CleverPeople.com: Computer Graphics & Animation}

Light Nodes in Blender

Gary Wright II — Wed, 22 Sep 2021 19:43:59 -0400

Since I started learning Geometry Nodes, I've been using Eevee instead of Cycles, so until Curtis Holt published a tutorial I had never thought of using Nodes for lighting (currently only available in Cycles).

OBS Open Broadcaster Software

Gary Wright II — Fri, 10 Sep 2021 00:37:44 -0400

Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) is open source software for live streaming and recording video.

Address of the Bookmark: https://obsproject.com/

Bob Ross - The Joy of Painting

Gary Wright II — Sun, 15 Mar 2020 23:14:03 -0400

Bob Ross - The Joy of Painting series taught millions of artists how to paint a landscape in under 30 minutes.

NOTE: Please join us in boycotting the Bob Ross, Inc. company and products! Bob was such a wonderful human being, and the corporate vultures at BRI have disrespected his legacy with their greed. There is a documentary that started airing on Netflix in 2021 that explains what happened after Bob's death.

Address of the Bookmark: https://video.cleverthings.com/video/joy-of-painting-bob-ross-season-1-episode-1-

"GIMP" GNU Image Manipulation Program

Gary Wright II — Sun, 08 Mar 2020 14:49:53 -0400

GNU Image Manipulation Program or "GIMP" is an open source cross-platform that is my favorite for doing 2D graphics, especially manipulating images and post-processing.

Address of the Bookmark: https://www.gimp.org/

Blender 3D Bug Workaround - Opens in wrong display with Windows multiple displays

Gary Wright II — Fri, 24 Jan 2020 15:12:31 -0500

Scenario: On a Windows machine with multiple displays, Blender 3D opens in the wrong display window.

Cause: Something to do with how Blender finds primary display in Windows environment and that data is saved in the startup blend file???

Fix: A bug report (https://developer.blender.org/T34962) has been opened for a very long time, but we need to further narrow down the root cause in order to fix it.

Workaround: When Blender opens in the wrong display (usually after an upgrade or after saving a new startup.blend file), you have to change your Windows Display Settings, then resave your default startup file, then reset your WIndows Display Settings back to your normal configuration. When you reopen Blender, it should open in the primary display device.

NOTICE: Depending on your display dimensions and configuration, fixing Blender may cause you to have to reset some custom settings (like reorganizing your desktop shortcut icons). The inconvenience of having to reset the locations of a few icons after the process usually far outweighs the inconvenience of the blender bug.

Instructions:

Go to your desktop, right-click on your desktop and choose Display Settings
Go to Multiple Display settings and change from Extend to Duplicate Display, apply and click Keep Settings. Minimize settings window.
In Blender, resave your default.blend file by going to File -> Defaults -> Save Startup File and then close Blender.
Go back to Display Settings again (maximize the window or if you closed it: go to your desktop, right-click on your desktop and choose Display Settings).
Go to Multiple Display settings and change from Duplicate to Extend Display, apply and click Keep Settings. Close settings window.
Open up Blender and it should now open in the primary display device.

Blender 3D - Development Versions

Gary Wright II — Sat, 14 Dec 2019 04:00:57 -0500

Development Versions of Blender 3D - These versions have the latest features, but may be unstable. You can help test them and report any bugs.

NOTE: You should be careful about using development versions in production projects.

Address of the Bookmark: https://builder.blender.org/download/

Blender Nation

Gary Wright II — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 19:39:51 -0500

Blender Nation has daily news about projects using Blender 3D software.

Address of the Bookmark: https://www.blendernation.com/

CG Cookie

Gary Wright II — Tue, 04 Dec 2018 17:02:04 -0500

CG Cookie teaches how to use Blender 3d, Unity, and sculpting. I recommend starting with their 2d basic art concept courses. They have the individual courses available, but they've organized the course into "learning flows" that track your progress. The community checks your homework and keeps you inspired. They have several good introductory videos available for free, but I recommend purchasing an annual subscription to get the full courses. You can also purchase a monthly subscription. They are the best online art courses I've found available and they have great instructors who make things easy to follow and understand.

Address of the Bookmark: https://cgcookie.com/

Krita - Digital Painting Software

Gary Wright II — Tue, 04 Dec 2018 16:52:57 -0500

Krita is a free and open source digital painting software. Perfect for concept art, texture painting, creating illustrations or comics. I love how well it integrates with my graphics tablet and pen. Very powerful and full-featured.

Address of the Bookmark: https://krita.org

Blender 3d Animation Software

Gary Wright II — Tue, 04 Dec 2018 16:49:18 -0500

Blender is a free and open source 3d animation software. It is incredibly powerful, and a full featured to support your entire 2D or 3D animation workflow.

Address of the Bookmark: https://www.blender.org

Using AI to Automate Dialogue Animation of 3D Mesh Character Models

Gary Wright II — Tue, 07 Nov 2017 13:41:31 -0500

I believe I've developed a process to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automate the dialogue animation of 3D mesh character models. Let me start with the vision: I want to...

Record an audio track of character dialogue.
Analyse the audio track using speech-to-text artificial intelligence.
Receive speech-to-text results, but with the time offset information for words and phonemes.
Import those encoded results into a Blender 3D animation timeline.
Blender uses those results to match phonemes with timeline.
Mouth shape from character pose library is selected based on phoneme and timeline.

While this sounds like a dream (because it would be), I actually think the pieces for this are already out there. With Google Speech API, I can post my audio file to the AI and get reliable speech-to-text conversion with word confidence scores. If in our Python script, we set:

enable_word_time_offsets=True

we get the text results with time offsets for each word. I'm going to check with Google, but I bet there is a debug flag available to get the offsets for time offsets for each individual phoneme. Why can't we use that data to re-associate the words with our timeline in Blender?

Working from the other end of the pipeline, I see a Papagayo product that puts text into mouth shapes, and I see a Blender addon called Automatic Lipsync that puts the Papagayo data into Blender.

Mission: Don't we now have the technology to put ALL of these together into either a addon plugin, or better yet core?

I'm fairly new to Blender, so this is going to be above my skill level - but folks - although ambitious I see no reason why this isn't possible? Where do I begin to make this happen or what would be the most appropriate forum to further the discussion?

Resources:

A primer on using Google Cloud Speech API and how speech recognition works.

A page with instructions and example Python code for processing audio with time offsets.

The official page for Papagayo.

The official page for Lip Sync Add-on.

And of course, Blender 3D!