Bill Garrett

Prepping footage for motion tracking

Ian Hubert is the mad god of Blender. He’s put out some excellent videos, but the series that speaks to me is his “virtual set” stuff, including this video: “Whenever you’re shooting, try to make it an optimal situation”. He goes on to give advice on how to do this: Try to keep the shotContinue reading “Prepping footage for motion tracking”

Masks characters day 3

I’ve found two very useful tools for quickly creating characters: CharMorph, a Blender plugin similar to and partially derived from MB-Lab This hair-styling tutorial, which brought a host of useful tips and tricks to people like me, who didn’t properly know how to use all of Blender’s hair-management tools CharMorph is very clearly still betaContinue reading “Masks characters day 3”

Masks characters day 2

I’ve got the basics of modeling and importing anime-styled characters, so now it’s time to give them some environments in which to operate. After a bit of searching, I came up with two apparently fast options: This amazing piece of work, showcasing Blender’s image management abilities to effectively turn a real-life HDRI into an anime-esqueContinue reading “Masks characters day 2”

Masks characters day 1

I found some preset hair on booth.pm, and finally figured out how to navigate the Clothing Editor in VRoid Studio to find the more specific settings. The resulting render is found above. Things I learned: The preset hair has no rigging whatsoever, I need to BYOB (Bring Your Own Bones) if I do this again.Continue reading “Masks characters day 1”

Location filming during a pandemic

Given the current COVID-19 situation, travel to typically photogenic destinations for photography and video is unlikely. Plus, I don’t have either time or budget for such things. I need to shoot closer to home. So what are my options? Atlas Obscura is a directory of “the world’s hidden wonders”. It’s got a searchable map ofContinue reading “Location filming during a pandemic”

Starfield

I created a moving star field with particle systems. I learned, or re-learned, the following things: I needed a randomizer for my ColorRamp node, to give stars their unique colors. Particle Info nodes don’t work with Eevee, but Object Info nodes work just fine. On that note, I finally plugged my head into ColorRamp, becauseContinue reading “Starfield”

Animating VRoid Studio models in Blender

I wanted to import VRoid Studio avatars into Blender and animate them, but I didn’t have a source of motion capture data. However, the CMU mocap data set is freely available! I needed two other things: the BVH Retargeter plugin, and a custom JSON file to do the mapping. Here’s that JSON file, as aContinue reading “Animating VRoid Studio models in Blender”