Hi Everyone,
When Blender gets RenderMan export happening, I plan to work on a little homage to Luxo. I’m not a Blender expert, so I’ve been playing with a simple Luxo model to get the hang of armatures. Here’s a rendering of the model:
The AO feature is awesome; thanks Ton!
And here’s my first experiment with a walk- err… bounce-cycle:
http://www.warpax.com/temp/test3.avi (240KB DivX AVI)
I haven’t specifically paid much attention to the original Luxo model or animation since I’d like my own work to be at least a tiny bit original. I last saw the short about 6 months ago, so I think I’m removed enough from it by now.
The springs were a bit tricky. They are controlled by a separate Python script that looks at the position of a couple of empties. The empties in turn are parented to the bones of the armature controlling Luxo’s main elements. By calculating the distance between the empties and comparing it to the rest length of the springs, I was able to calculate a scale factor for their length. This technique works quite well, although with proper RenderMan export, I would plan to set up the springs as completely procedural objects (RenderMan absolutely rocks for doing things like that).
My next step is to try to learn about NLA. I wish there were some good general tutorials for it…
Jonathan Merritt.