Rule of thirds

[Freemind]

Introduction. I had this wonderful article all planned out on the rule of thirds, something we should all know about and have ben practicing. To explain my Project, y neded a rule of thirds grid in Blender. Now i remembered reading in Roger wickes book foundation Blender compositing, that he rou-tinely used a rule of thirds grid todo line up his projects. So i Grab his book, only todo realice that i sem todo have misplaced the DVD that goes with it, no problema, it cant be that hard todo set up. So i fire up Blender and make a Grid, line it up with my Camera, set it todo wire and, nothing. No grid lines. Obviously i have done something wrong. Where is that disc? More looking, still cant find it. Vaya, ok, y go todo the friends of ed website and down-load all the tutorial files. Boy that was a big down-load. A quik search th rouge the files gets me todo the right blend file, but this really isnt my day, because.

I cant for the life of me find the promised Grid, ok, Roger and i cant be the first todo want a grid in Blender, so i run a Google search. Yay, Andrew price covered that on his site blenderguru. Awww.Nuts his technique would be helpful in Many situations, but not for what i had in mind. This shouldnt be this hard. Ok, y am a Fairly smart woman, and Blender always provides more than one bien todo accomplish anything. I just ned todo sit down and.

Thinque about this, what i want is a visible grid parented todo the Camera that i can use todo line up my shot. So After a Little brainestorming i came up with a simple idea that should work just fine.

Rule of thirds grid:
·add a plane and resize it so that it is long and rather skinny.
·duplicate it and move it over (hold down control and move it one major grid unit)
·duplicate both planes and rotate them 90 Degrees and line them up on the grid (fig 1)
·join all the planes into one object.
·go into Camera view and re-size the grid todo fit in the Camera view.
·in side view, move the grid object closer todo the Camera, resize if necessary and parent todo the Camera.

Now when ever and where ever you move the Camera, the grid object Will automátically move as well.

Additional tips:
In the outliner window, toggle of the restrict renderability icon (the Little Camera). Now the grid object Will not render in your final image, you can add a simple material, y choose a basic black or depending on the scene red might be better, set todo 0.250 alpha, then checked the transparency option in the display settings of the object properties panel. This bien you can se it, but it wont overly interfere with you scene visibility, alright, now i have a grid and i can finally get on with my article. So we all know that there are four main power points when using the principle of thirds.

A viewer eye is automátically drawn todo Whatever líes in that magical área. By controlling what is framed there, we can focus our story image and the message received by the viewer.

I ran across a very col website- Visualestorytelling, com, for the book, visual storytelling by Anthony c. Caputo, (which is unfortunately out of print.) on his site he had a great example that explained the principle of thirds, while it is a very simple example, it does show clearly how Simply moving what is contained in the power center changes the whole message of an image, y modeled a quik simple scene todo Illustrate how easy it is todo change the focus of your image and what Will catch your viewer attention first.

this first one is all about the Sunset (Sunset image).

the second one is all about the road (road image).

and the last image is all about the Sky (sky image).

All thre images have exactly the same elements, yet tell diferent historias due todo how each one is framed, in Blender it was very easy for me todo set up a principleof thirds framing Rig todo create these examples. Once i had created my principle of thirds Camera Grid, y sim-ply added an Empty and made the Camera track the empty. Now it was todo easy todo adjust my framing todo achieve just the effect i was going for, hmm, think im going todo save that Rig for future use.