Planet Blender v2 beta4 - 'Turning Pages'

0 / 517

Rendering a Light Saber
Blender Tutorials Downloads Videos & Education - Blender Cookie - 2010-03-10 03:05:58

In this Blender 2.5 video tutorial we tackle something that is on most people’s “create before I die” list, a light saber. This tutorial focuses in on the post-processing aspect by setting up a node network to create the effect of the glowing blade of a light saber. Modeling is not covered in this tutorial, [...]

http://blendercookie.com
Travel in Argentina and Chile
Oenvoyage's Blender Blog - 2010-03-10 01:32:49

It’s been now about a month that my wife and me are travelling in Argentina and Chile and we simply love it ! First we spend a few days in Buenos Aires, discovering some aspects of the argentinian culture, we also made a little game by counting the national football team shirts (the blue white stripped [...]
Blender Basics 4 Teaser
Art + Logic - 2010-03-10 01:14:00

Blender Basics 4 is now available at CartoonSmart.com!
back to work
mke3.net - Matt Ebb - lighting/shading/td/code - 2010-03-09 22:38:11

Sadly, I returned back from travelling in Japan last week and have to return back to the real world. We had a great time, unfortunately three weeks wasn’t nearly enough to do and see all that we wanted to, but that’s always the way I guess. Plenty of photos to go through, hopefully will be picking up my 11 processed rolls of 120 film today to start the hours of scanning…

Highlights were Ghibli Museum (and the awesome filmstrip tickets), Sapporo snow festival (or snow in general), Osaka Aquarium, shopping at muji, yodobashi camera, loft, etc, great food, temple flea markets, experiencing incredible architecture (eg. Ando) in person, and lots of other things too.

In Tokyo, yamyam organised a quick Japanese blender community dinner, which was lots of fun. Started off slowly and quietly but as people got a beer or two in them, communication difficulties got easier – luckily for me I didn’t have to use my abysmal Japanese language abilities much. More photos here and here. One topic that came up was Japanese (or non-latin) character support in Blender’s UI, and at least trying to eliminate the mojibake in the file browser. I’ve had a quick look into the code here recently, if anyone is interested in helping out, especially someone who uses a non-latin character language, please contact me!
blog post about blogs about illustration
Starbright Illustrations - 2010-03-09 14:48:49

I’m investigating other illustrators blogs right now and this post on escape from illustration island was a big help in finding quality blogs to check out. It’s probably just because it’s an alphabetical listing, but Ape on the moon was the first blog that they listed. It’s an absolute treasure trove of the highest quality stuff, mostly really good commercial vector illustrations on the day I checked it out. Watch out for your bandwidth though, there are a lot of posts right there on the front page and each one is good quality (i.e. big), it’s probably best to check out this resource on your employer’s Internet connection.

Illustration Friday is of course on the list, and anyone who has been reading this blog for any length of time will know that I try not to miss their weekly art challenge. I’m really quite pleased with how my Illustration Friday entry for this week turned out.

Next on the list was Illustrophile, which looks intimidatingly professional to me, as though it is by graphic designers for graphic designers. There is some nice illustration here, but I didn’t linger for long.

Illustrationmundo, the next on the list on the other hand says anyone can join, right there on the front page, much more inviting. I must admit I didn’t join though, I couldn’t work out what was in it for me. Would my work appear in the blog, or would I just get an inbox full o’ stuff. I’ll do some more research later and try to find out, or perhaps not, who knows?

Drawn! Was also on the list, but I must admit I find it a little dull, Illustration news foe illustration news’ sake. It’s not as if that much that’s interesting happens in the illustration world. It’s not economics, or politics. But I guess if you are actually in the business…

The next blog on the list Today’s Inspiration looks more like a history blog than an illustration blog to me. It’s about 50s illustrators and illustrations. It didn’t particularly appeal to me, and it is another one where the first page just keeps loading and loading as post after post, each with more than one illustration in, it is added to the bottom of the page.

Zerotoillo didn’t load properly for me, but then I am using Firefox on Ubuntu, so my system is a little nonstandard, but not that non-standard. That said, it was just a few text bars in the wrong place and bad header warning, the blog was perfectly readable, and all the illustrations were there, so that didn’t spoil my enjoyment. And it is an enjoyable blog, with long interviews and posts that give an insight into the author’s life and experiences. There are some very nice illustrations here too.

