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GIVE YOUR PROJECTS A FRESH START

I believe that the beginning of the new year is the right time to give your projects a fresh start. How many times you had burning desire to do something that matters, and then decided: later on.

Sadly, later on never comes. Just like tomorrow, that is elusive and when you are ready to catch it, becomes today.

So, it’s about time to start the ball rolling and concentrate on your passion. For me it means working on my book – and my blog. And connecting with people – it means a lot to me (thanks, Andrew!).

For you, it means the other exciting things, that can be brought to life. At last! After days, weeks and months of meaningless postponing.

QUESTION OF THE YEAR

Tell me about your dream project, that you will make in 2015.

Flood the comments with your projects!

And ta-da-da-daaam! Champagne.

The post 2015 – Some Words and A Hug appeared first on Creative Shrimp.

In this tutorial we’ll explore strange and exciting ways to kick-start creativity and overcome the fear of the blank page (or viewport) using Fractals and Mandelbulber.

To make our brain working we may need to throw in some abstract shape – say, inkblot. Then passing the hand-made variation of the Rorschah test, we start to recognize shapes and images. Eventually one of the images that we suddenly ‘grasp’ will serve as a starting point for our picture.

For sure, visualization of mathematical formulas, such as fractals, is a great source of patterns for sudden inspiration. Today we’ll talk about fractals and their 3d representation using free software called Mandelbulber.

Mandelbulber tutorial

1 Download Mandelbulber

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Brief explanation about fractals: fractal is essentially a detailed pattern that repeats itself on various levels. If you think of tree and its branches that copy the shape of the tree, or rock face that reveals more and more ‘rock’ geometric details upon zooming you’ll get an idea

2d or 3d representations of fractal formulas can produce fascinating results, quite different from what we model in 3d content creation suite (say, Blender), random to some degree but obeying strict set of rules. And in some cases infinite, like Mandelbrot set. 

2 Launch it!

After launching Mandelbulber we see 4 windows: Editor, Render, Console and one more, displaying number of Iterations. We’ll need only 2 of them for the sake of this tutorial: Editor and Render. The concept is pretty basic – we’ll tweak some settings in practical way to achieve the desired result, not delving into depths of the interface and formulas.

So, hit RENDER without hesitation.

Eventually, we’ll get something like this:

3 Navigation

We can navigate using mouse (click to zoom), or using controls in the View tab. Note that Mouse click close-up ratio and Step for camera moving can be lowered to make camera move more predictable, by smaller intervals.

4 Settings

The way of save progress in Mandelbulber is to save settings. But now let’s load some example settings (this brilliant piece of software contains plenty of great stuff by default!).

Got this random thing while playing with settings

I propose to start with Folded Trigonometric power 8 version 2.

5 Image

 Set resolution (something like 600×250 will be okay, or 1200×500 if you have appropriate rig to run it smooth) at the Image tab. In general, we might need viewport to stay fast while we navigate through the scene.

6 Fractal, IFS, Hybrid, Mandelbox

These are the setting of the fractal formula. For our goals we probably don’t need to tweak it right now. If you want to know more about basic settings, I recommend reading tutorial by Troy Loy: http://kestalusrealm.wordpress.com/2014/01/07/mandelbulber-tutorial-basic-settings-i/

7 Shaders

There are 2 types of Ambient Occlusion in Mandelbulber: Ambient occlusion and Screen space ambient occlusion. They provide a different results, worth experimenting. First variant is probably more ‘rich’ in terms of surface colors and shadows. Let’s up Ambient occlusion power to 4 and disable Depth of Field.

If you are not satisfied with the look, tweak color gradient using Color Speed and Random values. Color speed defines how fast color will change on the surface of the fractal. There is an option to prepare custom gradient in the external image editor and load it pressing Get Pallette button. In this example we don’t use this option, but take a notice anyway.

Background can be set using Textured Background checkbox in the Shader tab.

8 Lights

Try enabling lights and see how the picture reacts.

9 Start the Rorschah test

Delve into the fractal to see how its details unfold on various levels. Zoom using mouse button or navigation controls in the View panel. If you get flash of shape-recognition, or simply like the picture, save settings!

This process is a kind of procedural generation, where you providing data to the system and see somewhat unpredictable outcome. For more procedural techniques visit Blendersushi – blog by Jimmy Gunawan, I bet you’ll be astonished how far we can go with generative algorithms.

But let’s return to our fractals. One little trick to enhance the feeling of the depth: press Auto Fog and tweak fog density.

10 Render

When you’re ready to finalize it, set resolution in the Image tab higher, hit Render and save the picture, it can be done in the Image tab. Note that Mandelbulber doesn’t seem to antialias the images. So, one effective way to achieve antialiasing is to render in double resolution then lower it in half in the image editor.

11 Post-process

Use Gimp, Photoshop, etc to finalize the render. Or load another example in Mandelbulber and continue the journey.

