Ice and Icing

I've put the rollercoaster project on hold for a bit. I did a bit of work on it the other day, which I'll talk about in a separate post, and I might work on it as a break from the current project but I just feel I should be focusing on work for my showreel.

While the rollercoaster project is something that will be included in my reel it's a bit more general than my modelling 'remit'.  Sure, it has modelling, but it's focus is vfx which is a bit more general. I've always heard you should be quite specific in your reel and that it should clearly represent what you want to do so I'm working on a more modelling heavy project. I'm not going to talk about it at the moment, for some reason I like to keep most of my projects secret, as if I've got a huge audience waiting in suspense. But I'll do a few posts once it's out, it's a complex project (for me) so that may be a while.

This post is basically just announcing two new videos I released. It was originally going to just show one of the videos but then I left writing the post for so long that a new video was finished by then.

The first video is a new effect based on icing:

It's one of the most complex techniques I've used so I'll have to try and work out a smooth workflow for when the tutorial comes out. It makes use of semi-complex drivers (depending on if you've used drivers before) and it also has a pretty complex control system. It also takes a lot of repeated work for each curve that makes up the text, there's no easy way to duplicate it, it's all custom, so this is better for simple logos or shapes which require few curves rather than full words.

The second video is a tutorial for one of my favourite videos so far, Ice Shatter and Crack (a preview of the effect is at the beginning of the tutorial):

I was looking forward to recording this tutorial because most of the techniques seem pretty simple, but when it came  to recording it was the longest recording yet at 1hr 45min (looking at the timecode in the video above shows  how much usable footage I tend to get).  The techniques are simple, there's just quite a few of them and then I cover scripting a bit which takes a bit more explanation and I'm not sure how well I did on that. I tend to always get  a few people who say that the tutorials aren't suited for beginners and I'd agree, they're not! They're intended as intermediate, if you're a beginner and you can follow it then great, but this is even more true with the small scripting section. I give an overview, but it's really an overview for people that don't find programming a completely alien subject, maybe they've done another language or have tried some basic stuff out. This was more to say "Scripting can be very useful if you only know a small amount, here's how you could use it", rather than "Let's learn programming from scratch!".

I'll probably do separate blog posts for both the subject of tutorials (both my techniques and in the context of the blender community) and scripting.

Ray.