What you been up to, Stopsecret?

Ok, ok, this blog seems somewhat neglected lately, as you may have noticed. It’s not that I’m giving up on it, but these days I’m into The Legend Team a lot. So just to let you know, if you want to read more from me, please visit http://thelegendteam.wordpress.com/

As for other things, may as well throw it out there: made this sculpt recently:

It seemed to come out pretty well (thanks for the reference, the-blueprints.com!) Well, I hope you all enjoy this turn of seasons, have a great memorial day, and hopefully I can come up with some more interesting stuff later

-Stopsecret

Predicting Animation Time (Blender 3D Tutorial)

So, has this happened to you? An animation that was going to take ‘a few minutes’ turns out to be an hour or two. Want to know about how much time your animation is going to eat? Why should you want to know? Well, say you’re going out to the store for awhile. You’re gonna be gone for about three hours, and want to know how much time it will take to render out your 250 frame animation. You want to be able to play video games and browse blogs on your computer when you get back, so you want the animation to take less than the three hours. How will we go about this? So, for starters, render out a frame, don’t use the animation button, just render out a frame.

(Note: if you used the compositor, be sure to wait for it to finish its thing before continuing…)

Ok, so say your frame looked something like that, see where that arrow is pointing?  That’s your render time. That is pretty much all you will need to predict the following. I will now get into some math used to produce the final result. I will tell you the steps and leave footnotes for all you math-lovers out there.

Step 1:

Punch in your render time in seconds into the calculator. Divide by 60[1]. In this case, it would be 41/60 [2] or about  .683.

Step 2:

Take your number and multiply by  that by the number of frames you have in total [3]. In this case .683 • 250 or about 170.75.

Step 3:

That’s 170.75 minutes to render! If you want to get how many hours this is, divide by 60 again [4]. In this case, 170.75/60 or about 2.85 hours! Looks like in this case, you would maybe make it home in time to do your fun stuff without having to wait!

Step 4 (for hour-minutes):

To get minutes, take the end fraction and multiply by 60. In this case, .85 • 60 [5]. The end result being about 2 hours and 51 minutes.

[1] : There are 60 seconds in a minute, dividing by 60 takes the portion of a minute, in this case 41, and turns it into a fraction. In this case, the frame takes about 0.683 minutes to render.

[2] : The 41 comes from rounding the 40.63 up.

[3] : This takes the fraction of a minute you had and multiplies that by 250, if each frame takes .683 minutes to render than you would repeat that 250 times, or 250 • .683.

[4] : There are 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour, the second time you divide by sixty, we are taking 170.75/60 hours. It is much like [1].

[5] : This basically undoes step three to the fractional part, converting back to seconds.

So, did you bother reading the footnotes? If you did, high-five! So, I hope you enjoyed this little tip, but there are some things you also should know:

• Your render will probably not be constant, different things may cause the renderer to take over the predicted time.
• You may want to leave a nice gap on the end of your render time to account for this, say, changing the 2.85 hours to 2.95.
• You may make a mistake in your math, so if you are rendering out 500 frames at 20 seconds each and your calculator says it’s going to take two minutes, go back and check your math

Hope you enjoyed, even if I may have lost you at some point! Please feel free to rate and comment!

-Stopsecret Design

P.S: Special thanks to, I think it was Project London… A texture. If it was wrong of me to use it on my ship, please comment and I can get rid of it. Do you guys want a fuller picture of the ship?  ok, ok…

Click to enlarge

Wow, it’s been awhile…

Haha, yes, it has been awhile since I posted last. But actually, here’s the moral of this story:

Check out those sick views! And all after not posting for an extended period of time…  So, here’s the thing. When you don’t post for awhile, people stop and start to wonder why you don’t post. This causes them to frequently check the blog, waiting for the new post, BAM! Super views! It even stinks that I’m writing this, as my views will probably go down. Moral: Procrastinate, disappoint your blog followers, and you will be rewarded with great views!

hahaha, just kidding

Sorry it’s been this long… Should’ve posted something sooner. So, what have I been up to lately? Quite a bit of Legend Team stuff. I think it’s good to balance the pressures and demands of your regular life with the amount of time you spend coding, modeling, or game developing I think you would agree. So, yes, even if it’s short, I think this post will help me stick to my post-a-week thing. And perhaps add some humor to your weekend. I think I should have some more time to blog with summer break coming up and all. Until next time I post, hopefully not too long from now, goodnight! -rubs eyes and looks at 11:15 PM on computer menu bar-

-Stopsecret Design

Foreign Horizon

Yep, another space rendering. Blender and Photoshop Elements are a great combination “Foreign Horizon”, enjoy!

(Click to enlarge)

As good as my last one? Any areas you would improve on?

-Stopsecret Design

Looming Planets (Rendering)

I would like to get more into space renderings, and may share my finished products here with y’all. Here’s one I recently made, Enjoy!:

(click to enlarge) Have any feedback for me? I’d love to hear it!

