Finally my new official Blender Foundation training DVD “Track, Match, Blend” is shipping! It took a little bit longer than expected, but here it is!

It contains around 10 hours of training for Blender’s Motiontracking module. It covers everything from simple 2D-Tracking, image stabilization and setting up a classic 4-corner-pin-shot to advanced camera- and object-tracking, including face-deformation and marker-removal. Here’s a link to the content page of the DVD: http://www.blender3d.org/e-shop/images/TrackMatchBlend_Previewsite/

Watch the trailer! And then buy the DVD! :)

Even though the web is already being flooded by news about the release of Blender 2.61, I want to report about it here too.

When Blender 2.59 was the final stable version of the Blender 2.5x development, which ported everything from 2.49 to the new 2.5 codebase and mainly gave us a great new UI, a smoother workflow and some great new tools, the 2.6x development is bringing us some awesome new features.
Blender 2.60, which has been released in October, included 3d-Audio, some improvements to the animation system and UI translation and other nice fixes.
One of the greatest releases of Blender ever is this one though.
Blender 2.61 includes production ready camera-tracking, a new physical based GPU realtime render engine, Ocean Simulation and Dynamic Paint, each of them a kickass feature.

Below a few videos that describe what these features do:

Dynamic Paint basically let’s you paint with meshes or particles on other meshes. And not only does it apply color, it also includes a wave-simulation and other ways to do interesting effects.

The Ocean-Simulator is exactly what the name says: It simulates an ocean. It is a pretty straight-forward workflow and performs really well.

Cycles is a totally amazing rendering engine that allows not only physically based Global Illumination, but also live tweaking of the render in the 3d Viewport. It’s an interactive way of setting up your render settings while rendering. Some features are still missing, but it’s a really great start.

For me the biggest and most important feature is the camera-tracking module. Though it is not a one-click solution like you get in Syntheyes, it allows you to get accurate and precise tracks. The fact that it is built right into the 3d-Application makes it a godsend for VFX.
There are already lots of great results on the web, so I’ll just link a short overview of the general workflow here.

Well, it is exciting!

The development of Blender’s matchmoving module keeps on being amazing.
After adding some new algorithms for feature-tracking, which allow to accurately track insane amounts of motion-blur, now we also got object-tracking.
In principle object-tracking is very similar to camera-tracking, it’s just that the movements have to be kinda inverted, so that you don’t have a moving camera, but a moving object. The challenge is to integrate a moving object into a shot with a moving camera. Luckily Sergey Sharybin took this challenge within a week and gave us intuitive and powerful object tracking in Blender.
Below you find one of my first tests with it, and also a link to a tutorial on blendercookie.com.

A little quickie from today:
Ever since we have a pingpong table in the office, work has become even more fun!
Of course I couldn’t resist and tried blender’s camera tracker on it.
So here’s a little tribute to a famous scene from Forest Gump:

Matchmoving, animating, compositing, editing and sound design has been done in Blender.
Thanks Johan for the great performance!
:)

Here’s a demo of the current tracking workflow in Blender.
Though I have to admit that it is already outdated. In the last 3 days a lot of new features have been added. That’s why there is also a tutorial below. But even that is outdated! :D If Sergey continues like that we have a fully mature tracker in a few days. Though even this one is already pretty stable and usable!

Here’s a tutorial for the tracker: http://www.blendercookie.com/2011/07/14/gsoc-tomato-branch-camera-tracking/

And finally it’s here!
We got 3D Tracking right inside Blender!
Sergey Sharybin really is a coding machine. Just a few days after he implemented a good and stable 2D tracker he added 3d scene reconstruction. The results are surprisingly stable, so kudos to the developers of libmv too!

Here are some results:

My new tutorial “Blender 3D Compositing” is now available at cmiVFX.com.

I know, I promised a launch for september, but it took longer than expected. Originally I just wanted to do the follow-up to my previous tutorial about camera-tracking with Syntheyes and create a tutorial about inserting CG elements into some HD footage. But when I started recording I realized that you already need a strong foundation of compositing knowledge to be able to follow the required steps for CG integration. That’s why I decided to do the whole show and create a complete and extensive compositing tutorial that not only shows you how to integrate CG into film and add some nice effects but also goes into a lot of details of the technical side of compositing. So be prepared for more than 5 hours of nodes, renderlayers, renderpasses, pixelmath, filters, masks and colorgrading!

Here’s the teaser-vid:

And the finished result of the tutorials example file looks like this:

For more see the official press-release below
(more…)

Back in May 2010 we were invited to hold a lecture about our work on an industrial promotion film at the 1st CAVA Conference for Animation and Video Artists in Leipzig. Finally the organizers uploaded a video of our presentation on their blog that you can watch below. It has become a pretty long lecture and we were talking in German… ;-)

Danko took over the main part of the lecture giving an accurate overview of organizing a 3D video production ranging from team building, linking complex scenes with external references, Final Render Stage-1 R3, Back Burner, distributed bucket rendering, interactive rendering to RED camera workflow in terms of green screen and 3D and how we managed it with our decentralized working structure at 3DZentrale.

Hendrik, visual artist and film maker, was talking about setting up the storyboard, coordinating “real” movie shots with camera tracking and the use of light in the 3D environment ( starting at 0:05:00 ).

Johan, architect, did most of the 3D modeling and design work for the buildings in the video and gave an insight about his workflow from analyzing architectural plans on to modeling optimized and instanced 3D buildings to proper exporting to other 3D software tools ( starting at 0:37:00 ).

At the moment we´re not allowed to show the whole promotion video on the web, but as soon as it will be officially released, we will post it here for you. For now have a look at around 1:00:00 where we showed some still images…