blender 2.6 dev

Gravity Simulator

2011-05-20T05:32:00.000-07:00

Gravity Simulator

See the Script at: http://www.pasteall.org/21810/python

enjoy. :)

sintel comes to luxrender..... more to come

2011-02-19T10:10:00.000-08:00

chicken run scene prop from sintel (click to enlarge)

Volumetric Scattering: in luxrender 0.8RC1, Part 1

2011-02-17T15:35:00.000-08:00

Created in Lux Render, 0.8RC1 see:Lux Render Wiki the scene was created in blender 2.5 from: Luxrender forum

There are two main uses of Volumetric Scattering:

Atmospheric Scattering, (god rays) where light is scatted in the atmosphere or other mediums (eg water).
Sub Surface Scattering (SSS) where light is dispersed within the material, (eg skin, plants, organics, some plastics ect)

Atmospheric Scattering:
The homogeneous Volumetric Material is used to create this effect:
(see right default settings as used in the scene above)
Materials:
when setting up light rays one can make the entire environment use this volumetric material, however this can lead to much increased render time with very little visual improvement. so it is best to only assign the dusty_air volume where it is used. here in this example. the windows are a null material with the dusty_air set as internal volume, (note the normals are facing out).

All other materials in this scene have the external material set as air. So only light that has just passed through the null window material will scatter, light that has subsequently bounced will not scatter. (note that if you have a highly reflective/refractive object in the path of a ray, eg a mirror, glass ball etc. i is best to set that objects external material to dust as well since there will be a focus of light coming of it creating volumetric caustics.

(see bellow right default settings for a Clear volume.)

In this scene there is a lamp in the background is a simple point source lamp, one could of course use a mesh emitter, this lamp has the dusty_air set as its exterior medium. The lamp shade is the rough Glass Martial and for speed improvements has the Clear air material set.

There is a sun+sky lamp, this lamp creates the (god ray) effect. however to further improve performance its external medium is air, so that only light that passes though the window will scatter and no light beforehand.

Setting Up the Scene:
firstly note that all the external walls+windows are all one joined complete mesh. The makes keeping track of the normals easyer, (luxrender uses the normals to differentiate the internal/external mediums), in this model the normals are all facing out, (eg we are looking at int inside of the mesh. thus the martial on the windows as discussed above has the dusty air set as its internal martial since the windows has no thickness.

To improves render time, one can place a portal outside of the windows so that the renderer knows to focus its ray-calculations to that portal. thus dramatically improving the chance of finding a ray/light. A portal is just a plane with the normal facing int the desired exit direction of the light, you must check the portal property in the mesh properties panel. (see right mesh settings settings for a portal plain.)

Rendering Settings:

When using volumetric scattering the Bi-Directional integrator seems to work best. (see right render settings settings.)

Setting up The Partial fluid test:

2011-01-14T10:05:00.001-08:00

fisrt of all here http://www.pasteall.org/blend/4769 is the blender file feel free to play with it as much as you like :)

so to set up the system the fluid is being pored into a bowl. (this is half of a uv sphere that has been scaled up the z a bit to make it less deep.) sothat the fluid partical will colid withthis bowl it is important for it to be on the same layer as the parical system, but we dont want the bowl to render so, in the Outliner, you clikc the camra to the right of the bowl: (so that is is greyed out)

(note i did not rename the sphere so it is still called sphere)

The next step is to make it a colidable object:

(you can use the defalt values)

Next: Set up the fluid sim. on a small plane facing into the bowl. you can use the defalt fluid settings for that as well i used 5000 particals,

Next set up the strand visuatation:

(not to use the path render option you need to Bake the particals first)

the path settings will draw the path of the partical over a set time interval:

to make this path segment move along the total path of the particals over time, i keyframed the interval at fram 0 and 500. (above left is fram 0)

(left fram 500)

notice the small difference in time step:

so if a particle is moving fast it will create a longer path than one moving slowly.

from here i just set up some nice materials for the path so that is fades out ect.

fluid particals

2011-01-13T16:41:00.000-08:00

this is just a nice visulatiation of some of blenders fluid particles. If anyones intrested in how i set this up i could do a quick tutorial .

Blender Partical Fluid Test from matthaus woolard on Vimeo.

SimpleLuxGPU

2010-09-14T04:44:00.000-07:00

Here is my best so far attemt at using SimpleGPUlux Rending systme:

new update

2010-06-04T10:54:00.000-07:00

have been doing some more render tests,
with luxrender and cuastic light.

