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Quick update! My problems earlier mostly had to do with how to combine objects, merge vertices, make edges along face intersections, etc. It seems like every Blender tutorial I was initially able to find was extremely willing and excited to tell me about doing this through the boolean intersection modifier (which makes no sense for simple stuff from a workflow standpoint, and doesn't really work with coplanar stuff either.) I ended up finding the knife stuff through somebody's hard surface modeling workflow display - even they didn't make note of it - and I found the cleanup tools for everything else on my own. Baffled why everyone seems to skip explaining these tools; just one of those things I guess. Switching to the 2.8 beta has also been pretty great. I'm glad I didn't spend enough time in 2.79 to build reflexes for it; I actually had no idea the beta was so stable and its formal release so imminent. The new UI loving rules and has made life much, much better. Also it seems like Blender has, like, some kind of version of every other program inside of it somehow. This poo poo is so loving deep, man, I had no idea, it's fun as hell and it's going to feel so rewarding to start making actual stuff. I haven't even gotten into lighting/rendering at all, my textures are basic like a north face fleece, I'm slow as hell and still overwhelmed but I am on the path, dammit. Below are the models I made in the process of learning some stuff. Thanks again for the encouragement and I'll post again when I've got something that looks cool!  e: oh yeah - if you were wondering if that spiral column tapers towards the top, hell yeah it does. even the stuff I can do in this manually is just continually blowing my mind *PUNCH* fucked around with this message at 23:45 on Jun 1, 2019 |
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Jun 1, 2019 23:32
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 trying my hand (for the billionth time) on remaking blood gulch from halo, here's a work in progress shot of the base. forerunner architecture is pretty fun to model (holy poo poo i really need to learn more about fundamental elements and principles of design) im trying to strike kind of a happy middle ground between bungie and 343 style Kanine fucked around with this message at 04:35 on Jun 2, 2019 |
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Jun 2, 2019 03:21
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Sometimes Blender is more robust than I expect. I wanted to figure out realistic lighting for a space scene and had the mildly insane thought that I should just model it in actual scale and see how it looks. So I got a spaceship a few hundred units in size in the foreground, an actual sized planet out of frame, and then a moon in the backround that is 300 million units away and 9 million units across that the planet happily bounces light at. Nothing breaks. It renders fine. Maybe that's to be expected, I dunno, but I absolutely expected it to explode into a cloud of shrapnel made of floating point errors.
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Jun 2, 2019 03:56
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*PUNCH* posted:Quick update! My problems earlier mostly had to do with how to combine objects, merge vertices, make edges along face intersections, etc. It seems like every Blender tutorial I was initially able to find was extremely willing and excited to tell me about doing this through the boolean intersection modifier (which makes no sense for simple stuff from a workflow standpoint, and doesn't really work with coplanar stuff either.) I ended up finding the knife stuff through somebody's hard surface modeling workflow display - even they didn't make note of it - and I found the cleanup tools for everything else on my own. Baffled why everyone seems to skip explaining these tools; just one of those things I guess. My old habits may be a little out of date for 2.8 (i've only messed with it a tiny bit, not sure how much changed), but some tips for merging and adding edges: Ctrl-E -> Edge menu. Brings up lots of basic edge tools. You'll use this a lot. W -> "Specials" menu. Also tons of useful tools, you'll probably mostly use subdivide and remove doubles from this menu Alt-RMB -> selects edge loop. Double-tap G -> Drags vertexes (including whole edge loops if you have one selected) along their connected edges. Ctrl-R-> adds edge loops. Defaults to center, you can drag it after LMB. If you RMB after LMB it will be perfectly centered if you're worried about perfection. If you don't have a good understanding of edge loops, look that up and study it. It's absolutely essential to doing all types of modeling. More so for organic, but it definitely applies to hard surface modeling too. W -> Remove doubles - removes overlapping vertices. You can alter the range it checks, defaults to a tiny range for perfect overlaps W -> Bridge edge loops - if you have two unconnected edge loops selected (e.g. two parts of a disconnected cylinder) this will create faces between them. Alt-M - > Merge selected vertices. Lets you select first, last, or center. Shift-R -> repeats last action. This is especially useful when doing a bunch of manual vertex merge operations, because it'll use your last selected option e.g. center merge. Booleans are awesome (and have gotten a lot better in the last couple years) but should be used very carefully. If you don't know what you're doing you're just going to make an absolute disaster out of your meshes and get yourself in a really bad place where you either have to backtrack or retopo, which sucks. Make sure you're using the boolean modifier to do this since it's non-destructive, as opposed to the boolean tool.