-Stopsecret Design

 

Getting started in 3D

Sorry guys! I’ve been working on The Legend Team quite a bit lately, and I probably should’ve gotten a post up sooner

So, I like to think of myself as an advanced user when it comes to Blender (I mean, I don’t think I’m at the level of someone like Andrew Price or Jonathan Williamson…). If you classify yourself as above my talents, (or if you ARE Andrew Price or Jonathan Williamson lol) maybe you should stop reading

So, if I had a nifty time machine and could go back in time, telling myself how to proceed when it came to learning Blender, some of what I would say may be on the lines below.

So, for starters, one thing I think you should be coming to the learning process with is desire. I think to a large extent, the amount you want to learn 3D will affect how quickly you learn things. If you come with a “Let’s do this!” attitude, you may learn 3D quite rapidly (well, if you keep that attitude ). If you come to the table with a “Let’s get this over with…” attitude, I’d like to see the types of renderings you come up with… So, once you have the desire to learn 3D, you should learn the interface. You can take two approaches:

1. Explorer

Pressing random buttons, experimenting, and toying around may help you learn eventually… (recommended for limited/no internet access)

2. Follower

There are a ton of great tutorials online, that can get you started in a jiffy.

I think finding a balance of both is good. If you like experimenting, you may learn new things that can be hard to find on the internet. However, there may be things on the internet that you wouldn’t find easily by experimenting yourself! Also, USE REFERENCE IMAGES FOR MOST OF YOUR MODELS!!! How can I emphasize this enough. Want a good model? I would recommend getting good reference images. I may even go so far as to likening (note: most circumstances, I think sometimes just sitting down to model is ok…) sitting down without reference images to a man who sits down to write a story without an outline… I think a lot of practice is needed for bigger projects. I would not recommend modeling a sports car as a first project Don’t be too ambitious, or you could get frustrated, and don’t be too un-ambitious either (hey look, I made a UV sphere!) or you may not get anywhere fast. Ah yes, speed. Don’t expect (unless you’re really fast) any beautiful renders in five minutes. If you’re gonna model, make sure you set some time aside to do it. And don’t be frustrated if it looks like junk after the first pass. Keep on moving… Also, don’t underestimate the compositor, learn how to use it!!! You ought to find it a nice help to you. At any rate, if you apply yourself, have a good computer, and patience, I think you will go far

Hope this helped you in some capacity! Questions? Anything I missed? Are you Andrew Price or Jonathan Williamson? lol. feel free to comment below.

-Stopsecret

P.S: Feel free to request a tutorial on this page: Request A Tutorial

Going somewhere, number six?

 

So, a little explanation of the title there… Some of you may be familiar with the old TV series, The Prisoner. I recently got ahold of one of the rarer Lotus 7′s that is a replica of the car belonging to number six in the show (Patrick McGoohan). Yesterday was  sunny, so my friend let me drive it. The car is so cool I wanted to share it with you all:

 

 

 

 

Did I get you? The car is a 3d model, integrated into the film! I used Blender’s motion tracking… Which, I will say, is pretty sweet! I hope you enjoyed seeing an example of it! I guess this would be a great opportunity to tell you not to believe everything you see on TV…

Want to do your own motion tracking? You can find a great tutorial here!:

http://www.blenderguru.com/videos/introduction-to-camera-tracking

Comments? Critiques? Feel free to share below!

Be seeing you!

-Stopsecret Design

Humvee

Hi all! I have been working on a Humvee lately, and am happy with the results This came out really well, and I think I may sell it on Unity’s asset store. It comes with various paint jobs, as you can see below. Anyway, it could be a great opportunity for actually making money off my hobby. If I do go through with selling it, expect another blog post soon Gallery below:

For those of you who are not content just looking, here is a webplayer showcase (ctrl to change textures):

Click to play

Paints:

-Bluish Clean

-Burnt

-Dirty Green

-Gray Rusty

-Light Green

So, can I ask you, my readers, a few things? If you were, theoretically, a game developer, and this fit the style of your game, would you buy this? If so, how much would you pay? Is there any features that turned you off when you looked in the gallery or played the web-player? Feel free to comment below!

-Stopsecret Design

Grumman Tiger Low-poly Model

Yes, another low poly model from me. This one is of a Grumman Tiger. Gallery Below:

Hope you enjoy! I think I may be getting better at modeling real-life stuff. Note: Don’t underestimate the usefulness of reference images.

Also, I highly recommend getting an account on www.the-blueprints.com, they have great references for vehicles If I make another one, I think I may release it for free to you guys, what do you think? Anyway, until later, bye!

-Stopsecret Design

Low-poly Ferrari 458 Italia

Hi there everyone! Here’s a quick post showing you this Ferrari I made. It’s pretty low poly I think, perhaps even low-poly enough that it could be used in an iPhone game… (rendered in Blender)

Gallery below:

Feel free to tell me what you think!

-Stopsecret