(click to enlarge)

my final very nice luxray render took 8620 seconds to render. but it does look nice :)

Upcoming Big Rendering

2010-06-02T15:34:00.000-07:00

i have started a big comparison of open source rendering options. hope to be finished by the end of the week.

here are some of the first results results,
Direct lighting, ambit, ray-tracing, ray depth 10-20 max supported!
Luxray 7.0rc2 730s
Blender 2.49b 970.23s
Blender 2.5 render 262.19s
Blender 2.5 508.69s
Yafaray 0.1.1 3.766s

in this case Yafaray was the clear winner!
see renders:
(click to enlarge)

am doing more ray-tracing tests along with strands, volumetrics (were supported ect)

Ps. the Luxrender render was stooped by me when i deemed it crisp and thus to the same fine quality as the other renders.
I am also testing SmallluxGPU the demonstration version of what GPU accelerated Luxrender could end up as, this runs nice and fast on my macbook pro, with 4 threads 2 for cpu and 2 for gpu.

Edit:here is a hi resolution version of the above image

Keyboard map update.

2010-03-25T06:27:00.000-07:00

I have msot of the edit mode (for mesh) and object mode buttons in blender 2.5 alpha 2:

(click to enlarge)

while making this i have nottest that some keys seem over used (eg the 's' key) and others like '[' ']' '\' '/' '`' 'k' 'y' 'j' 'v' 'x' ';'

there are also some conflicting keys, such as shift+f is fly mode, (which should work in both edit and object) however since shift+f is mesh fill (fly mode doesn't work in edit mode without changing the shortcuts)

please leave your comments, on other conflicts you have found, allso on how i might best depict the diffident content on the keyboard?

blender 2.5 Alpha 2 Keyboard shortcuts map, on its way

2010-03-24T16:40:00.000-07:00

i have jsut started creating a map of the keyboard short-cuts for blender 2.5 alpha 2 see here:

there is still a long way to go.

testing the render branch of blender 2.5

2010-03-22T06:48:00.000-07:00

I used my test scene from the previous post on blender render25 branch (32 bit) [27656]
on blender 2.49b I got this as before:
Time: 1h 6m 21s = 3981 seconds

On blender render25 branch:
Time:13m 28s = 748s

blender render was 5.3 times faster than blender 2.49b and it was 1.6 times faster than blender 2.5 alpha 2.

Comparison of image:
The Hair was by far the slowest part of the render here. also do take note of the colouration of the fur and cone. Unlike in the normal blender 2.5 alpha (see previous post) the monkey is an almost perfect replica of that in blender 2.49b.
see difference map: of blender 2.49b and blender render25

And see map of: blender 2.5 alpha 2 and blender render25

system and render settings:
the cone in ray-traced transparency, the sphere is a ray-traced mirror, the hair is using zbuff to fade the ends, the monkey is repeated by a array modifier, and has SSS. the background is a NURBS surface. there are 4 colored lights. (rendered on mac book pro 0sx 10.6, 2.53 core 2 duo, 4GB 1067 NHz DD3 ram, )

rendering improments in 2.5 alpha 2

2010-03-11T17:40:00.000-08:00

here is a test render:
the cone in raytraced trasparency, the sphere is a raytrased mirro, the hair is using zbuff to fade the ends, the monky is repeated by a array modiphier, and has SSS. the backround is a NURBS surface. there are 4 colored lights. (renderd on mac book pro 0sx 10.6, 2.53 core 2 duo, 4GB 1067 NHz DD3 ram, )

blender 2.49b
time: 1h 6m 21s = 3981 seconds

blender 2.5 alpha 2
time: 19m 54s = 1194 seconds

this shows more than the 3 times speed up.
here is a diffrence map of the two results:
one can see that the hair paticals in blender 2.49b where rendered larger than those in 2.5, there is a slight color diffrence, and the bump map on the monky is aplied with diffrent intesity.

blender 2.5 doc,

2010-03-09T05:21:00.000-08:00

I propose that it is time for the comnity to start work on the blender 2.5 manual,
due to the great interface changes in blender 2.5 there alot more work updateing the manual for this release than that for preivus releases.

