Had a presentation in my Middle English class today. I ended up doing mine on Anonymous (as a joke), and when I realized I could use Blender to pull off some cool effects, the original 30 minutes of preparation I’d planned escalated into seven or eight hours’ worth.
I first made a pretend movie trailer in Blender (the linked movie is in iPod .m4v format, H.264 codec):
I used a background plane with an animated cloud texture, a foreground plane with another animated cloud texture (and animated alpha), and text sandwiched in between with the alpha animated to fade in and out. For some reason Blender wouldn’t include the music when I exported it (from the sequencer), so I had to add a music track in iMovie and then compress it to Quicktime. The other thing is that Blender kept producing exceedingly large files — a 40-second 800×600 movie was 1.4 gigs, but iMovie compressed it down to 20 megs or so. If anyone knows how to get Blender to do that compression on its own (and how to get the music to accompany the movie), please let me know!
Next I whipped up a quick slide background scene, rendering it from four different angles for the four sections of my presentation (using ambient occlusion, as you can probably see). I also Photoshopped the resulting renders, mostly darkening it with curves, and adding lens blur for two of them:
Towards the end I realized the color scheme was a bit on the depressing side, so I quickly threw together this slide for those needing happy colors:
And here’s one of my favorite slides, thrown in at a random position as a tongue-in-cheek:
Anyway, this was far too much work for a five-point presentation, but it was a lot of fun. Blender’s more useful than I ever realized. I don’t think I’ll ever give a non-Blender/Photoshop presentation again. :)
[tags]Blender, 3D, art, Photoshop[/tags]
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