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Jun 2, 2019 04:37
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Ahhh awesome, thanks for this! I'd learned the rest but the W-related ones are going to be really useful. I'm still super slow but that's because I'm still at the point where I've gotta really think about what I'm doing. Yeah I've already dealt with some boolean mesh chaos, particularly on coplanar stuff. Didn't know there were two ways, I'll watch for that. But again I feel like with everything I've done sofar they seem totally unecessary, and that if I have a reason to use them it's because I've hosed up somewhere else. My guess is that they'll become useful when I'm messing with stuff that doesn't have easy axes, like unions of sculpts or something. Thanks again!
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Jun 2, 2019 06:39
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Elukka posted:Nothing breaks. It renders fine. Maybe that's to be expected, I dunno, but I absolutely expected it to explode into a cloud of shrapnel made of floating point errors. It can! light floating point errors can give you gaps and leaks in the shadows where they become a little inaccurate. Physics get slow at large scale too. There are tools to work around this though. Generally any large scale work like that is best done in 2 files - one with the planets and space scale stuff, then that would be rendered as a spherical image and mapped onto the inside of a sphere wrapped around your object at only a couple km wide. Much easier to manage in stages like that. It is good practice to work as close to 0,0,0 as possible.
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Jun 2, 2019 19:18
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A friend of mine is working on some tabletop game modules for a star wars roleplaying game and was looking for 3d artists who could help make models for 3d printing based on his own designs. If anyone is interested shoot me a message.
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Jun 3, 2019 05:59
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Kanine posted:A friend of mine is working on some tabletop game modules for a star wars roleplaying game and was looking for 3d artists who could help make models for 3d printing based on his own designs. If anyone is interested shoot me a message. Try this guy, he has his own Shapeways store and has a lot of experience with this sort of thing: https://www.shapeways.com/designer/mel_miniatures
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Jun 3, 2019 14:12
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thanks for the shapeways link! also does anybody know how to have more than 16 texture samples in an unreal material? im making a terrain material and its a pain to have to cut out certain masks/textures also on unreal, is there a way to speed up shaders compiling? im using a fair amount of material functions within my terrain material, and as a result its taking a long time to compile the material every time i make even a tiny alteration to one of the functions. The final material is instanced so that helps, but its annoying when im laying the ground work in the functions (pun intended)
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Jun 3, 2019 20:57
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Kanine posted:thanks for the shapeways link! I believe you can help alleviate this by setting the texture’s Sample Source to “Shared: Wrap”. That changes the sampling to enable more individual textures but the actual limit itself is imposed by the graphics cards / DirectX so it’s not changeable at its core
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Jun 3, 2019 21:13
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Pathos posted:I believe you can help alleviate this by setting the texture’s Sample Source to “Shared: Wrap”. That changes the sampling to enable more individual textures but the actual limit itself is imposed by the graphics cards / DirectX so it’s not changeable at its core thank you! also i went through and packed every possible grayscale map i could into packed channel textures and that also helped get it under 16, but in case i go over this will be a massive help
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Jun 4, 2019 03:56
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 some more progress on remaking blood gulch
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Jun 4, 2019 04:21
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It's not 100% for this thread but does anyone know some good tutorials for Solidworks? Getting it put on my work computer to replace lovely Vectorworks that doesn't work after upgrading to OSX Mojave. I vaguely used Solidworks for a bit 15 or so years ago but since then it's mainly been AutoCAD or Vectorworks.
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Jun 5, 2019 09:52
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 A render I made. The model is a bit long in the tooth, but I felt like using that one. I actually just meant to test whether you could reasonably see spaceships at realistic separations between each other with some reasonable camera, and it turns out the answer is yes. Then I got carried away making it look neater and learned a bunch of things in the process. A 1000 mm focal length lens should be able to snap that image in reality. The foreground ship is 10 km from the camera and the next ones are 100 km, 200 km and 900 km away. The body in the background, a habitable moon, is about 300 000 km away, and is lit by the same planetshine as the ships, only fainter since it's so much further away. The lighting is about as realistic as I could make it. Besides the little lights on the ships, the only actual light source here is the sun. Here's how the scene is laid out: 
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Jun 5, 2019 11:49
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Where's the key light on the bottom edge coming from? And ambient light should be zero  .
