I’ve got a procedural texture that I’m happy with. It’s been fine for still renders. But when I animate the object, the texture slides around. I figured the obvious solution would be to bake down the procedural texture into a regular UV image map(s) like diffuse, specular, AO, roughness, etc. But when I baked, I got a black map. I wanted a shadeless, color-only diffuse map. Just that. No lighting information. But I got nothing.
A call for help to my #b3d twitter fam!
A Workaround So Clean, It Might As Well Be The Solution
So, still confused about the resulting black map bake, I start considering other solutions. And then it hit me:
Last week I ran into some problems with a project at work that required me to have just basic knowledge of rigging. After burning over an hour watching and rewatching tutorials, and, because I was under a tight deadline, I got frustrated and eventually just edited the mesh directly to get a basic pose.
Beginnings
Now that I’ve hit the deadline and delivered the project, I spent the following weekend to fix my problem once and for all.
I started with a basic mesh comprised of 7 different primitives.
Which is fine, for arriving at a character shape fairly quickly, but trash when it actually comes time to rig and animate several primitives as if they were one. So once I got my turtle shape, I joined 2 primitives at a time, and joined up the meshes as best I could. Pair by pair, until I had a turtle mesh and a shell mesh. In hindsight, I would have just joined up the shell and the turtle to get one mesh, but that’s what this whole project was for: learning. Once I had my meshes joined, I marked my seams, and UV unwrapped. Then it was time for texture painting!
Texture Painting
Not the best UV unwrap, but it works for this project.
Rigging
Once my turtle was painted, it was time to rig. Now that the pressure was off, I had an opportunity to actually learn how to properly built a rig, set up IK constraints, and orient joints using pole targets. Woo!
Motion Tracking
Now that I had my rig all finished, I was ready to animate. And my IK constraints made it WAY easier to set a few keyframes and get a halfway decent animation. Next, motion tracking.
This one actually took me a few hours because I was having to relearn how Blender’s requirements for reconstruction. 1) Blender requires 8 continuous tracking points from the first frame to the last to even have enough data to reconstruct the scene. 2) the average solve error needs to be 0.3 pixels to get an accurate track. My first try resulted in a solve error of 35.6 pixels. So eventually, after learning the requirements, trying some addons, and manually helping it along, I eventually whittled the solve error down to 1.4. Close… Technically usable, but still not the best. In the end, I learned a TON from building this little guy from scratch. So without further ado, I present to you, Shelly.
Hopefully this helped someone. Thanks for reading!
This is a VFX shot and edit sequence created for a short video in late March 2019. We couldn’t find the ideal location (an open field surrounding a lone tree) for this shot, and I needed too many specifics to match any stock footage. Short on time, I turned to Blender for the solution. All things considered, I’m pretty pleased with the shot. The entire composite took about 8 hours to design and create, plus and overnight render.
Timelapse of the compositing processCapture 1Capture 2
The project was filmed in less than 4 hours on an overcast morning. I tried to get as little of the sky as I possibly could, as I knew I’d be grading day-for-night. Below is the final result:
If you’re like me, you’ve been on a quest to find the best video editing software that you can run on your Ubuntu Linux PC build. If you’ve been in the video world for any amount of time, you’ll probably know that Resolve 15 is arguably one of the most robust tools in the industry. Here’s my experience on running DaVinci Resolve 15 on Ubuntu 18.04
After the initial install, everything seemed to have went fine, but when I clicked the new icon in my application tray… nothing happened. After a few more clicks, I uninstalled it and went on with my life. A few months later, DaVinci Resolve came up in conversation when talking about postproduction solutions for Linux. So I decided to give it another shot. Same issue.
Unfortunately, in Linux_Installation_Instructions.PDF there is literally nothing telling you that you should install dependencies. I ended up finding the required dependencies somewhere online.
After that simple line in the terminal, Resolve fired right up in Ubuntu 18.04 On to the next hurdle: limited file type imports.
Convert footage using FFMPEG.
Only some file types work with Davinci Resolve 15. The ones I’ve tested that work are:
Apple ProRes (.mov)
Motion JPEG (.mov)
If you can afford the space, I’d choose Apple ProRes before anything else. Unfortunately I haven’t found a way to specify 4:2:2, 4:4:4, or HQ preferences. It’s just ProRes, and from the looks of it, it’s the highest quality possible. You may be able to change this with the -q value. Still testing this.
In my 10+ years as a video editing professional, I have never used the motion jpeg codec. However, after running a few tests, playback in Resolve 15 is flawless, and the file size is the same, if not slightly smaller than the original file. My original test file was a Panasonic .MTS file clip at 1.7GB. After the transcode to motion jpeg, the result was 1.6GB, and played perfectly inside Resolve.
The further I tested this transcode setting in ffmpeg, this reduced the file size just a little bit. The biggest clips were originally 4.3GB and the resulting files were hanging out around 2.3GB-2.7GB.
