2 Glow effect video tutorials

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
#1

Well, I promised OlivS some help using the Glow sequence effect in this thread, and I just bought Snapz Pro X a few days ago, so why not make some video tuts :slight_smile: Now I’ve figured out a good workflow for making them, I’d say it’s at least as fast as, if not faster than taking screenshots and writing up a nice HTML page, and more fun too!

Anyway, they’re in QuickTime MPEG4 format, and from what I read on the web, mplayer and vlc should be able to play them on Linux. I’ll be curious to see what this does to the traffic limits on the web server (not close yet, so no worries). You may need to right-click (Ctrl click for mac users :wink: and do save target as, or whatever.

Just basics using the glow effect:
http://mke3.net/blender/video_tutorials/glow1.mp4

Isolating and glowing individual objects:
http://mke3.net/blender/video_tutorials/glow2.mp4

Cheers and enjoy

#2

The Glow Effect #2 was great! Didn’t think about that method of isolating the glow effect.

How about a Broken Tutorials DVD?

#3

awesome tuts

#4

Thats indeed quick to do and learn. Only a bit hard to hear what you say sometimes. But still, thx

#5

Great stuff :slight_smile: I hope you make more of these.

#6

hmm… yes. that really was a clever trick with the two scenes. I have never really used the scene-possibility in anything. I just havent found a good use for it, but seeing this… well… this helps me a lot in some of the things I hadn’t quite found a good solutions yet… (except rendering several versions of the animation with some of the layers turned off… :slight_smile: ) this makes rendering much faster!

thanks.

.b

#7

very cool
we need more of these.

truespace has an entire library of them, and I know from experience that they are much more helpful than plain text tutorials.

A newb library of these would be great.

#8

Yeah, it seems when the CPU activity is high, it drops frames, and to keep in sync, it speeds up the audio. I also wanted to get through it quickly to keep the file size small, but I understand it may not be that clear. It’s the first time I’ve done this so I guess there’s room for improvement!

Glad you guys found it useful. There’s a lot more to the sequence editor than meets the eye. :slight_smile:

#9

I hope you will show us :slight_smile:

#10

many thanks for the tutorials :slight_smile: . I’d only used the sequence editor for quickly comping movies and stills together. This opens up a whole new way to utilize the sequence editor.

It’d be cool of the Fac IPO or the glow settings could be animated, but I guess there aren’t really that many places where that would be really useful. Though, if its not hard to code, I don’t see why not (of course, I don’t see a lot of things soooo…)

anyways, thanks again for the vids.

#11

I’ve been wondering how to get a lamp to look right, I mean a tall lamp with a lampshade on it. For kicks I tried the glow effect, just a smidgen, on the shade itself and it now looks perfect! Not photoreal, that cg perfect look if you follow me.

We should have a fleet of these vids. They’re very fun.

Oh, three things: I couldn’t figure out how to move the strips after I placed them. I used G and they only moved horizontally along the timeline. After some fiddling I could get them to move vertically, but I don’t know what I did that made them do so. :slight_smile:

Second, you didn’t mention this but it’s nice to know. After making a Meta strip, you can adjust the properties of it’s parts but selecting it and hitting Tab.

Thirdly, (found this by mistake, and it may be just me), if you have TexFace selected on materials they get a very yellow tint if anything in the scene has the glow effect applied. For me my walls were yellow in the room where I had the glowing lampshade and merely de-selecting Texface fixed them.

Hope this helps, and please make more :slight_smile:

#12

cool, it’s a good compositing way.

#13

DOH :expressionless:

You know these tutorials have shown me one glaringly obviouse funtion of the sequence editor, that my brain had refused to see, namely being able to PREVIEW a plugin like zblur and seeing the effect without rerendering, it does it for you, change a setting in zblur and the preview updates to show it, the same with glow, AHHHHH sometimes I can be so thick (kick kick kick thump on head bad brain, bad brain) :o :smiley:

Ken

#14

:slight_smile:
Thank you very much for these, broken!

#15

Hey, this is my kind of tut!
Please do the same for all the other features in Blender.
Yes, I know that’s a rediculously large request, so I don’t expect it to be taken seriously. But wouldn’t it be great?
Maybe just a few key features which are confusing to learn. For example, if somebody could walk me through the whole UV texture process, I’d be ecstatic.
I hesitate to criticize, but I just couldn’t make out a lot of the audio. I think you could overcome the distortion by speaking with deliberately exaggerated clarity.

Thank you very much.
Noel

#16

Thank you very much for these tutorials, broken. That’s a cool way to glow individual objects!

It’s very interesting to see how other people work with Blender - it’s much easier for me to pick up workflows from video tutorials - good job.

#17

very cool. And the video tuts’ are very cool.
I think most of the artist here are visual anyway…
video tutorial work better.(for me at least).

#18

Nice! I really like video tuts. :slight_smile:

One thing though. You make it sound as though you need to make the metastrip to compositate the glow effect on top of the other scene. That can also be done by selecting the glow strip instead of the meta strip when adding the Add effect.

Martin

#19

I’m happy cuz I just learned how to use the glow plugin! Thank you broken.

#20

Thanks for the feedback, everyone! I’m glad that the videos seem to have been useful, and I now have some ideas for improvements (speech clarity, etc) in the future.

kencanvey: Yes, it’s quite cool - as long as you don’t change anything in the underlying scene, Blender keeps the render cached, so it doesn’t need to re-render the scene every time you tweak a post-pro effect’s settings. You can manually refresh though with the ‘Refresh’ button if you need to for some reason and Blender hasn’t done it automatically.

theeth: Indeed you’re right, that’s a good point. I didn’t really think to just put the add on top - it makes more sense to my mind and is easier for me to see what strips are input into what effects when they’re organised with lots of Metas, so that’s how I did it :slight_smile:

Cheers!