I’ve used and created a few rigs now for my different animated shorts and test animations and I’ve had my share of frustrations with the process. First off, it can be quite tedious to create even a mediocre one. Second, it’s hard to create a good one; forget about how hard it is to create an excellent one! All of my rigging experience post " Penguin Flight" have come from a tutorial I read from the Blender Summer of Documentation. Even then, I didn’t do it from the rigging tutorial (which is incomplete in the most interesting of places) ; rather I did it based off of the Character Animation tutorial (which is quite, quite good and got me started after “Penguin Flight”. In fact, you may recognize it as the source of Raul Domingo).

First up, a coaster that Penguin Pete designed the texture for:

then the entire scene with a texture I made for the table:

My latest attempt at computer animation is called, Shrodinger’s Cat. Check it out!

I don’t like posting too many videos because they could be removed at any time, leaving this post worthless. However, here are some neat cartoons I found. The first one, “Wanted”, I found because it was featured in issue #92 of 3D World. It was the final project of some German film students. It took them 6 months to complete.

“Bath Time” is a cute CG short I found on youtube after watching “Wanted”:

I’ve heard about Yafray so much and I’ve seen that it can deliver VERY photorealistic shots. The Blender internal renderer is not bad - as a matter of fact, it’s awesome. However, for all the really realistic stuff people tend to use Yafray. I tried to use it before, but all I got was a blank screen. Today, doing some research, I found out that, for some reason, the lights need to be jacked up in order for Yafray to work. Click on any of the pictures to see a larger size.

Thanks to the helpful users over at blenderartists.org, I was able to solve the problem of the water turning black upon landing on the table in my fluid simulations. Apparently, I needed to turn on TraShadows (transparent shadows). You may want to save this for your last step because it causes the renders to take a LOT longer. I put the cup, table, and water with TraShadows on and you can see the results. (Click for full size)

I tried another shot at using the physics engine and here’s my latest work. I rendered this at full HD resolution so it took 2 days and 7 hours to render these 990 frames. Enjoy!

Back to Basics - Bullet Physics Engine Dominoes (Part 2) from djotaku on Vimeo

Back to Basics - Fluid Simulation (Part 2) from djotaku on Vimeo

Copied verbatim from my vimeo page:

I tried another fluid simulation. I still have a few things to learn.

1. It appears that inertia caused the water to fly out of the cup - I did move it relatively quickly. How can I lift the glass of water without causing all the water to shoot out.
2. Why is the water black when it hits the table? I had that issue in the first simulation and it also appears to be the case in the tutorial I followed the first time around. However, this is obviously non-realistic. I really intend to investigate this.

Back to Basics - Soft Body - Towel falling on Table from djotaku on Vimeo

Back to Basics - Bullet Physics Engine Dominoes Part 1 from djotaku on Vimeo