Sago Lane

Wysard – sketches

Sacha — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 06:27:38 +0000

the term “wizard”…. from Middle English wysard (from wys “wise” and the -ard suffix also in drunkard etc.) – different sources

According to this source: “… but wizard began as an insult equivalent to ‘smart ass’ or ‘big brain’,…”

Inspired by the Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett, which I started rereading… in English this time.

Trying out some digital painting. For someone who only really does flat coloring and shading will need a lot of practice.

Theory for Storytelling and Writing

Sacha — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 04:18:36 +0000

THEORY OF UNEXPLAINED EXTRAORDINARY ALL PROBLEM-SOLVING EVENTS

If, during the climax of the story, when things look really bad for the protagonist, and the audience thinks “boy, I wonder how he’s going to get out of this mess”, something extraordinary happens, just like that and without any explanation, which solves all the problems of the protagonist, the audience might feel screwed*.

* figuratively speaking

Healthy Gums & Pointy Teeth

Sacha — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 04:13:10 +0000

Again inspired by the students’ production (revolving a scene inside a shark’s mouth), I did another quick test in Blender. My goal wasn’t to recreate the shark’s mouth, but more to focus on materials, lighting and other settings to achieve a satisfying and convincing result.

Click for full version

In a scene like this different factors need to be considered; from the light sources (mainly coming from 1 side) to characteristics of materials (teeth and gums) to other real life effects (like Depth of Field).

In the animated image below I broke it down to the more important factors and passes I used for this simple test scene.

Click for full animated version

No ray tracing was used for this image.

Hairy balls

Sacha — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 06:30:47 +0000

After doing some simple benchmarks in the school I work at, I found out my pc is the slowest of all computers. With rendering it’s even 25% slower than the infamous laptops of some of the students. Another difference however is that everyone is using Maya, while I’m the only one playing with Blender. While the students struggle with their raytraced rendering (tweaking & waiting), I’m able to render out some decent non-raytraced images in very short amounts of time.

With Blenders special Strand rendering the hair and fur is no exception:

Tip: for full versions right-click on the thumbnails and select Open Link in New Window

Non-photo realistic hairball

around 84.000 strands
render time 56 sec
render size HD (1920×1080)

Blond hairball

100.000 strands
render time 1 min 5 sec
render size HD (1920×1080)

My office desktop: 2GHz – 2CPUs, 2046MB RAM

I truly love Blender…

Sacha

Sky

Sacha — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 17:10:39 +0000

Photos were taken somewhere in 2007

1st post – a simple 3d test

Sacha — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 04:08:36 +0000

For my first post a lighting and compositing test I did in Blender.

The model is from Bathpups, one of the student groups that are currently in production in the school I work at.

For the technical geeks:

no raytracing
render time 38 seconds for 720×576 on a dual core
FSA (Full Sample Anti-aliasing) enabled, which increased render time with +/- 14 seconds