{"id":501,"date":"2009-01-12T22:11:54","date_gmt":"2009-01-13T03:11:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/?p=501"},"modified":"2009-01-13T19:48:48","modified_gmt":"2009-01-14T00:48:48","slug":"the-domino-effect-blender-revisited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/2009\/01\/12\/the-domino-effect-blender-revisited\/","title":{"rendered":"The Domino Effect: Blender Revisited"},"content":{"rendered":"

A quick post today;\u00a0 I was back to work for the first time in three glorious weeks, and I have to admit that it only took about two hours of the chaos inherent in office life to get me pining nostalgically for my morning cup of tea in the living room with the cat purring contentedly on the back of the chair behind me.\u00a0 I will be calling it an early night tonight and trying not to get too exhausted in my first week back.<\/p>\n

You may recall that some time back, I mentioned that I was fooling around with a package of 3d modelling software<\/a> called Blender<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 Part of my last vacation hurrah on Saturday and Sunday was to spend some quality time in front of the monitor fiddling about with this little package of digital wonders.\u00a0 I was greatly assisted in getting back up to speed by a terrific series of tutorials posted on YouTube by super3boy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The video below is a brief animation I rendered after completing super3boy’s 19th blender tutorial<\/a>, on the subject of domino physics.\u00a0\u00a0 The animation shows a series of “dominoes” set up on a plane;\u00a0 the first domino falls over and knocks over the next one in sequence, causing a tower of dominoes to crash to the ground.\u00a0 It was remarkable how simple this was to create.\u00a0 All it took was some very basic modelling – creating and scaling a mesh cube, really – then copying the “domino” several times and placing it on the plane.\u00a0\u00a0 Blender takes care of the rest;\u00a0 the physics of the virtual world are already coded in the software and all the (ahem) visual artist need do is designate the appropriate objects as “actors” in the scene to be animated.\u00a0 A brief key sequence starts the “game engine”, which is the piece of software that calculates the physical outcome of the scene you’ve created (in this case, tumbling dominoes) and – last but not least, a command to render the scene into the desired video format.\u00a0\u00a0 It took only about five to ten minutes of my interaction with the computer to do this;\u00a0 the rest was taken care of by the software.\u00a0 I am flabbergasted.\u00a0 Blender is also capable of adding textures, lighting and shading effects to all of the objects (none of which are evident in the scene below, as I didn’t take the time to apply these effects), which is to say it’s capable of making the animation look a hell of a lot more realistic than the sequence below.\u00a0\u00a0 Right now, I’m just astounded by the ease with which this sequence was created.<\/p>\n

<\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n

I am looking very much forward to using Blender more extensively in some video projects I have germinating in the recesses of my mind.\u00a0 I am especially anxious to explore the video compositing capabilities of the package, and to combine 3d effects created and rendered in Blender with actual video footage captured from live action cameras.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A quick post today; I was back to work for the first time in three glorious weeks, and I have to admit that it only took about two hours of the chaos inherent in office life to get me pining nostalgically for my morning cup of tea in the living room with the cat purring […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,28,515],"tags":[649,650,1169,1168,1208,1170],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=501"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":503,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501\/revisions\/503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}