New RayTraing Optermisations in trunk

2009-10-06T14:44:00.000-07:00

to test the new ray-traing optimisations i chose a slightly unusual test: a very high poly scene with ambient (ray-traced lighting) (left, the legs each have just over 6 million vertices, the total seen has just under 23 million verities, a lot!!! )
in blender 2.48b it took 46 minutes and 1 second to produce this.
in blender2.5 r23664 it took 6 minutes and 3 second.
My secondray system wich this test was run on is and old linux box with a 1.8Ghz single core Amd and one gb of ram, the file size is just over 780mb.

edit: i used the following render settings:
AO ray traced 5 samples using add, and plain.
osa:8
50%:HD size
all object have no define material
and one sun raysadowed

Voxel sculting

2009-09-24T03:15:00.000-07:00

Raul has stated a new project on voxel sculpting, as he mentions a good example of this in 3d-coat since this is a new concept of modelling/sculpting i downloaded the trial version of 3d-coat (available for win/linux/osx) and writhing 2 minutes was creating:

a underwater rock-formation. Admittedly i was using the materials and brushes supplied with 3d-coat.

The Voxel sculpting work-flow is such that as you extend the object it adds resolution to that extension. the result is that you never end up having a mesh with to low a resolution for your current brush to have effect. of course you can increase the inter resolution (using multi-res) however this will create lots of resolution were you don't need it thus slowing down your system.

finaly a means of having custum keyboard shortcuts

2009-09-07T02:56:00.000-07:00

Key board short-cuts for blender 2.5 dev

2009-06-21T03:50:00.001-07:00

EDIT: warning many of these are out of data. for an uptodate version go to blenderguru.com

universal:

"F1" open blender file
"F2" save as
"F3" repeat history menu
"F4" scroll assistance / switch panel sides
"F5" switch panel sides
"F6" previous operation properties (nicer than "t")
"F7" run script
"F11" full screen
"F12" render
"ctrl+q" Quit
"ctrl+w" quick save
"ctrl+alt+w" duplicate window
"ctrl+u" save user settings
"ctrl+o" open resent
"ctrl+alt+s" split region menu
"ctrl+alt+shift+s" split region into 4 parts
"ctrl+alt+f" search
"ctlr+shift" redo
"ctrl+z" undo
"alt+a" play back animation (in all windows)
"ctrl+x" reload startup file

(3D view port):

"v" switch to vertex paint
"tab" toggle into and out of exit mode
"r" rotate, (add x,y,z to rotate only about these axis )
"alt+r" clear object rotation
"t" toggle last operation properties panel
"I" Insert Key-frame
"alt+I" Delete Key-frame
"ctrl+I" Invert selection (selects all unselected items)
"a" toggle deselect, select all
"shift+a" add object menu
"s" scale
"shift+s" snap menu
"b" box select tool
"shift+b" zoom to box selection
"n" properties panel
"ctrl+space" maximize sub window
number keys, vie that layer,
shift+number-key add layer to view
alt+num-key is for second Row of layers
"ctrl+alt+t " ten timer menu, animation playback control

Object mode:

"ctrl+t" track menu
"alt+o" clear object origin
"ctrl+p" parent menu
"alt+p" clear parent
"alt+s" clear object scale
"ctrl+g" group
"ctrl+shift+g" add to group
"ctrl+alt+g" ungroup
"alt+g" clear location
"shift+l" select linked menu

shared between object and edit mode

"ctrl+alt+c" set centre menu
"c" add to selection tool
"x" delete selection
"alt+z" toggle texture view
"z" toggle wire frame view
"alt+h" undo all hide
"h" hide menu
"g" grab move
"shift+d" duplicate selection
"shift+a" add object menu
"shift+w" Warp

Edit mode

"ctrl+tab" select mode (eg switch between vertex edge and face modes)
"w" subdivide menu
"shift+w" warp
"e" extrude
"alt+r" spin (use "t" or "F6" to change properties)
"shift+t" triangulate
"u" unwrap menu
"shift+p" mesh separate
"alt+s" shrink/flatten
"ctrl+shift+s" to sphere
"shift+f" fill mesh (faces)
"ctrl+f" faces menu
"alt+f" beauty fill faces
"shift+g" similar vertex select
"alt+j" triangulated mesh to quad
"l" select linked
"shift+l" deselect linked
"ctrl+n" make normals ...
"ctrl+alt+shift+m" select non manifold

Button Window

Right click on any value impute to control variable with a key frame, or driver.
"I" to insert a key frame will hovering mouse over any value input
"d" to add driver
"ctrl+centre-mouse-button" will reseize the content, try it!