Update on the “Never Forgotten” series animation! I’ve since shifted from the desert sands and dunes into a more abstract ‘title sequence’ type vibe. For this section, I’m using particle systems and smoke simulations 100 percent of the time. Starting to get some of the shots back from the render machine, and they’re looking pretty cool! Hoping to get everything buttoned up in the next week or two.
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Blender Smoke Simulation: Creating Windblown Dunes
Shoutout to @loranozor for requesting this walkthrough! I don’t do a blender smoke simulation every day, but one of the biggest takeaways that I got from learning my way through this project was the difference between the resolution divisions of the smoke domain and the resolution divisions under the “high resolution” checkbox.
Smoke Domain Resolution
Basically, as I understand it, the resolution of the smoke domain defines how many voxels are used in the simulation. The higher the voxel count, the more accurate the main body of smoke. Use domain resolution to shape the main look of your smoke sim. If I’m not mistaken, I believe the little cube in the corner of your smoke domain helps you visualize the size of a single voxel, so you can get rough idea of your simulation scale before you even bake it.
“High Resolution” Divisions
Once you’ve got the main shape and behavior of your simulation looking the way you want it, it’s time to enable the “high resolution” checkbox. This is essentially like applying the subsurf modifier to your smoke. It keeps it’s main general shape and behavior, but the high resolution divisions add that extra little bit of “whispiness” for added realism and resolution.
If you’re interested in learning more about blender smoke simulation, check out Mantaflow. It’s a great branch of blender pushing the boundaries of smoke and fluid sims!
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Subsurf vs Multires: What’s the Difference?
My name is Matt and I’ve been using Blender for over 10 years. Today I came to understand the difference between subsurf vs multires. I’d like to share that information with you now.
Subsurf?
Subdivision Surface is a modifier that adds virtual geometry to your mesh, giving it a smoother appearance. The extra geometry isn’t there until you apply the modifier. The extra geometry is added evenly, across the entire mesh.
Multires?
The multiresolution modifier adds editable virtual geometry to your mesh. The extra geometry is editable in sculpt mode, allowing you to add finer detail to parts of your mesh, leaving other parts untouched. You can step up and down the different levels of resolution, retaining selective detail.
Best Use Case? Which One Do I Pick?
Most of the time, I use Subsurf. It’s just a general, quick way to add extra geometry and smooth out your model. Mulitres is best and almost exclusively used for sculpting. Once you get that extra detail in there, you can use that high poly Multires model and bake out a normal map to toss into your material. TLDR;
Subsurf: general smoothing.
Multires: specific to sculpting high details and baking later.
Subsurf vs Multires
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VFX Workflow: Start to Finish
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!
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I’m a Purist
Opinion
This idea has been with me since I was a kid learning card tricks. The purist in me never liked some special custom-made gimmick or some thing that essentially made the trick possible. Because suddenly, now I’m relying on that gimmick everywhere I go. Now I can’t perform if I don’t have that gimmick.
The same holds true in my professional life. And instead of gimmicks for magic tricks, it’s plugins for applications. They might seem cool at first and give you some ability you didn’t have with the stock version of the software, or save you a bunch of time in creating a custom look or help you deliver an effect on a tight deadline.
Reasoning
However, in the end, just like with card tricks, now you’re stuck relying on this plugin that now you can’t live without. And even worse, if you’re working on a team and need to hand off a project to another team member, they can’t work on the project unless they have all the same plugins you have.
Just a minor, technical note: for the sake of this article and the naming conventions used by different softwares and companies, I’m using the term ‘addon’ and ‘plugin’ interchangeably. There very well may be a technical difference between the two terms, but Premier and After Effects call them plugins and Blender calls the addons. They’re almost the same thing to me.
Of course there can be exceptions with regard to my ‘purist’ view on the idea of this subject. One is the nature of the plugin, and Blender definitely falls into its own category when it comes to plugins/addons. Especially since it comes with its own addons panel in the preferences menu, addons are an integral part of Blender. Plus you can bake or otherwise export things that you make using addons into a filetype or object that anyone else can import and use. The addons are limiting in that way.
Paid addons for Adobe products on the other hand, have the potential to cause issues. If you’re on a team and need to make some minor changes to a project, but don’t have the addons, now you’re in trouble. Plus you might even run into licensing issues, depending on the plugin.
