The Historic England website allows viewing aerial photos on its website. However, the way it displays them is using a 'SmartFrame', and although it usefully allows panning around the very large images, the main point of it seems to be to prevent downloading, even if the images are in the public domain.
I recently made my first foray in learning probably one of the most advanced Blender add-ons that exists: Animation Nodes (AN onwards). And by 'learning' I mean I've done one project in it and don't know when I'll do another.[...] Here is my first, and possibly last, test:
This post is mainly about using the Shrinkwrap modifier for modelling, which is below, but there's also a quick update on some of my projects right at the end.[...] Before I started the 'Heartbreaker' project I probably wouldn't have said that the Shrinkwrap modifier is one of my favourite modifiers in Blender (not that anyone had actually asked me, or likely ever would). Maybe in the top 10, but only just. I would probably have gone for one of the classics, like the Subsurf or Mirror, you just can't go wrong with those two. However, that's all changed. If anyone ever asks me*, I will say my new favourite modifier, at least regarding modelling - which is what I'm doing most of the time - is the Shrinkwrap. It has become my go-to, problem solving, reliable friend.
It's a catchy post title I know.[...] Technically this is the first post on my own site about the vfx rollercoaster project I'm working on, so if you want to catch up have a look at some of the previous posts that I ported over from my other site.[...] At the end of the last blog post I said something about using an inverted camera so that vector blur would work for reflections. I did indeed get this to work and seeing as I can't find much mention of either an alternative method or this method, I'll explain a little further.
This is just a quick post (I hope) with a tip on how to render a different background when using HDRI lighting in Blender 3D. As you can see from the images on my gallery I generally just render a single object and don't really make a scene for it. The downside of this is that if the object is reflective it doesn't have anything to reflect in the empty scene and looks plain and unrealistic.
I've just finished my latest video and thought I would give a few details (ok, it turned into quite a few details) as to how it was created. The finished result is below.[...] There are several different elements that came into play to create the finished result: