New “Human Generator” addon for blender allows you to create and customize any character. It allows you to design your character’s gender, ethnicity, body shape, hair, age, clothes, and it’s fully rigged. Cost for the personal license is $68 and $128 for the commercial use. It’s created by Oliver J. Post and Alexander Lashko.
Simple clicks and adjustments to createVarious poses and clothing
If you’re used to working in Maya and want something to help you port over files from it to Clarisse this tool is awesome.
Muhammad Etman created it. Here’s the gumroad to purchase if you like what you see. It’s $70 but for what it does it could really speed up your workflow into Clarisse.
What’s great is you can still set things up in Clarisse as you’d normally do but now you have the ability to just send over files you want from Maya easily. Update a camera in Maya, click to send over the camera. If you have a huge geometry set you want to port over now it just takes the push of a button to send it over. Now, you can manually setup your shaders in Clarisse or you can assign an arnold shader in Maya and port that over. Super handy.
Here is a great example of using it for a large scene.
Here’s the UI for it (you can set it up in different viewing modes)
Select the elements you want to port over, click “add” and then send it over to Clarisse. It’s that easy.
Maya file:
Simple click to send over the camera, light, and geometry with shaders
Clarisse file after sending over elements (3 clicks later):
I came across this amazing series on YouTube by StudioBinder. Their YouTube channel goes over everything video and photo production. Their series the Shot List is a must watch on a series of ultimate guides to camera shots, camera framing, camera angles, Depth of field, Camera Gear, Camera Movement, Camera Lens, and Frame Rate. This is a must watch series to increase your knowledge in cinematography and photography. Definitely worth the investment. Enjoy.
If you want to study other movies for their cinematography these two sites are wonderful resources:
There’s been big buzz on NFT Art over the past several months and now it’s really starting to explode.
So what’s NFT? Or should I say “Non-Fungible Tokens.” And what are NFT artworks?
NFT art is a record of who owns a digital piece of art using the blockchain technology. Any piece of digital content can be “minted” into a NFT that creates a file which lives on the “blockchain” which tracts the entire history of that piece. That NFT art can be sold and re-sold and a record exists of it’s ownership and price value. The payment for these artworks is cryptocurrrencies, usually Ethereum. Now, the head scratcher is after you’ve bought a NFT artwork, you don’t receive an actual piece of art with your purchase. You’ve bought the non-fungible token which is just a long series of letters and numbers that is dropped into your digital wallet. You don’t receive some physical file or print to hang on your wall.
An NFT is non-fungible because it is not interchangeable. Each NFT Art is distinct and has a unique ID assigned to it. It’s blockchain cannot be altered. It is a permanent record or ledge of this piece.
When you buy a piece of NFT artwork you retain ownership of the digital piece, but it still is available on the internet and various other digital means. Anyone can still download that piece from the internet, share it, etc. So what good is ownership? Well, the more a digital artwork is seen and shared it increases it’s visibility and potentially it’s “worth”.
Now, when that artwork is first sold, the site hosting the artwork retains a commission and the artist receives their payment. If the artwork is resold (and resold and resold) the original creator retains a “commission” on every resale (usually 10%). So as the work gains in value the original creator still receives “commissions” on the work.
This sounds awesome. How do I get into this new market?
Well, it’s not as easy as it seems. Not crazy hard but their are some hurdles to handle.
You need to have an account to buy Cryptocurrency, like Coinbase, Kraken, or many others. Now you need to buy some cryptocurrency (like I said usually Ethereum).
Once you have that you need to attach your coin to a digital wallet (usually MetaMask). Finally, you can link your digital wallet to the NFT Hosting site. You can now buy a NFT artwork.
But what if I wanna sell NFT Artwork? That’s another hurdle. Some of the top sites like Nifty Gateway or Super Rare are curated sites. Meaning you have to submit a portfolio and a video about yourself to gain access to sell on those sites. Other sites, you need to submit an application, and other sites you can just upload an NFT artwork and sell. Obviously the curated sites offer a larger audience and can command a larger selling price.
Okay, you are able to get onto a site to sell a NFT artwork, you need to convert your file to the blockchain. This will take “gas” to “mine” your artwork, which costs you a fractional fee of crypto currency. Now, the gas rate is variable. It depends on when you go to “mint” your artwork. Think of an utility company charging different rates for electricty, peak vs. off-peak time. This mining comes with an environmental impact since it takes a neural network of computers to process the data.
So is this a sustainable market? Is this all hype? Should I do this? Are all very good questions and honestly I don’t know. I do know people said the same thing when Crypto Currencies first cam on the scene. The technology of blockchain is very real and stable, but is this a fad? I guess only time will tell. There are good signs that maybe it will stay, Christie’s auction house is treating it as real. Artists such as Beeple, Ben Mauro, and many others have had tremendous success with it. To be honest I’m still learning about this interesting new art space for digital artwork. If anyone has any thoughts I look forward to hearing them.
