Blender: Compositing Techniques with Render Passes

In a partnership with CG Channel and cmiVFX, a second episode of free online tutorials was launched. This time around it’s a tutorial by Hand Turkey Studios’ Jason van Gumster covering composting techniques with render passes in Blender.

Registration is free, sign up today to get your free tutorial.

Update: We’ve decided to release the .blend file for this tutorial. You can find out more about this on sheep-dot.


http://www.cgchannel.com/
http://cgchannel.com/news/viewfeature.jsp?newsid=6763

Hand Turkey Studios recently created a logo for the open source Flash video player, FlowPlayer. FlowPlayer is a very useful player that can be embedded into any website to play videos in the Flash video format. It is used on such large sites as The Internet Archive and putfile.com, as well as Hand Turkey’s own animation portfolio page.

A detailed description of the process that was used to create this logo can be found on sheep-dot, Hand Turkey’s side projects blog.

In the October 2007 issue of 3D World magazine (Issue 95), there is a review of the Advanced Blender Fluids training DVD that Hand Turkey Studios produced with CmiVFX. The training DVD received a rating of 8 out of 10 stating that “for pros who need the option of realistic fluids in Blender, it’s a must.” Go to your local bookstore or magazine stand and to buy the magazine and read the rest of the review!

We’re quite pleased with their assessment and even happier to announce that we’re working with CmiVFX on the second advanced training DVD for Blender in that series. Look for an official announcement of the DVD to come in the near future!

As we did last year, Hand Turkey Studios participated in this year’s Red Hat High program. Jason van Gumster traveled to Red Hat headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina for one week to teach 3D animation with the open source program, Blender, to a group students with ages ranging from 13 to 15 years old. Jason assembled a team of artists from the Blender community to co-instruct the class, including modeler and tutorial creator Jonathan Williamson, 2006 Suzanne Award-winner Sam Brubaker, and Elephants Dream director Bassam Kurdali.

The Digital Animation track at Red Hat High was the most popular track with students in 2006 and had the largest class size this year with 15 students attending. Other tracks at the camp included Audio, Illustration, Digital Darkroom, and Programming featuring other open source tools such as Hydrogen, Audacity, Inkscape, and The GIMP.

Red Hat intends to expand the Red Hat High program to other locations throughout the world and is in the process of developing materials to aid teachers in developing curricula that suit their needs. The team of Blender instructors is actively involved in this process. As part of this, Jason will be giving a QuickTake presentation about Red Hat High at this year’s SIGGRAPH conference in San Diego.

More Information

• Video of student work on Sheep-dot
• Article on Blender Nation
• Red Hat Magazine Articles
  • Red Hat High 2007: Getting Started
  • Red Hat High 2007: Update
• Red Hat High flickr stream

Hand Turkey Studios will be offering two Training Workshops on Blender in June. Details on each workshop are listed below:

Blender Basics
Date: Saturday, 9 June 2007
Time: 2:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Location: Apex Digital (900 West Broad St., Richmond, VA 23221 - map)
Cost: $50, payable via Cash, Check or Credit Card via Paypal

Basics II: Organic Modeling & Materials
Date: Saturday, 16 June 2007
Time: 2:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Location: Apex Digital (900 West Broad St., Richmond, VA 23221 - map)
Cost: $50, payable via Cash, Check or Credit Card via Paypal

Also, we are offering a $10 discount if you attend both workshops!

If you’re interested in attending, please send an email to info {at} handturkeystudios(.)com.

Descriptions of each of these workshops can be found on the Workshops page of this site. Copies of Blender for all modern computing platforms and all files used in the workshop will be made available on DVD for course participants.

There is limited space available, so please confirm your attendance early.

You may notice that we’re holding our workshop at a new location. This location has computers on-site, so bringing your own computer or laptop is not necessary. However, you are more than welcome to bring your own machine if you’d like. If you have any questions please do not hesitate in contacting us.