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Jun 5, 2019 17:31
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Ambient light is zero. The lighting on the bottom is sunlight reflected from the planet. It's also what's lighting the dark side of the moon, it's just much fainter there because it's 300 000 km away. The top side of the ship, the parts that aren't in direct sunlight, would be totally black if it wasn't for a lot of very intense sunlight bouncing around. The top radiator fin for example is lit by the sun bouncing off the hull. e: For reference, similar lighting in reality: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Earthshine.jpg Elukka fucked around with this message at 17:41 on Jun 5, 2019 |
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Jun 5, 2019 17:37
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Aargh posted:It's not 100% for this thread but does anyone know some good tutorials for Solidworks? Getting it put on my work computer to replace lovely Vectorworks that doesn't work after upgrading to OSX Mojave. Do you still have a Mac? You know SolidWorks only runs in Windows, right? Running it in Parallels is going to be unbearably slow for any serious professional work, and if you run it in boot camp just buy a Dell XPS or whatever instead. Fusion 360 is a reasonable SolidWorks alternative that runs in the Mac OS, provided you aren't doing complex industrial work that requires SolidWorks-specific features.
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Jun 5, 2019 18:01
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Elukka posted:
That is extremely awesome, well done. Love that you used real or near-real scale for everything.
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Jun 5, 2019 19:17
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Sagebrush posted:Do you still have a Mac? You know SolidWorks only runs in Windows, right? Yeah on a Mac with boot camp (though it's a decently specced 27inch retina with i7 32gb RAM decent graphics card etc..), unfortunately I don't make the IT decisions here and can't get a PC built up for Solidworks alone. We've also got a network license for Solidworks for one of the other departments so I can just piggyback off them for free. I'm only using it for some reasonably simple furniture / exhibition design so I'm not going to be taxing the machine too heavily.
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Jun 6, 2019 01:09
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Nice. How realistic is the exposure and dynamic range? I feel like most of the "space" imagery we're used to (like in Star Wars etc) is basically hyper fake HDR-like, where somehow planet day-sides, night sides, ships, and stars are all nicely exposed. You're definitely going in the right direction with how bright the lit side of the moon is, I wonder if any stars would really be visible? Paul Pepera (https://www.artstation.com/paulpepera) made some really convincingly over/under exposed space scenes, based on (and sometimes using) Apollo photos:    Just a potential direction to go with that sort of thing. That planet/moon system would be strange to live in though, I'm pretty sure at those relative sizes and separation (that's a very big moon) they'd orbit a center of mass outside the planet, and relatively quickly be tidally locked to each other too. Like Pluto and Charon. So the day/night cycle would be weeks-long for both.
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Jun 6, 2019 01:39
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It's a pretty wide dynamic range but I tried to keep it to something a camera might sanely see. I'm not a photography expert though so some guessing is involved. The top side of the ship, directly lit by sunlight, is a few hundred times brighter than the bottom part. I based the stars on shots like this: https://i.imgur.com/coP2Z2y.jpg That's exposed for direct sunlight, but it's still got faintly visible stars in the background (gotta view at full size to see them though). I figure mine's a somewhat longer exposure since I've got a white spacecraft too and its directly sunlit part is overexposed. e: Now that I think about it, the difference between Apollo photos and ISS photos can be explained by one being shot with 60's-70's cameras and the other by modern DSLRs. 
Elukka fucked around with this message at 21:58 on Jun 6, 2019 |
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Jun 6, 2019 11:55
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Elukka posted:e: Now that I think about it, the difference between Apollo photos and ISS photos can be explained by one being shot with 60's-70's cameras and the other by modern DSLRs. It's not so much the difference between the older cameras and newer DSLRs it's more got to do with the properties of the film that they used. Doing a bit of digging it seems the Apollo missions used Hasselblad EL medium format cameras with slightly modified Zeiss lenses so picture quality would've been pretty top notch. The colour grading that they have is because they used Kodak Ektachrome film stock for the colour prints. Now currently there are a whole bunch of cameras on the ISS but most of them are Nikon's of the D3/4/5 ranges so the images coming out of them would be quite clean and would need some level of post processing to get a similar look to Ektachrome. Or just run them through VSCO or Instagram for that classic slide film look!
