In today’s competitive marketplace, studios are snowed under with portfolio entries. There are simply far to many artists fighting for very few positions. The answer is clear, if you want to get hired in this industry, you need to rethink your strategy and promote yourself in new ways.

Enter: The handheld video age. One of the newest methods for getting seen at the moment is, believe it or not, via the cell phone. The following is an excerpt from a discussion on getting a job at Crytek.

“Someone I met recently had his [demo] reel on his cell phone. It was really awesome to start up a conversation with someone and start talking about 3d and be able to see a reel mid conversation, really great idea I thought… you never know who might be sitting next to you at the bar having a drink.”

Touche. If you want to get noticed, you need get seen. Obviously iPods aren’t cell phones but I’m sure you get the idea. Speaking to someone face-to-face is far more personal than sending a link over the internet, and you are far more likely to get a call back.

In this tutorial, I’ll be covering the steps to render an animation to your iPod. To demonstrate, I’ll be rendering this simple fluid sim animation, but feel free to use whatever you like.

Render settings

Before rendering your animation it’s important to keep in mind that the maximum resolution an iPod is capable of playing is 640 x 480. The actual resolution of the screen is only 320 x 240, but it helps to upload the maximum incase you connect it to your TV.

So go ahead and set the dimensions of your animation to 640 x 480 and your output format to PNG.

This will export each frame as a separate PNG and place it in your output folder which by default is /tmp but you can change that by clicking the folder icon in the output panel.

When you are ready hit the big ANIM button (or press Ctrl + F12). When your animation has finished you should see each frame saved as a separate file in your specified folder.

Now to put all those loose frames into a single mov file…

Compiling the movie

To compile all our frames into a single video file we are going to make use of the Video Sequence editor. So with our blend file still open, change the 3d viewer window to Video Sequence Editor

In the new window, click Add>Images

Navigate to where you saved your frames and select every frame but holding down your right mouse button as you drag over them. Files will turn purple once they are selected. Once you’ve done that, hit ‘Select Images’.

You will now be taken back to the editor screen where you will see a purple box with a number underneath it. This is your timeline which contains all your frames. The number underneath is the frame that you will start the timeline at. Move the bar to frame 1.

In your render settings panel, change the output format from PNG to Quicktime. We also need to change the codec settings, so click Set Format.

In the window that opens next, you will need to set the compression type to MPEG-4, because it appears to be the only codec type that the iPod actually recognizes. H.264 does not work.

Go ahead and change the settings as follows:

Finally we need to click the Do Sequence button in your Scene panel (f10).

This will tell blender to follow the instructions in the sequence editor instead of rendering our scene.

Now all you need to do is hit the big ANIM button again. This will open the render window which will quickly compile all our frames into a neatly packed .mov file

Importing into iTunes

Open iTunes and click the Movies tab

Import the file by going to File>Add File to Library…

Navigate to where you saved your .mov file and click Open.

Connect your iPod and bobs your uncle!

So there you have it! A powerful promoting tool that tucks nicely in your pocket but can be whipped out at a moments notice. This will no doubt give you an advantage at the next Siggraph conference!

If you have an animation you have previously rendered, but would like to put on your iPod, I would highly recommend you use the open source program MediaCoder which will convert it to the correct format.

Do you know of any other unique ways to promote your work? Write it in the comments below!

Most professional cameras these days come with a built-in ‘Rule of Thirds‘ function that overlays a 3×3 grid over the viewfinder. This allows photographers to quickly and easily line up their shots for optimal composition. So why not set up blender to do the same?

To start, you will need to save the following image to your hard drive:

(click for big)

In the bottom left hand corner of your 3d view, click View>Background Image.

This will open a dialogue box. Click the single button that says Use Background Image. Then click the Load button that appears.

Navigate through the folders and select the image that you saved earlier to your hard drive.

Finally drag the Blend slider to 0.00 and hit the Premul button. This will enable the alpha channel in the PNG we loaded.

Close the Background Image box and you’re done!

If we flick to our camera view (Numpad 0) we can see that the 3×3 red grid is now overlaying our viewport. How easy is that?

The lines will blur slightly depending on how far zoomed out you are, but the basic outlines are there. The best part is, if you change the resolution, the overlay will shrink and stretch to fit, meaning you will always have optimal composition no matter what size ratio you choose!

Remember: If you want blender to load these settings upon start, press Ctrl + U.

I hope you get some benefit this quick blender tip! You might also like to try overlaying the Golden Mean, (an alternative to the rule of thirds). Many believe that the Golden Mean is the perfect dimension ratio to add energy and motion to your picture. More on that here.