An excellent talk about all things NFT is with Emmanuel Shiu and Jan Urschel on their Art Department Podcast. Listen to it, they go thru the whole rabbit hole of NFT art and should you do this or not. Also, check out their links page, it’s a great collection of information.
So most of you might have seen this amazing announcement from Epic Games/Unreal: MetaHuman Creator
Now this is crazy impressive, but wait it gets better…
Mind blowing stuff. You can download 2 free metahumans already. I’m very excited to see the full version of MetaHuman Creator when it comes on-line. It’s a cloud based application. You’ll be able to create real-time photorealistic digital humans in blazing speed.
This made for Unreal so it’s going to hook in nicely to all of unreal’s tools. 30 different hair styles using Unreal Engine’s strand-based hair, 18 different proportional body types. When you’ve completed your character download the asset via Quixel Bridge. It’s fully rigged, ready for animation and motion capture in Unreal. You can also get source data in Maya form with meshes, skeleton, facial rig, animation controls and materials. I think the possibilities of this tool are endless. It is a top tier fidelity cg human but you can also output a lower level of detail. You may have limitations of modifying this character into other applications. I haven’t really messed with Unreal that much but this just might push me over the edge to jump in.
Keep an eye out for updates on Epic Games’ MetaHumans creator and lets see where this goes.
I haven’t talked about Substance Painter in awhile. I’ve gotten a bunch of 3d model kits from various sources. Some have no UVs and others have just okay UV layout. Now a couple years ago Substance Painter released the ability to do auto UVs. It’s works great. The algorithm is pretty neat working with simple geometry to complex. You can always finish up the UV layout in another application afterwards.
Below is a robot head I purchased off of ArtStation that I’m going to incorporate into a painting. I just wanted to use Substance Painter to do a quick pass on this head. I wanted the color scheme of the head along with some wear and tear on the head.
So, most of my friends will tell you, I love the movie Groundhog Day. I watch it every year on Groundhog Day.
What I do love about it is that it demonstrates how someone can change for the better. So, I always find a great way to check up on my recent New Year’s Resolutions from a month ago. Am I staying on track or have I already fallen off the band wagon.
This year I started using the App/Website Evernote again. It’s had some great updates to it. I made tons of lists and started pages for projects. All to make sure I stayed on track this year. The basic version is free which is great. It’s web based so you can check your lists anywhere.
Here my home page. You create pretty much any document. You have a little notepad to jot down notes for that moment. You can create “To Do Lists”. Once completed you check them off and it crosses it off the list (which always feels great).
TO DO List
You create Documents (Notes) for whatever you need. I began using it to create cliff notes for new applications/tutorials I go through. This one is from Artstation using Blender for Sculpting.
Blender Sculpting Tutorial
It really helps, I can type down the hot keys, mark up screen captures, etc. I use a Windows machine, so I found clicking the Print Screen button a little cumbersome. I have dual monitors, so I have to download the image, bring it into Photoshop to crop it, then save it. There are other ways to do this and I’ve tried them. I found LightShot a free application to be great. Once installed it takes over your “Prnt-Scr” button. I always you to quickly marquee your screen, make a note, and then paste it. It works on Mac and PC.
Light Shot
Having this note is so much easier than going back to the video, and you can paste weblinks to go back to the videos if needed.
There are templates you can use or create your own. I have found this very very useful to keep track of my projects, to do lists, and organize my day.
“Okay, campers, rise and shine, and don’t forget your booties ‘ cause it’s cooooold out there today.”
So here’s a little sketch I did using Maya with Arnold. I wanted to play with lighting scenarios and the Lighting Filters I mentioned last week.
I was originally inspired with this piece by trying to pay homage to the 19th century artists, like Jean-Leon Gerome and Ludwig Deutsch. They were part of a movement called Orientalism, which was a depiction of the Middle East thru artists from a Western culture’s perspective and interpretations.
I began researching Star Wars related elements. I wanted to incorporate, specifically a bounty hunter, but with all the attention to Boba Fett with the amazing Mandalorian I chose a more obscure one with Dengar. A friend, Brian LaFrance pointed me to a great reference gathering tool Pure Ref. You can create your own pin board of various references easily.
I was able to find low resolution models on RenderHub. There were a bunch of free Star Wars characters from a user, Rip Van Wrinkle.
From here, it was trying to figure out a layout and characters to support my main character, Dengar. For some characters and environments I swapped out textures, used megascan textures. I combined some characters together (made a jawa out of the emperor, etc).
Then just played with mood using different lights in Arnold.
Studio EB 