This blog really is just notes for me on how to be less of an idiot :-)
I was trying to keyframe a camera to follow an object by hand yesterday. A combination of things including my misunderstadning of how keyframe easing made that a lot less fun than it needed to be. Lots of horrible interdependencies in my keyframes and jerky camera moves. There is a constraint that will allow the camera to track an object. And you can easily check your easing in the graph editor. Another great video from Grant Abbit: For some reason I was thinking interpolation and easing were connected and I was treating it like black magic... then I watched this video that shows how to see the interpolation in the graph editor. Duh! Why didn't I think of that... :-) With these 2 videos I'm able to smoothly track an object flying through space from a stationary camera which is exactly what I wanted. But for spaceships it probably makes sense to have the camera track an empty that the ship is attached to. That way things like shake can be added to the ships coordinate system and will show up on camera.
This blog really is just notes for me on how to be less of an idiot :-)
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Another "my memory is so bad I have to make a blog post" entry. This is a great little video showing how to use the graph editor for path animations. So you can control the start and end of the path evaluation as well as the gradient of the curve. The other thing I seem unable to remember is how to scale the graph editor axes independently which is very useful when doing find adjustments. I know I've probably googled this 10 times.
Ctrl+MMB and move the mouse up or down!!!! Dumbass. I feel like I've been here before. Vegas refusing to play Mov files. OK Mov is an old format that Apple doesn't promote anymore. But I have about 6Gb of alpha blended explosions and blood splats in that format.
To get it working:
Deprecated, my ass :-0 I've been using Eevee pretty much since 2.8 came out. Turns out when I started using it, it made some assumptions that were wrong about how shaders needed to be set up. Yesterday I finally got irritated enough to figure out why my renders always looked a bit off.
I had 2 significant problems: I was using DX normal maps when Blender uses OpenGL format. That's bad since they use different coordinate systems. I was still feeding the Metallic and Roughness in using sRGB as the colour mode. I found out that actually they should be set to nonColor, just like the Normal Map. So now I have to go back through all the materials I created in this project and fix them. Because I was lazy and didn't set this stuff up properly in the first place. There might be a lesson there somewhere.... https://www.cgbookcase.com/textures/how-to-use-pbr-textures-in-blender I've used Blender's sculpting tools a few times with limited success. This time I decided to sit down and watch some training videos rather than just guessing how to do stuff. Found this series of videos by Grant Abbitt and I think they are pretty good. The use of constant detail, refining the shape and then cranking the detail up seems to be very logical and perhaps not what I was doing before. Also |Grant does a good job of showing you the finished product at the start of the video and his videos are clean and concise. Videos where you don't see the results until the end are a peeve of mine. Time to make an Easter Island Head. I'm currently working on an Alien outside new broadcast... Inspired by District 9 and Chris Foss's Easter Island head spaceship paintings. Here's an early shot processed to look like a Victorian photo. One of the important things here is even though the ships and head will be small on screen in the final product, I need to make them appear to be the same scale. If you imagine the ships to be about the size of a 737, then the head is huge, so I'll have to pay attention to that when adding the materials. This head looks like its about 4 inches tall.
This is a pretty exciting week for Blender users with 2.81 dropping. As well as a host of new features it offers improved performance when rendering. I decided to take a look, since performance influences which renderer to use. In my case, I love the look of cycles but I'm just too impatient. Using a scene from a project I just finished I decided to compare 2.8 with 2.81 as well as with the latest Studio Ready driver from NVIDIA. Summary: For my limited test scene on my specific computer:
Note: I didn't compare the output images except visually. They look about right, I don't know how different the pixels are, it isn't something I'm that concerned about. If you need to match footage between versions that might be something you care about. Your mileage is going to vary! My scene probably has all kinds of weird stuff in it and for my cycles renders, there is still a lot of noise. That's partly because I did the project using Eevee so I didn't care about the lighting for Cycles. The Eevee and Cycles renders look totally different. My system is an off the shelf HP Omen desktop running Win10 .
Eevee Performance Switching from 2.8 to 2.81 gained me a significant performance increase. This increase did not change with the new OptiX driver. Blender Eevee Time to Render Per Frame for 24 Frames
Pretty nice lift right? Basically my Eevee renders now take less than half the time. Cycles Performance Blender Cycles Time to Render a Single Frame
Edit->Preferences-> Cycles Render Devices and set your preferred rendering system. If you have it set to none which is the default, its going to render on the CPU which will be slow. Cycles Performance Take 2 By the time I realized the mistake above I'd already installed the latest Studio Ready driver from NVIDIA using GeForce Experience. I wasn't willing to roll back drivers to test this but I did do render tests on the latest driver with 2.81 with None, CUDA and Optix. Blender Cycles Time to Render a Single Frame
The interesting result here is 2.81 using Optix. I'm seeing about a 25% reduction in render time which again is definitely worth having. Disclaimer:
I used to work at NVIDIA :-) Seeing as I wasted an entire day on this....
I was building a tiled road section with nornal maps, when I rotated tiles I started to see some weirdness in the specular. Took me a while to figure out what the issue was. The input to a normal map vector should have a Color space of Non Color. That's probably true for all normals maps wired up this way :-0 Doh! Doh! Doh! In the past a lot of my cg work has been 2.5D at best and I've added camera shake in post. But since upgrading to the latest version of Vegas I've lost my favorite camera shake plug in. Previously I would have been warey of adding camera shake in Blender since rendering a 5 second clip could easily take 5 hours but with eevvee (the very fast OpenGL Renderer in Blender 2.8) I can generate 1080p 24fps video frames of my current scene in almost real time. This means that taking risks in the animation is much less expensive compared to using Cycles (the ray tracer). Here's a youtube from an annoyingly young person showing how to add noise to a camera in the graph editor. Obviously this noise could be added to anything, not just cameras. Also obviously this doesn't mean I won't continue to add camera shake in post, it's just another tool in the bag. Getting ready to call this done... this took about 3 weeks. Blender and Substance Painter mainly. This is supposed to be an off-world mining colony in the style of Bladrunner/Alien. I need to add a bit more detail to the terrain, but that can wait until my new computer arrives. Using Real Terrain Data and SubDiv Surfaces in Blender.Nice video here on how to achieve this: I pretty much just use this blog to remind myself of stuff... so here are a few blender things I learned and then forgot and then learned again.... Focus on an objectPretty much every other graphics package on the planet lets you zoom and center on a selected object by pressing the 'F' key. In Blender its '.' on the numeric pad. I actually like how Blender uses the numpad but I usually forget this one. Multiple Materials on an objectHandy for things like windows in a spaceship, where you want a single mesh but with different materials. It's not complex, but it's not obvious either. Follow the link for satisfaction. https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/516/add-different-materials-to-different-parts-of-a-mesh Atmospheric AttenuationBasic fog, but also a great introduction to the Compositor. A big slice of Blender awesome that I've barely touched. |
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