The Cog Project

independent films by Colin Litster produced using BLENDER

This is the website of an independent 3D animator, and film producer, whose main project is called 'COG'. Over the coming months I will post images, movies, explanations and tutorials about all Cogfilms productions.
My ageing hero's will take you to the beginning of creation, the 4th dimension, and through to love and retirement. ...... and hopefully make you laugh.
The projects are being produced in Blender, the OPEN SOURCE & FREE 3D creation suite, developed by Ton Roosendaal et al.

• October 2008 Following on from last month the building work has completed and a terraced house erected. All the materials here use many node based aspects of Blender. The aim was to produce a weathered UK Victorian terraced house to act as basis for producing an entire town.
  
  I have been writing several comprehensive chapters to help you master the fine art of Blender shading. It will include one of the first in-depth node material explanations published.
  
  Further details will follow but for now click on the thumbnail image, or this link, to see a large render of the house.
  
  
• April to September 2008 Time to raise the roof as some nice node materials are created to produce a slate roof to go with my brick node shader. The nice thing about this shader is the fact it can be tiled onto any size flat surface with no repeats at all yet it uses only 2 image textures each under 27Kb. The slate colour can be easily changed as can the weathering to give a new or dilapidated look. Click the image for a small animated example.
  
  

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  After a very busy summer I have now successfully moved to the country. Not Yorkshire but to the beautiful south west of Wales. From this peaceful and inspiring location I hope to devote much more time to my Blender projects that recently have been unavoidably neglected.
  That's not to say I have been totally detracted from Blender. I have been writing several thousand words on mastering Blender node materials with several professional examples to achieve some stunning material effects in Blender. This is an example of an aged brick node shader that builds on several other town sized examples to create a city within Blender.
  Not only that but another thousand or so words on using the node compositor to make your animation and still creations as professional as possible. Details will follow soon.
  
  
• Jan/Feb/Mar 2008 Well its about time I did something to update this website to justify its cost. So I am producing a new tutorial explaining how I created the waterfall effect in my Blender Summer of Documentation contribution on materials and textures. Time to introduce a slightly more complex texturing example. This includes NODE materials as well as the use of the modifier stack that were very new when the Blender Summer of Documentation was written. I am adding these as a 3rd part section on the BlenderWIKI. I will also be making a narrated video available on Youtube.
  As with any water image its best seen in motion so click on the above image to see a short clip of the waterfall in motion.

The film is dedicated to my great friend Roger Finch who tragically died in 2003. Roger was an inspiration to many non-professional film makers encouraging them to dream, persevere, and achieve the impossible.