Quick Dyntopo Sculpt

Ok, I'm officially a dyntopo fan.  I think I'll presculpt all the characters with this prior to retopology.  I'm at the point where I need lots of peripheral characters and background people.  Here's a secondary professor sculpt I pounded out in about an hour or less.

Finished a New Script

So I finished a new version of my texture paint script that works in concert with agisoft photoscan.  This is a screen grab of a trash can I scanned in retopoed and used the script to upgrade the texture.  If anyone wants the details of the work flow I can post it up, but I think I've got it down well enough to start churning out the props.

Little things add a lot...

Added flowers trees, mist pass DOF etc.  Getting close to calling it done and moving on to the next set.

Still working on the street.

added the F250 and the Pilot.

Ford F250

So here's Ford F250 I modelled with some scanned assets for the background and ground.  I still have some to do on the truck, but I thought this was interesting enough to post up.

Working On WorkFlow

Do you ever make so little progress on so many fronts that you're not sure what to post?   Well I feel as though the progress has been hampered much of late.  We moved our entire household and I've had to squeeze in work when I have free time. 

That being said I got a new toy for Christmas, well I bought it, it's Agisoft Photoscan.  I have been going wild taking pictures and scanning them in.  That's when I noticed a major shortcoming of the workflow.  Agisoft's scans are pretty crude sometimes and their textures and unwrapping leave a lot to be desired.  So I figured out that you can export Collada out of Agisoft and that gives you all of the camera positions.  I then was able to correlate the field of views and magnification for each camera back on the object.  What this allowed me to do is retopolgize the scans, unwrap them and then retexture the resultant object using texture painting in blender.  since this was somewhat tedious I decided to write a python script that automates the camera painting projection setup.  I finally got it working pretty well, below are a few objects I've scanned and started down this workflow path on.

Here is my first object fully completed through the new work flow, yes I can fly the camera around this beauty

Below is another example I'm in the middle of.  The Chair on the left is the scan, the chair on the right is my retopo of the scan (yes you can see I'm not done with the retopo yet as I just started on the scrolls.  After I am donw with them,  I will then texture paint the scan onto the new chair when I'm done.

Honda Pilot

I know it feels like I'm rarely posting, but I've been working on my modelling skills.  I'm thoroughly convinced I'm terrible at modelling, but also that I'm better than I was.  Here's my current project.  I've come to the conclusion that the correct way to model is to take your own reference photos.  This is my car so I have infinite access to taking more photos.

An Updated Photo with the model aligned to the camera:

Whirl Part 1 completed.

So long time no post.  My brother has been hard at work again with his class of students.  I think they did a superb job with the time and resources they had.  There is a lot of blender in here.  I did a lot of the rendering, the particle systems and modified the famous Agus3d scene to render the fly down the river in cycles.  Most of the river shots were done in Blender Internal, but the rest was rendered in Vue.  The king rising out of the river, smoke and transition from water to solid was done in blender with mostly cycles and Blender internal for the smoke and fire.

I have been working on the film in my spare time but have been busy moving and other various things.  I have actually completed most of the animation for two shots of the film.  Right now I'm putting cycles hair on my characters.

Ant World Update Update

So, having completed (well good enough for now) the materials stage of the ant landscape update.  I decided to try adding automatic foliage.  I haven't started coding the python yet, but wanted to manually create a scene to start coding.  I created a simple scene with materials from the script and then added trees with a manual weight map.  To create auto tree generation I've got to auto generate the particle density weight map in python with two criteria, height and slope.  I've also got to auto generate a tree from simple geometry and finally give that tree a foliage like material.  Then I apply a particle system to the terrain with the tree as the object(this is the easy part since I already have all this code from the cloud generator)  Anyway I did this manually to see how it would look before I start and here is what it looks like:

Ant Landscape with trees.

Note: right now the script is broken with absolutely current version of blender from graphicall or buildbot.  I am waiting to fix it when 2.64 comes out so I can tell everyone to use the release version.  Cycles changes so much I need a stable release with current features so I don't chase my tail so much.

You know you have a son when...

So blender nation had free clone troopers and my son wanted to see what 1 million looked like.  I dupliverted 280,000 and slowed blender to a crawl, so I just copied an instance 10,000 times, here's only 10,000, as close as I could get to a million.... yeah I know, this movie ain't ever getting done with so many tangets, but hey, why not....

Edit: So last night I got dupliverts working and I maxed out at 280,000.  I'm going to try the VBOs with the array modifier next (thanks for the input)

Joe is shape-keyed!

I did a rough shape key of all expressions I need for starting a scene and threw him into a rough set here:

When I say rough I mean rough.  I still have a LOT of detail to add to this scene, but I wanted to get a general feel for the layout of the scene.  I recorded the dialogue earlier and I'm ready to start animating him.  Obviously I need glass in the window and materials on the chairs and plates and stuff on the tables etc, but I was quite pleased with the over all feel.  From the blender artists thread for Joe I received feedback that I need to work on his hair.  I had pretty good hair from blender internal,but I no longer want to mix blender internal with cycles, so I'll go for polygon hair and if cycles gets real hair support soon I skip over to that.  I really want to try this set in Lux instead of cycles as it looks better in there, but I don't know if I want to pay the higher render time price.

Shape Key Tool Script

So I've been rigging a character lately and I really needed a way of copying individually selected vertex positions from one shape key to another. What actually happenned was I had to fix a topology error and bmesh screwed up the positions of the edited virtices in all the shape keys. I started to manually edit the position of each vertice to put it back to the basis position and this took forever so I wrote this script to fix each one. 

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?263316-Shape-Key-Tools

Free Buildings on Blend Swap

So I uploaded some of the buildings to blend swap for everyone's enjoyment!

Let me know if there are any problems in the model:

http://www.blendswap.com/blends/architecture/old-town-store-front-buildings/

Another Test Render

Another quick test render of a character in the set.  I'm ready to start animating and trying out scene's on the set.  A few more cars and I figure I'll work on some moving vans and possibly a semi tractor trailer truck too.  I am really struggling with the lighting... any comments welcome.