The only way to truly test if this is a viable alternative to Adobe CC on Mac or Windows is to actually test it on a live project with a real deadline. This may have been unwise, but I found it to be thoroughly worth it. I tried the above ffmpeg commands, only to realize after exporting that the resulting transcodes were sub-par. Pixelated garbage in, pixelated garbage out. So this time I hit up Handbrake. This one got me. Handbrake is essentially ffmpeg under the hood, but it doesn’t offer all the options that the command line does. So my exports out of Handbrake looked great, but there was no audio supported. On Ubuntu, Davinci Resolve only supports PCM audio, and that’s the one thing you can’t kick out of Handbrake (at least from the options I have).
New Plan
The original exports from my ffmpeg commands above looked like garbage, but the audio (pcm_s24le) was supported and sounded fine. So I ended up exporting Mpeg4 video out of Handbrake with no audio. I synced those clips up with the existing PCM audio in Resolve, and everything looked and sounded awesome. Next objective, getting an H.264/AAC file out of the free version of Resolve.
Instead, I exported 20-30 minute bits of my 3 hour long timeline as Quicktime MOV files with MPEG4 codecs. They looked and sounded great, but were a touch big on the file size. Next. I just dropped them in order into Shotcut, and encoded the whole thing as H.264/ACC. Done. So for future reference, it probably wouldn’t hurt to just encode everything as Quicktime ProRes PCM, do my work in Resolve, then export QT ProRes PCM as an intermediate, then concatenate in Shotcut or Kdenlive. Kind of a wonky workaround for now, until I can afford the full version.
Notes about the free version of Resolve 15
The editing capabilities of the free version are quite nice, but they clamp down your options when it comes to exporting. First cheap shot: they don’t support H.264 encoding on export for Ubuntu. And at the time of this writing, DNxHD and DNxHR both cause Resolve to crash upon export. So without H.264 and DNxHD/HR… your export options become extremely limited. This is especially true if you have a long (3 hour) timeline that you need to deliver to a client. So is there a workaround? Fortunately there is one, but it requires a bit of hard drive space, extra time, and some FFMPEG knowledge. First, trying kicking out your timeline with these goofy settings:
I thought a Kakadu was a bird…
Here’s the gigantic and disheartening list of features that they hold back from the free version. Also, here’s another magic setting that seems even smaller than Kakadu:
Project Complete
I eventually exported the video in about 10 different sections, using MPEG4 encoded Quicktime MOV files. Decent quality, and decent file size. I ended up assembling all those color graded and sound-edited files in Shotcut and rendering the H.264 MP4 that I was looking to deliver in the first place. A super wonky workflow, but in hindsight, I think it will be worth picking up a copy of Lightworks for my edit work Resolve Studio for my color work, and cutting audio in Resolve’s Fairlight, or if Fairlight absolutely cannot handle the task at hand, I can always grab a copy of Ardour. Those softwares paired with Blender, Kritia, Inkscape, and GIMP, I don’t think there’s anything I’d be missing from Adobe CC that these platforms can’t provide.
With the highly anticipated release of Blender 2.8, there is one big question hanging in the air. What’s going to happen to the years and years worth of add-on development work put into versions 2.79 and earlier? The introduction of 2.8 is already groundbreaking in terms of shattering render times and giving artists the option of Cycles and Eevee to render their work, but 2.8 also shakes up Blender at its very core: the source code.
The API rewrite for Blender 2.8 will essentially force all of the individual add-on developers to update their add-on to be compatible with version 2.8 and up. What does this mean for the end users? This could mean an open door for new developers to enter the world of add-on development for Blender, and potentially put pressure on the existing add-on developers who have contributed to version 2.79 and below.
As new developers enter the scene, this could put pressure on existing add-ons, as the new tools have potential to be innovative, considering how different Blender 2.8 is from 2.79. This also has the potential to leave some add-ons abandoned, especially if they haven’t been updated in the last year or so. This new development environment also has the potential to push the existing add-ons that have been successful since 2.79 and below to new heights in 2.8.
At the point of this writing, this is an exciting new world that has tons of potential in either direction it moves forward. Either the existing add-ons upgrade to 2.8 and remain amazing, new add-ons explode onto the scene and take advantage of brand new features unique to 2.8, or some mix of the two. Only time will tell what the future of 2.8 will be, but no matter what happens, the future promises to be a bright one. Rock on, and happy blending!
I’m glad you asked! If you spend much time in the world of 3D modeling and animation, it won’t take you long before you come across this term. Photogrammetry is essentially the process of taking a bunch of photos of an object, and generating a 3D model of the object in the photos. Seems crazy, right?
Of course like anything, you can spend as little or as much as you want doing this kind of thing, but some may be surprised that you can create your very first 3D photoscan using tools that you probably already have lying around. If you have a computer and a cell phone, you can get started right away!
Get Started
First, find the right subject. Bad subjects are hyper-intricate like fine brushes or translucent things like certain types of leaves or glass. Also, your subject has to remain perfectly still while you’re taking pictures. Your two year old nephew and your cat are also bad choices for scanning.