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Jun 7, 2019 01:57
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Yeah, I meant more that the accidental light leaks, lens flares, and out of focus windows help to ground an image that's otherwise just a thing floating in a featureless void (since you're not going to get visible stars). And still possible with modern cameras!  Definitely not everybody's style (esp the one on the right, it just looks sloppy), but those look more "real" than this flawless image:  Those 60s/70s Hasselblads were legit and the quality stands up today:   Two similar-ish images, taken 50+ years apart:   Digging in to it more, I'm pretty sure those aren't stars in the reference you posted - just sensor noise or damaged pixels. For example, in these four images from the same ISS mission as the image you posted, taken across three days and of wildly different parts of Earth/space, the pattern of faint dots above Earth has matching pixels. Easier to see if you crank the white point way over so they get bright. https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2explore/40695344965/in/album-72157679671299912/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2explore/40876660584/in/album-72157679671299912/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2explore/40695349945/in/album-72157679671299912/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2explore/27717641948/in/album-72157679671299912/ It's not all the exact same pixels every image, but there's enough overlap that it's got to be camera-generated to be that consistent. You can see something similar in that bottom-left image I posted, there's bright(er) pixels in space above Earth... and on the dark side of Earth too. I didn't find a picture with an exact match to the one you posted, but it's similar to ones that are definitely camera-generated. Compare to actual star photos from ISS, where they're always on the night side, and the exposures are way longer: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2explore/albums/72157680091012838 Sunrise/sunset or even a thin crescent moon totally blows out the sensor if other parts of the image have visible stars. I'm getting deep in to the weeds on this because I'm also working on a space-themed 3D project, (a Dune tribute) and I want it to look as "real" as possible, with 60s/70s space photography as the main reference. As penance for the long post, some of my past space-themed indiscretions:  Firefly Alpha (3D) staging over the Bahamas (NASA photo)  Firefly Alpha second stage, all 3D/digital, attempted simulation of a long exposure  Sunless Lunar South Pole crater lander, 3D base + unrealistically bright stars + paintover  Venus lander, 3D base + photos and paintover Prolonged Panorama fucked around with this message at 04:45 on Jun 7, 2019 |
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Jun 7, 2019 03:51
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Random q: Any Amsterdam/netherlands based CG dudes here? I'm in Amsterdam until July 10th, and while I'm somewhat busy (gonna go yell at Ton since the BF is nearby, lol), would love to meet up with any local art goons.
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Jun 7, 2019 14:05
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Wrooooong thread..
Grey Hunter fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Jun 8, 2019 |
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Jun 8, 2019 17:07
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 working more on the blood gulch remake. I need help coming up with a name though. It needs to be related to blood thematically (other blood gulch versions were hemorrhage, bloodline, coagulation, etc.) One name im considering is "sanguinary" but im totally open to suggestions!
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Jun 9, 2019 00:54
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Kanine posted:
"scab" isn't a very pleasant word, but it is pretty loaded with concepts of restoration, rebirth, etc. that might be useful
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Jun 9, 2019 06:14
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Handiklap posted:"scab" isn't a very pleasant word, but it is pretty loaded with concepts of restoration, rebirth, etc. that might be useful hmm, maybe "scab gorge"
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Jun 9, 2019 06:24
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You guys see that Shave and a Haircut got acquired by Epic Games and will be released for free (including source code and shaders) in the coming weeks? That’s a nice little surprise
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Jun 9, 2019 06:41
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Kanine posted:
I would put some grass around those large rocks. Random tufts of grass might help ground those large boulders. Right now they look kind of weird there. Floaty / lack of AO? Not exactly sure why they look so weird to me but they do. Maybe have smaller rocks around them or sink them into the ground a little more?
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Jun 9, 2019 17:08
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sigma 6 posted:I would put some grass around those large rocks. Random tufts of grass might help ground those large boulders. Right now they look kind of weird there. Floaty / lack of AO? Not exactly sure why they look so weird to me but they do. Maybe have smaller rocks around them or sink them into the ground a little more? that's a good point, i gotta make them feel a bit more grounded.