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What Is The Golem Network?
What Is The Golem Network?
Simple explanation: Golem is a bunch of connected computers that team up to become a giant rendering Megazord!
This is a really cool project. Recently I have found myself lacking computational power in a professional environment. The client loves this Blender animation, but I’ve got 1/13th of the power I need to render what they want by the time they need it. Traditional render farms are out of the question because on demand render pricing would be enough to just buy a render farm outright. Possible solution? Golem network.
Disclaimer: I have not used Golem in a professional setting. However, that doesn’t mean I’m not very interested in the project. The idea being: you can download a simple client for accessing the network, set up a few ports for your router to forward, and essentially “go online”. There were anywhere between 250-350 computers or “nodes” on the network at any given time (at the time of this writing). You can check this number now at stats.golem.network. It even gives you the collective number of CPU cores, RAM, and disk space available at any given time. Pretty cool!
There are two sides to Golem. First is the side where you can essentially put your computing resources ‘up for rent’. This allows others on the Golem network to use your computer to render projects. The other side is renting computing resources from the network. Got a huge project to render? You can pay to rent resources to finish your project way faster. A huge advantage is that this is much less expensive than using a traditional render farm. Here’s a promotional video that explains it quite well:
My Experience
I ran spent about 2 weeks on the Golem network just renting my unused compute power. Wasn’t sure what to expect. The Golem network is built on the Etherium blockchain and providers are paid in GNT or Golem Network Tokens. If you are buying compute power, you’ll be paying in ETH and also covering any transaction fees. As of now estimating how much you’ll need to render your job is kinda complex. You need to define a specific ‘timeout’ time for your job. So if a weaker node gets your job and takes longer than your ‘timeout’ time, you basically lose your money. In my experience, I rented out my AMD FX 8350 Black Edition and earned about $0.07 worth of GNT. I think it’s because the network is still so new. Even the client to connect to the netowork is still in beta. It could also be that not a lot of people are using the network just because it’s just so new.
Regardless, the Golem Network is an incredibly cool project to keep an eye on. Who knows, it could potentially be the only way we render our complex projects! It is also worth mentioning that Golem is compatable with Blender projects. I have yet to test out the capabilities of the network and discover what is and isn’t possible when rendering Blender projects with certain versions of Blender, different addons, plugins, etc. Will keep you posted! Thanks for reading.
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Using 3DConnexion Spacemouse with Linux
Uh… 3DConnexion Spacemouse Wireless?
If you’re like me and spend any amount of time in the 3D world, whether it’s for game design, game development, motion graphics, 3D animation, or CAD, you’ve probably felt a bit limited and slow when it comes to navigating the 3D viewport. In some programs, you even have to grab different tools or hold hotkey combos to get the movement you want (zoom, pan, fly, rotate, etc). A company called 3DConnexion has made a fantastic effort to fix all that. For this driver install, I’m using a 3DConnexion Spacemouse Wireless.
If you’re on a Mac or a Windows machine, it’s as easy as heading over to their site and installing one of their official drivers. It even comes with a little training program to help you get the hang of the basics.
Unforuntately, 3Dconnextion dropped linux support some time ago. They technically have a Linux driver available on their official site, but it doesn’t work. However, I found the solution:
Setup
There is an excellent 3rd party driver available online called SpaceNav and it’s the best thing that’s ever happened.
Installation is quick and easy. Just download the zipped file with the extension of your choice, extract it wherever you want, and execute the file named ‘configure’, then run ‘make’, and make ‘make install’, and if you want the changes to be permanent and start the driver everytime you boot, then just run ./setup-init. All these instructions are in a handy file named README! After a reboot, Blender should be up and running with your 3DConnexion Spacemouse.
Inside Blender
Once you’re in Blender, you can hit one of the shoulder buttons (the long, skinny buttons on the side) and it will bring up a settings menu for your 3D mouse. From there, you can tweak everything to your liking, including naviation speed, inverting axes, and include some a navigation guide when you fly around.
That’s it! All done. Enjoy flying around the 3D world with your fancy spacemouse!
Side Note:
This is currently not working with the daily build of Blender 2.8 as of March 25, 2019. It works fine on 2.79, though.