Sculptris owned by Pixologic, more reasons to get Unlimited Clay

Hi guys

I’m glad for DrPetters, the excellent dev behind Sculptris, good ideas deserve good rewards and he got what he’s asked for
I don’t know what will be the future of sculptris, but one thing is clear, Pixologic will not maintain a “free” tool that overlaps his flagship Zbrush, so I think they will integrate that into Zbrush but not overnight, Sculptris has a community and that should be handled with care… anyway, enough of random thoughts, at the bottom I feel a bit sad because the open community lost a good opportunity but at the same time it let space for Unlimited Clay in the Blender sculpting feature set more than ever
So I feel more compelled to finish it , I only wish to have more skills to finish it faster. Help is very needed and welcome.

On the other side, in august (that are my regular job vacations) will start the roof building, I’m crossing fingers because in September-November the hurricanes season will start again

Cheers to everyone
Farsthary

Growing 2D flourish vectors in Blender

Hi all!

This time is a simple tutorial about making in Blender 2D vines growing like in AfterEffects, I have search in the web for it but all I have found regarding Blender are the 3D simple curve growing effects but 2D branching flourish vector growing are much more beautiful and ever present in AfterEffects compositing.

During this week (busy with a very interesting course), I had nonetheless some time to play with Blender and try to achieve this so I hope this tip will help people who have wondered the same.

The only limitation I currently see with the method is that you could not control the size of the billboard object in a local way, currently if you animate the size of the particles it will animate the size of all the particles, not the new ones as should be, it is a matter of internal code of the current particle system and I hope in the future could be fixed because then there will not be any limits on what could be achieved with this method.

Other ways to perform this effect in theory could be with animated dupliframes instances that act as a mask but dupliframes seems to not be included in 2.5 and in 2.4x are not animatable

Here is the example file

Cheers and hope you like the tip

Farsthary

From the middle of a course

Hi guys
I miss you all, I’m in the middle of the course “Interactive High Quality Rendering” in the UCI college in Havana, is based on the Monte Carlo rendering methods and the PBRT methods from Paul Guerrero a professor of a graphic research group at a Viena Institute. !WOW!
One thing is reading the PBRT book but another is actually getting things explained! I have clarified many things and concepts from my first attempt to write an unbiased render for Blender and I’m pretty sure that this course eventually will be reverted in Blender in the future
I have a long road-map now regarding Unlimited Clay and Particle surfacing after I finish this course but eventually I would like to contribute to the render module again with much more experience and best of all, for the time I finish my current projects I hope Blender render module will be merged with render branch and shading system improvements will be in place
And another important thing is that i have gather here tons of resources on graphics, math, physics papers, documents, etc (around 80 GB ) of many renown authors and researchers.
Cheers to all Farsthary

poll : Blender Foundation resources

Hi, this is one of the blog maintainers,

This is not an official move, only something to take the temperature over there (results will be published)

They’ve been some discussions recently about the resources of the Blender foundation for the future moves: a constant funding would allow to hire additional people for doing not very exciting but necessary stuffs (refactoring, quality control, etc..), like the great Matt Ebb has been doing for 8 months, killing bugs thanks to a generous donator.

This is why I’m  throwing a quick poll in order to give everyone some ideas….

Kind regards,

Lapinou