The Blog of Glen Moyes

I just barely finished my first video for The Guerrilla CG Project on Subdivision Surfaces. Guerrilla CG: Subdivision Surfaces from Glen Moyes on Vimeo . This video was quite unlike any other project I've done before. All but one animated sequence in this video was rendered by playblasting in Blender. I had to do some tricks like forcing Blender to use anti-aliasing in my graphics driver settings, and using chroma key to remove the background from each render so I could composite other elements together, which is something I usually never have to worry about. Anyway, the results turned out very well. I used After Effects for compositing and editing. It took me about 3 days to put the video together. The next video I'll be doing do will be on topology.

Guerrilla CG is finally online. It hosts amazing videos that explain the fundamentals of computer graphics in a fun and easy to understand way. The videos are not software specific either, so you can watch them and take that knowledge to your 3D application of choice. During college I taught Blender workshops for two years, and prior to that I did video tutorials for Blender. I learned that in order to teach people how to use the software I needed to spend quite a bit of time teaching the fundamentals first. So in my later workshops more than half the workshop concisted of myself doing a PowerPoint presentation. It turned out to be more effective, but we only had two hours of class a week, so I continued making video tutorials as part of the class so they could watch them at home. I put those videos on ShowMeDo so other people can watch them as well. I was later contacted by Andrew Silke about a project he was working on called GuerrillaCG. He saw the stuff I did on ShowMeDo and want...

Riven Phoenix's The Structure of Man series, which I've evangelized ever since I received my copy of the DVD set, has to be the best and most affordable (US$45) way to learn how to draw people from memory. Since leaving Rexburg I've had more time to continue watching the series--finally; I've owned it for about 9 months with not enough time to watch it until recently. When I initially started The Structure of Man series I went through the first 19 videos with pencil and paper rather quickly, but then I realized that my final sketches didn't show much of the process of how I got to the final. All the important stuff that the video series is teaching, like the simplified angles and proportions that make up the human body were gone when I started rendering. I could watch the video over and over again until I memorized the formulas, but all I needed was some kind of primer that had all the formulas down on paper as a quick and complete reference. That gave me the idea ...

I've been making video tutorials for Blender since August 2004, and in those years I've found TechSmith's Camtasia Studio to be the best solution, simply because of the quality of the TechSmith Capture Codec (TSCC). The other alternative is CamStudio, an open source app that works really well, but the CamStudio Codec is not as fast as TSCC. On my new system I get 22 fps with CamStudio in a 1024x576 region, whereas with TSCC I can get a solid 30 fps, and it's easier to get the audio and video to sync up properly. After using their 30-day trial, experiencing the performance boost was enough to convince myself to buy Camtasia Studio, until I realized it cost US$300. To my joy, I read today that TechSmith is doing a promotion where you can download their old Camtasia 3, get a software key for free, and later upgrade to Camtasia 5 for US$150 (this is for a limited time). Just download the software: http://download.techsmith.com/camtasiastudio/enu/312/camtasiaf.exe Then fill...