Good choices for scanning are things that are still, opaque, and don’t have much reflectivity or transparency. Things like rocks, tree trunks, seashells, or backpacks make great subjects.
Once you’ve got your subject, you’re ready to rock! Snap a ton of pictures from every angle you can get. And even when you think you’ve got enough, take a few more because when you’re turning these photos into a 3D object later, you’re always better off waiting a few minutes longer because you took too many photos rather than getting a jumbled up mess of geometry because you didn’t take enough photos.
I didn’t have enough good photos of this object, so the point cloud is sparse.
You can find good many options for software with a Google search for “photogrammetry software”. Once you’ve got your software, just drop in all your photos, and hit go!
Wrap it up
Your photogrammetry software will analyze all of your photos and use the metadata to triangulate the position of various features in each image. A point cloud will result after the first few processes are complete. Point clouds are essentially just points on a three dimensional graph. The information contained in the point cloud can be used to construct a mesh and an image texture resulting in a 3D model you can use anywhere!
If you want to learn more, just stay tuned because I’ve got a few tutorials planned to hit the learn library later this year! Hope you guys learned something new and I’m pumped to keep sharing. In the meantime, if you’re new to 3D, check out my Blender 2.8 Overview course over in the learn library!
If you’re like me, you’ve probably second-guessed how much you’ve shelled out to companies like Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, and others. It costs a great deal to be on the cutting edge of technology, and some software can set you back literally thousands of dollars. Seriously. Have you tried licensing a copy of Maya lately? Let’s check out some free software that could make you money.
It took me a bit of testing out different software, but I think I’ve compiled a pretty decent list that, I’m personally convinced, with enough skill and creativity could completely replace Adobe Creative Cloud.
Operating System
First up, I’m going to start with the most basic. The operating system. Most people think computers fall into 2 categories: Mac vs PC. Well, PC just means ‘personal computer’ so… every consumer computer falls into this category, but- I digress. A great open source alternative to Mac and/or Windows is Ubuntu Linux. There’s TONs of documentation out there and a mega community who supports it.
Update January 2020: I’ve been using Manjaro on both my work and home machines, and I find it much easier to set up out-of-the-box, and there’s much more support for my video editing applications. I write more about that here.
Photoshop
Photoshop is no doubt the industry standard when it comes to image retouching and manipulation. But few people know of a great open source alternative to Photoshop called GIMP. GIMP is an acronym that stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. Kind of an unusual name, but a stellar piece of software available for free. An excellent choice for users who only need to do minor editing and retouching every now and again.
Premiere Pro
This one is a tough one, I’m not going to lie. Depending on how much video you need to edit, how big the project is, and how often you need reliable editing tools, there may not be much of a choice here. Just to be fair, this comment is coming from someone who makes his living and supports his family editing video. If that’s not you, Kdenlive is an excellent choice to edit just about any video you might need.
Another piece of software on this list is Shotcut. It’s a little more scaled back as far as the technical capabilities, but it’s still able to do some basic edits. I haven’t logged more than a few hours in Shotcut, but it can handle basic edits for small applications like vlogs and home movies. If you need more technical control, I’d check out Davinci Resolve, or Kdenlive.
Also, this one’s kind of an honorable mention, but just to be clear, this is NOT open source software, but it is excellent (the Hollywood gold standard) software in color correction, and more recently, video editing. It’s now available as free software that can be used with Mac, Windows, and Linux. That of course, is DaVinci Resovle. Definitely worth checking out.
After Effects
Again, another toughie, because of the way that this program operates. After Effects is a layer-based compositor, which is the only compositor that I am aware of that operates in this fashion. It makes sense when you view it as a part of Adobe CC as a whole, because Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Lightroom, and others are all layer-based. However, there are a few node-based compositors that are open source that I can suggest. The first, and definitely the most battle-tested is Blender. Easily the most powerful software I’ve ever come across. Another option would be Natron. Natron is more up-and-coming than Blender, but still something to keep an eye on.
If you’re already checking out Davinci Resolve, then you’ll already have Blackmagic Fusion which comes bundled with Resolve. Admittedly, I have limited experience in Fusion, but from what I gather from coworkers and others who have used it, it’s more than capable for graphics and VFX. It’s a node-based platform much like Blender, Natron, and Nuke, so if you’re coming from a node-based platform, you should feel comfortable pretty quickly!
Illustrator
Illustrator is a great platform for creating vector art for use in large-format work like billboard design or design works that require your images to be flexible, such as a web environment. It’s is included in Adobe CC, but there’s also a great open source alternative called Inkscape. An amazing tool for creating vector art and logos, and available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.
Audition
Again, if you’re checking out Davinci Resolve, you’ll get another built-in program called Fairlight. My experience at the time of this writing is zero with Fairlight, but from my brief glances at the interface, it looks absolutely capable.
Another powerful option is Ardour. Conveniently enough, Ardour is available to download and install via the Ubuntu Software Center.
Missed Something?
Drop a comment below, or shoot me a message, and I’ll add to this list!
