Blender Creates Wedding Crown for ‘The Residue 2’

Five years after the first season, the highly anticipated sequel to ‘The Residue’ has finally aired in recent weeks.

Since its premiere, the show has not only attracted the enthusiastic following of many viewers, but has also frequently been featured on various trending topics, especially in the past two days: The official Weibo account of ‘The Residue’ revealed a behind-the-scenes photo of the wedding scene of the main characters, Fan Xian and Lin Wan’er: fans of the show sighed:

the long-awaited wedding scene has finally arrived after five years.

Many netizens were curious about the “unique”-looking crown in the photo: “What makes the crown?”

Makeup artist Sun Lingling also provided more details on the crown’s backstory: as the wedding of Fan Xian and Lin Wan’er is the only wedding in the season, they wanted to make some changes and innovations, so they combined some traditional cloud patterns using Blender technology to model and then 3D printed the crown – it can be described as “a fusion of ancient elegance and cutting-edge technology.”

Blender, a free and open-source 3D graphics software, is not only used by individual enthusiasts and small teams, but also by professional institutions and companies, including NASA, Sony, Marvel Comics, etc. Blender’s mission is “to provide the world’s best 3D CG technology as a free/open-source software to artists,” and its vision is also the same: “to enable everyone to freely create 3D CG content, freely use technical and creative production means, and freely enter the market.”

Therefore, Blender adopted the GNU GPL license, allowing the public to make various modifications to the code library, and promised that it is “a permanent free open-source software” and “your own 3D software.”

From the functional perspective, Blender supports almost the entire 3D creation process, providing a range of creation functions from rendering, modeling, sculpting, animation, visual effects, video editing, simulation, etc. It is cross-platform and runs well on Linux, Windows, and Mac computers.

Blender is equipped with a powerful unbiased rendering engine that can provide amazing hyper-realistic rendering effects. Among them, Cycles is a production rendering engine based on ray tracing, which uses multiple importance sampling for one-way path tracing; FreeStyle is a non-photorealistic (NPR) rendering engine based on edge and line, relying on mesh data and Z depth to draw lines on selected edge types; and the new engine EEVEE added from version 2.80 also makes the gap between offline rendering and real-time rendering Blender has a comprehensive set of modeling tools, including: keyboard shortcuts for achieving a fast workflow; N-Gon support; edge sliding, folding, and dissolving; grid and bridge filling; Python scripts for custom tools and add-on components. These tools make it easy to create, convert, sculpt, and edit models in Blender.

In this regard, Blender claims to be “designed for sculptors.” By providing both sculpting and polygon modeling toolsets, Blender greatly simplifies the transition from concept research to final model creation. Its built-in sculpting features include: 20 different brush types, support for multi-resolution sculpting, dynamic topology sculpting, and mirror sculpting.

Whether it’s simple keyframes or complex walk cycles, Blender can turn static characters into impressive animations. Its animation toolset includes: a character animation pose editor, non-linear animation (NLA) for independent actions, forward/inverse kinematics and audio synchronization for quick posing, and a complete set of assembly tools, including: wrapping, skeletons, and automatic skinning; drawing weights; mirroring functions; and B-spline interpolation of bones.

Blender’s built-in video editor not only allows basic operations such as video cutting and splicing, but also enables complex tasks such as video masking or color grading. Specific tools include: real-time preview, Luma waveform, chroma vector graph, histogram display; audio mixing, synchronization, erasing, and waveform visualization; up to 32 slots for adding video, images, audio, scenes, masks, and effects; as well as speed control, adjustment layers, transitions, keyframes, filters, and more. Blender also supports visual effects, meaning that camera and object motion tracking, masks, and compositing can all be “fixed in post”; each tool can be used to write scripts and customize via the Python API; and the user interface, window layout, and keyboard shortcuts can also be fully customized.

Over the past 30 years, Blender has undergone continuous iteration and upgrade, and its recognition in the industry has continued to increase. Some of the world’s leading companies have also become regular donors to the Blender Development Fund, including Epic, AMD, NVIDIA, Otoy, and others, in order to ensure that Blender can continue to innovate.