Lines and Colours was also represented in the list of illustration sites I found, and there are certainly some very nice illustrations there.

Signature Illustrations is a very nice collection, there is a lot of inspiration here and the page loads up really quickly, even though there are hundreds of illustrations on it.

The next one on the list was a nice change, most of the previous links were commercial images but Character Design is more animation and storyboard orientated. It has the sort of illustrations you see at the end of Dream Works movies. There are some really vibrant and amusing illustrations. Monsters and pop-culture stuff. It was my favourite of the list, apart of course from Illustration Friday.

The Little Chimp Society looks really useful, you can post news about what is happening in your illustration career, apparently, if only I was better at getting on with stuff like that.

The commenters on the post left a lot of nice kinks too, like Drawger, with lots of illustrations, and an interesting layout.
Render Development Update
Durian - 2010-03-09 14:41:02

As mentioned in my last blog post, there were four big changes planned, shading system refactor, indirect lighting, per tile subdivision and image tiled/mipmap caching. As usual, in practice those plans can change quickly in production. So here’s an update on the plans and some results.

For indirect lighting, the intention was to use a point based method. I found the performance of these quite disappointing. The micro-rendering method works well only with low resolution grids, but this is noisy, and when increasing the resolution suddenly performance is not as good anymore. That leads to the Pixar method which is somewhat more complicated. This can scale better, but the render times in their paper aren’t all that impressive, in fact some raytracers can render similar images faster.

Indirect lighting test with sky light and emitting materials

So, I decided to try out raytracing low resolution geometry combined with irradiance caching. With the new and faster raytracing code this seems to be feasible performance wise, and the code for this is now available in a separate render branch. Right now we’re not entirely sure yet performance is good enough, though we may be close to about 1 hour / 2k frame on average. This is with irradiance cache, 2k rays per sample, low resolution geometry, one bounce, one/few lights and tricks to approximate bump mapping. These are the restrictions that we’ll probably work with.

Indirect lighting test in alley scene, with sun and sky light

A prototype implementation of per tile subdivision is also there for testing now. It’s very early though, doesn’t work with shadows, texture coordinates, raytracing, etc, but it’s already possible to do some tests.

Displaced monkeys with per tile subdivision

Regarding the shading system, I worked on node based shaders for a while, however it became clear that the benefits for durian wouldn’t be that big and that it was taking too much time. Being able to define materials as nodes more correct & flexible would be nice but also not help rendering better pictures much quicker, in fact converting our existing materials would take more time probably.

New shading nodes - you'll have to wait a bit longer for this

The code for this is not committed yet, and will probably have to wait until after Durian. However the core render engine code has been and is being further refactored so that we can easily plug in a different material systems, which is a big chunk of the work.

Image caching I haven’t really started on yet. I’m looking into using the OpenImageIO library, though it’s not clear yet if this would be a good decision, as it would introduce another image system in Blender and duplicate much of the existing code. Besides that images aren’t the only thing that would benefit from this, there are also for example deep shadow buffers which are not covered by OpenImageIO. Reusing code could save us a lot of time though.

Single plane subdivided with voronoi and clouds texture for displacement

Further plans are:
- Try to get indirect light rendering faster, make it work better with strands, bump mapping, and displacement.
- Work further on the per tile subdivision implementation to get it beyond a prototype.
- Find out if we can use OpenImageIO, and either use it or implement our own tiled/mipmap cache system.
Brecht.
Interview: Pablo Vazquez (Durian)
BlenderNation - 2010-03-09 14:05:55

My apologies for the mediocre sound quality (I goofed up the sound settings). I hope you’ll enjoy it anyway!
blender 2.5 doc,
blender 2.5 dev - 2010-03-09 13:21:00

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.
Still Alive
Arkavision - 2010-03-09 07:35:46

I’m still alive, school has just been a bit all-encompassing lately. Attached is a sketch I did earlier today, after the last of my many mid-term exams. (YEAH!)
Feng Zhu Desert Bike Raider
BlenderNation - 2010-03-09 07:14:13

By Andrew Fraser (a.vector) This beautifully rendered, cleanly designed piece from Andrew Fraser sports a fascinating almost-but-not-quite steampunk style. Inspired by the concept works of Feng Zhu, Andrew has managed to capture, almost true to the original, all the intricate detail and design concepts that Feng puts into his work. Andrew, a mechatronics engineer who was introduced [...]