Blender adds Camera Tracking!

[knightly]

http://cgcookie.com/blender/2011/07/14/gsoc-tomato-branch-camera-tracking/

 

[PaulGriffith]

Do you use Blender Knightly? Is it worth sitting down for a few hundred hours and learning it haha?

 

[escher]

For the low-budget filmmaker who wants to look "shiny", your choices are either Blender (free) or Lightwave (not too pricey). Past that, you're in Maya territory which is much more expensive.

I haven't used the latest Blender but I've always fought with its interface. I love the Lightwave approach and they also have a super-friendly tight-knit forum community that helps out total newbies.

 

[knightly]

I do use blender and it's absolutely worth taking the couple of hours to overcome its interface (much better than it was in previous versions)... and it's free!

Here's some reference and the model/ animation I made from it (still working on the animation part, it's a bit wonky).





View attachment HM-Intro.3-H.264 800Kbps.mov

 

[escher]

I think that when Blender gets their new modern renderer fully in place I'll check it out again.

Here's some of my primitive prototype Lightwave work. Everything except for that first clouds shot and those three landscape images are Lightwave. (The clouds and landscapes were done with Vue.)

And this is total newbie stuff, done with the built-in renderer.

 

[knightly]

nice. My last 3D experiments were done w/ Infini-D, so I'm pretty happy with my progress... and I love the cost! It also is starting to show some possibilities as a compositor and color correction tool (roughly, but still free).

I've just figured out how to rotoscope with it today watching other videos... so one of the big drawbacks has been addressed (although not directly) by the developer community.

 

[zim9000]

Hey Knightly, thank you for the info! I gave it a shot once trying to follow a tutorial I found on how to make a wine bottle and did pretty good till the end. Hopefully as I watch the survival guide videos it will demonstate how to make a basic object and be able to animate it? If I or anyone else had any questions while creating something do you think you would be able to help out with them? Thanks man!

 

[knightly]

I tend to be a helpful person... I'd be happy to do what I can

 

[knightly]

http://mango.blender.org/
There's some youtube vids by blenderfoundation that showcase some of the work being done here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZalGrjGKSA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZalGrjGKSA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_oNv0uLxMA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_oNv0uLxMA

 

[knightly]

And this series is looking pretty cool: http://cgcookie.com/blender/2012/01/04/vfx-pipeline-compositing-part-1/

 

[FrankLad]

I'm one of those guys who downloads the latest version of Blender once every year or so and gives up on it after a while.

Though to be honest, I think it's more because I'm so accustomed to the 3D app* I've used since 1998, than it is a fault of Blender. Heh heh.

But man... it's got such an impressive feature set these days. Maybe I'll give Creative Cow's "Blender Survival Guide" a try. (Thanks, knightly!)





* trueSpace is now free: http://www.caligari.com/downloads.html

 

[knightly]

I was going to look at that Truespace, but it's windows only. Part of what I love about blender is that it's Mac/Lin/Win perfectly cross platform etc.... makes it wonderful at the level I'm at as no one I work with has the funds to outfit folks with computers... this allows anyone to work with us (part of what I love about Celtx too ).