following video and presented it to our squadron’s leadership (please view in HD):
After a few tweaks, the final design was sent off to be stamped. We ordered 200 2.5″ diameter coins and a few weeks later a very heavy box arrived!
I hope you enjoyed reading about how the coins were made using Blender. If you have any questions or comments please feel free to post them below. Thank you!
After taking an break from Blender (which was broken up by that coin), I decided that now is the right time to not only get back into the .blend, but also begin using 2.5x. I have spent the last hour or two going through tutorials, guides, etc trying to figure this thing out.
To help those who have not made the switch yet, I’ve compiled a list of all the problems I ran into, and the solutions I used. I hope this will be helpful to others during their switch.
If I have missed something please feel free to post your solution.
1. Get back into the rotation:
a. The first thing I did was get into top view, this is important to do this now before we change our settings, it’ll save you a step later on. You can do side, left, top, whatever, but your rotation will be lopsided if you follow the below settings without first changing the view. Once we do the below steps, you can change it back to camera view if you really want to.
b. To access the user preference area, instead of dragging down the top bar like in 2.4x we now have a dedicated window:
c. I made the following changes to my user settings. BlenderNewbie’s Kernon Dillon posted a quick tip on the meaning of the Window Draw Method in the System tab. Automatic worked for me, but you may experience different effects. What we are still missing, however, is middle-mouse button to pan-view, rather than rotate-view. This is a little bit of an annoyance to me, but I’ll learn to get over it if I have to.
2. Make some hot(key) additions:
a. First take a look at this hot-key chart to see if you prefer the 2.5x defaults, or if you want to change them.
b. Based on this tutorial, let’s make some hot-keys! This will add hot-keys to switch between vertex, edge, and face modes when you are in edit mode. Making these additions should save you a lot of time by just hitting ’1′, ’2′, or ’3′ to switch between the three selection modes. It will not alter your layer-selection hot-keys while in the other modes.
c. If you want to change your hot-keys, just find the action you want to change by using the search box or scrolling through the options, then click over the applicable item that needs changing (mouse/keyboard + key).
3. Render window change:
I liked it when you hit render and a new window would pop up. In 2.53 it defaults to changing your 3d view to the image editor view, which you have to switch back once you’re done. I’m not a fan of this, and there are two ways to change it:
a. Basic change:
b. A more interesting change that will open the door to some interesting possibilities:
For this method you’ll have to render once, then make the above change. Now each time you render it’ll render to this window instead of the main 3d viewport.
Why is this a “more interesting” method? Well, you can make that “user preferences” window any window you want. This will open up some possibilities that hasn’t been explored in any other version of Blender. Do you want to have a window with all your mesh tools that you can move around and not have it docked to the side? There you go! Do you want to have a special window for image painting or UV mapping? There you go! The possibilities really are endless with Blender, and if you’ve used another 3d program before you know how useful these little floating windows can be.
These are just the first few things that I noticed that really bothered me, as more come up I’ll add to this post. Please feel free to add your own solutions to the 2.4x -> 2.5x move.
March 24th marks one year of using Blender and being active on the BlenderNewbies forum. Prior to Blender, I used 3ds starting with R4 for DOS in 1995 and finishing with Max 7. I was never able to model anything during that time, so my prior experience was unproductive (but it helped me learn the terminology).
Below is my showreel. Viewing from within Vimeo will allow HD (click here).