Links:

Rorschah test: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_test

Fractal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set

Fractalforums: fractalforums.com

Benoit Mandelbrot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benoit_Mandelbrot

Inspirational fractal videos:

Mandelbox trip by Krzysztof Marczak

Mandelbulber 3D Animation // Project Hypercube by Marcus Bernert

Thank you! Feel free to share your fractals and comment.

originally published: 11 march 2014

The post Mandelbulber Tutorial: How to Find Inspiration in Fractals? appeared first on Creative Shrimp.

Sometimes we can’t wait for inspiration to just come to us. And what I find interesting about these dead-end situations, that once you feed some images to your brain – it begin to generate. The more, the better. That’s why I encourage you to visit places like Flickr and Pixabay and just search for something, that sparks your imagination.

Deep elven forest at dusk? Frozen river, reflecting sky? Maybe weird abandoned places?

In this forest we find elves by Peter & Ute Grahlmann

That all sounds like a perfect words to begin searching process.

The main thing with this technique is to listen to your feelings, while scrolling down dozens of images. And when something stops your attention, analyze what you see.

Super bonus for nerds:

Variation of this method – Start generating Fractals with Mandelbulber. Nice starting point too.

Highlights of the podcast:

1. Surfing Flickr while generating ideas

2. Using Lightscreen free software to easily grab the part of the screen to the image file

3. Some random thoughts on composition

The post Gleb’s Podcast #04. How to Get Through Creative Block using Flickr appeared first on Creative Shrimp.

Before we start, let me say it: I believe that every artist can make a living doing what she or he actually wants. What I mean is the projects that inspire us the most.

How many times you was inspired by something, but then abandoned your passion just because you was scared to take a leap of faith and do things, that would be considered stupid by your parents or friends?

I thought the same way about my ideas.

But now I think: Weird projects? Being self-employed? Taking a leap of faith? Fine, let’s f#cking do it!

I was introduced to computer graphics when I was 16. Like many of us, I started with 3ds max and was spending very small amount of time learning how to do stuff and connecting with people.

My first renders were so crappy that I thought I would never make a single AWESOME image.

And this perspective scared the hell out of me.

Several years later, the mechanism was launched that would led to a big change in my life. I’ve stumbled across the TUTORIAL on the internet. If I remember, it was about ‘How to render an interior’ using Vray.

You can say, ‘tutorial, what a discovery, dude!’ I know that sounds stupid, but that’s how things worked for me. Something clicked in my mind and what was merely a hobby started to transform into something bigger.

When I was 22, I got a CG Artist job and started to make the models for computer games. You guess it wasn’t too hard, because I was able to render a cube rather efficiently at the time.

In the free time I was also learning Blender (free open source software which has an awesome community) by watching Andrew Price and CG Cookie tutorials. Now I was using internet to my advantage by absorbing every bit of knowledge, because I knew it will pay off in the future.

So, this is the word number 1: Learn

When a big CG competition called ‘Her Majesty’s Zeppelins’ was about to start, I’ve jumped in this boat because I knew I can learn how to do stuff.

Nevertheless, the possibility of winning was completely out of my reach, I thought.

In fact, I was so afraid to fail in public that I concentrated on doing the best render possible. The risk of public failure motivated me so much that I persisted for a month, doing nothing but zeppelins.

Huge zeppelins, tiny zeppelins, her majesty’s air fleet steampunk zeppelins.

I crushed the competition by winning the 1-st place.

That’s when I learned the second word: Dare

Several hours later I created my personal blog using blogger.com service by Google and posted there my first tutorial: Making-of Zeppelins.

Imagine, after years of devouring knowledge I was about to SHARE THE EXPERIENCE, that I absorbed earlier.

You can say: the tutorial, not a big deal. And you’re probably right. But for me, it was the game changer. Hugely positive feedback from you, folks, motivated me to develop my own skills further. To delve into crazy experiments, to explore uncharted territories of computer graphics, to make stupid things.

As I byproduct of recording tutorials I started to develop my English, which is still far from being good, but at least you wouldn’t want to shoot me. Or would you?.

So I bought a condenser microphone, recorded a crappy tutorial with the voice-over and posted it to the new WordPress self-hosted blog and also uploaded it to Youtube.

Then another one.

For me, sharing things online made the difference.

After discovering the passion for blogging and doing my own projects, I’ve left the full-time job to concentrate on what I love to do. Ironically, now this decision makes sense from the financial point of view too.

That’s how the things work: when you share your knowledge, your passion and your vision with others, impossible becomes possible. The question is, will you listen to your inner Van Gogh-esque voice that tells you to stop scaring the world with your personality?

Tell it to SHUT UP, because people can fly when they want to.

That’s the word number 3: Share

Now it’s your turn. Share my story and thank you for being awesome and reading this article.

The post CG Artist’s Story: 3 Words that Changed my Life appeared first on Creative Shrimp.

Our thanks goes to Nikita for discovering the old footage.

The post Gleb’s Podcast #02: Why Doing Stupid Things is Good for Your Career? appeared first on Creative Shrimp.