Nature Academy Part 1

I took part in Blender Guru's Nature Academy online training course. Nature Academy It concentrates, as the name suggests, in creating realistic nature scenes in Blender. I've learned some quite useful new tools and also learned to do compositing in Blender which I haven't really done before.

Due to school projects I haven't managed to finish every course in time, but luckily that isn't a problem since all the tutorials can be viewed at any time. There's also rather good collection of pre-made objects to use to add more variety your scenes, although I prefer to model my own.

Anyway, here's the results so far :) I'll post part 2 once I have time to complete rest of the course.

Grassy field. Practiced using hair particles to create grass.

Gone fishing. Fog effect and ripply water surface

Ocean. Larger waves. This looks much better when animated, but haven't had the time to render it.

Plants. Lots of plants. Practiced modeling various plants and used ivy generator.

Rocky coastline. These rocks are really nice. There's practically endless variations of them. These are really dense meshes, but could easily be baked into low poly rocks.

Mountains. Practiced using ANT landscape generator to create... mountains! and also created snow / stone mix material.

Shadow Warden (2012)

Shadow Warden Trailer from Noora H on Vimeo.

Light character's promo pose

Our game project, Shadow Warden, is a two player co-op action/adventure game, set in post-apocalyptic mayan world. The game utilizes Kinect sensor. One player uses Kinect to destroy enemies while other player leads the two through the world, solving puzzles and doing various other things. Or that was the plan. Due to time constraints most puzzles weren't implemented.


The whole process was very educational. If things can go wrong, they usually go etc... Although in the end the game worked relatively well. :) But yeah, it was interesting to find out the right workflows and techniques used in game development.

My main responsibility was modelling, rigging and animating the main "Light" character. I did this in Blender and then exported the model into UDK. I also modelled and textured few props and rendered promo images of the Light character.


Shadow Warden Light Character from Jarmo Wallenius on Vimeo.

We also had the chance to 3d print the character. I posed and modified the model to get it work properly with 3d printer. The model was hollowed and in two pieces so I could place two small batteries and led lamps in the model, thus lighting up the character from the inside. I still can't believe they let me do such complex electrical connections all by myself. Good thing I managed to complete the task without major injuries.

3D-printed Light character with lights off and lights on.

Anyway, the whole 3d printing process was very interesting. It took about two days or so to print the whole model. (Not counting the overnight bath in sodium hydroxide to get rid of the support material)

Mars Effect short film

Mars Effect was one of our school projects and actually it was the first animated short I've been involved with. It's not perfect by any means but still, it was quite useful project to learn the process for creating such animations and to avoid the mistakes we did with this one.

 The whole animation was made in Blender but some minor additional compositing was done in After Effects. As for my part in the process... I modelled the rocket, the flag and set up the simulation for it. I also animated a number of scenes, like the opening and closing scenes and many others.

 We actually got third place in Assembly 2012 short film compo. That was rather interesting experience :) More information about the video can be seen on it's Vimeo page.

Here's a video showing some of the things I did for the animation.

My Mars Effect from Jarmo Wallenius on Vimeo.

Warning! Ancient material

Ah, the time when I applied to the degree program here in Helsinki Metropolia University of Applied Sciences...  It was early summer back in 2010. All applicants had to do pre-assignments and then the lucky (skilled?) ones got in to take part in entrance examinations.

I guess I can finally reveal my pre-assignments to the whole world (or to the lucky few who might see these) We had to illustrate an old somewhat humoristic Finnish folktale of one rather simple man. Words weren't allowed and were were limited to two pages. Here they are in all their glory:

First page

Second page

Yeah, It may not look like much, because it isn't. But still, it was good enough I suppose. But now... Things get even better. We also had another task: Design futuristic nanotech robot for dental care:

Well, maybe not exactly nanotech, but obviously it's a small robot fixing someone's teeth, isn't it? It is!

Yeah, I still don't know how I got selected into the entrance examinations. Anyway, that's what happened and luckily I don't have the hand drawn pictures I had to do there. They were something else - and not in a good way.

I did get to give them my demoreel dvd which had a couple of 3d images and short animation which I won't tell more about. Maybe those got me selected? Or maybe it was an error?

We shall never know. Or that's what they say.

Thank you and sorry.

Let's get started

Hi and welcome to my art blog!

Artistic depiction of me for your viewing pleasure

My name is Jarmo Wallenius. I'm an 3D & digital artist from Finland. I study 3D-animation and visualization in Helsinki Metropolia University of Applied Sciences for third year and I'm aiming for a career in game development or movie industry.

I will post material from my school and personal projects here as I get them finished, along with work in progress stuff and possibly some abandoned projects if they are otherwise decent.

Feel free to give feedback about my stuff. All comments are much appreciated. 

The visual side of this blog will hopefully improve as I figure out how this works. :)