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Jun 9, 2019 23:42
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https://twitter.com/KurtFitzgerald i just made a twitter specifically for art reasons. does anyone have good 3d art twitter accounts to recommend? also if you wanna share your art twitter id be happy to follow you
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Jun 9, 2019 23:43
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Pathos posted:You guys see that Shave and a Haircut got acquired by Epic Games and will be released for free (including source code and shaders) in the coming weeks? That’s a nice little surprise I guess Joe Alters patents all expired or something. When I worked for.. uh.. large theatrical animated film companies back in the day, there was always this weird dodge with Fur/Hair/Tech Anim and whatever or not it runs afoul of something Joe Alter did and if there was liability or not... "we're this big rear end multinational... why are we dependent on this one eastern European dude doing our plugin...?" "Don't ask questions." This is usually followed up by the dude in question getting hired by a competitor and ghosts the production..
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Jun 10, 2019 07:03
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Kanine posted:https://twitter.com/KurtFitzgerald Not sure if this is the sort of stuff you're into, but these are a few of my favourites: Aaron Covrett 3D artist https://twitter.com/AaronCovrett/status/1083405551357382659 Gil Damoiseaux Realtime vfx dude https://twitter.com/Gaxil/status/1133061143990288384 Croasan 3d animator, posts tips from time to time https://twitter.com/croa_san/status/1009512403636191232 Klemen Lozar Realtime VFX and gamedev stuff https://twitter.com/klemen_lozar/status/1094302635442622464 500 fucked around with this message at 08:00 on Jun 10, 2019 |
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Jun 10, 2019 07:55
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thanks for all the recommendations! followed
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Jun 11, 2019 19:12
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500 posted:Not sure if this is the sort of stuff you're into, but these are a few of my favourites: What do you call this "oomph" sound? I am looking for something like this in my game. Better yet, how do you create it?
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Jun 12, 2019 06:05
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So, turns out blender is pretty cool! This is the first thing I've, like, actually made for its own sake rather than for strictly self-educational purposes. Any idea how I'd put some juniper needles on this thing, or at least the direction towards the right tutorial? It's a bit bleak without any foliage. Dense pine needles sound easier to do but maybe I'm totally off here. Went overboard with the trunk/root texture, so now everything else looks dumb. I think soon I'll build a real texture onto the rock, find a way to build out the moss a bit, and maybe add a chip or two to the bowl. Hooray learning!  e: here, have a more flattering render. Haven't even touched lighting/rendering yet, no idea what I'm doing, just pushing buttons 
*PUNCH* fucked around with this message at 06:30 on Jun 12, 2019 |
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Jun 12, 2019 06:12
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At a rough guess, use one hair particle system to generate the base stem, and another one to generate the needles off the stems.
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Jun 12, 2019 06:38
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*PUNCH* posted:So, turns out blender is pretty cool! This is the first thing I've, like, actually made for its own sake rather than for strictly self-educational purposes. Any idea how I'd put some juniper needles on this thing, or at least the direction towards the right tutorial? It's a bit bleak without any foliage. Dense pine needles sound easier to do but maybe I'm totally off here. you’re right blender is cool sometimes I look at the junk I’ve created like http://rodtronics.tumblr.com   and I wonder, was this a waste of my evening? it’s never gonna go anywhere or make me money or contribute to a career but then I wonder, perhaps it’s a good hobby and it doesn’t have to be economically productive to be good for myself to do. I do enjoy being lost in the creation process where hours fly by guess it’s coz I think I could have spent that evening leaving how to make a dynamic web page work django which would enhance my life so Ifeel guilty because I am sick of my job and want a massive change and CG isn’t going to be it here in christchurch but perhaps learning databases and django will echinopsis fucked around with this message at 08:08 on Jun 12, 2019 |
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Jun 12, 2019 08:02
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Elukka posted:Sometimes Blender is more robust than I expect. I wanted to figure out realistic lighting for a space scene and had the mildly insane thought that I should just model it in actual scale and see how it looks. So I got a spaceship a few hundred units in size in the foreground, an actual sized planet out of frame, and then a moon in the backround that is 300 million units away and 9 million units across that the planet happily bounces light at. Nothing breaks. It renders fine. Maybe that's to be expected, I dunno, but I absolutely expected it to explode into a cloud of shrapnel made of floating point errors. blender is the best open source software that has ever existed
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Jun 12, 2019 08:09
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