blender is proof that software can be good

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Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

I've finally taken the step of writing my own code to avoid interacting with a part of Blender's UI.

# ¿ Aug 3, 2021 19:49

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 21:54

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

echinopsis posted:

what is it?

I want to make a spaceship fire some thrusters and I enjoyed the experience of using the NLA editor so much I want to never touch it again and I just want to have a button that lets me say "fire a thruster here". I'm halfway there!

Also it turns out to be essentially impossible to make a completely independent, clean copy of an object in Blender - some data blocks remain shared and tangled up even if you explicitly tell it to make everything unique. I didn't wanna go through the trouble of finding all of the cases where that happens and essentially writing my own copy function that works properly and instead use an incredible kludge: Every time a thruster fires I append the effect from a separate .blend file. Because that's the only way to get a clean copy.

Edit: I have discovered another way to get a deep copy! You must go through the clipboard. Either by doing that directly or going through the outliner, which for some reason goes through the clipboard when it copies something. So basically if you copy a material normally through the UI it will do a different thing than if you make it go through the clipboard.

I'm going to come out of this covered in so much Blender gore.

Elukka fucked around with this message at 00:38 on Aug 4, 2021

# ¿ Aug 3, 2021 22:05

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

Songbearer posted:

The NLA is like looking into an abyssal pit where once you learn the eldritch horror of how it works you are a changed person, cursed with this knowledge and all the less for it

It's incredibly useful when you have an animation library but man is it intimidating and there's a lot of weirdness that goes even beyond Blender's trademark obtuseness

The tracks have collision! Why on Earth. You gotta play track Tetris.

I got this cute little thruster effect which is actually just conical meshes with some vector math around the edges. I can spawn them with the script now but I still have to figure out how to move the actions to the current frame and maybe adjust their length. Which means I have to touch the NLA, but through code.

https://i.imgur.com/3lVJRtZ.mp4

echinopsis posted:

ahahah. thanks for the detailed answer.

really seems like the kind of thing that would make sense to do from a game engine, although blender should be easier for that than it is

Yeah a game engine would do well for this but I enjoy the flexibility of Cycles and Eevee and the way any arbitrary node jungle is likely to work across both. It turns out actually making a simulation/game loop is pretty straightforward:

code:

import bpy

def tick():
    print("tock")
    return 0.1
    
bpy.app.timers.register(tick, first_interval=0.1)

Elukka fucked around with this message at 13:29 on Aug 4, 2021

# ¿ Aug 4, 2021 12:04

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

I made my horror-kludge script work and fire these thrusters so I don't have to do it all by hand.

https://i.imgur.com/DWA9mRm.mp4

# ¿ Aug 12, 2021 15:40

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

I made another test render and it's got space noises now. (it's ok they're radio noises they can propagate in space)

https://i.imgur.com/neRBzJR.mp4

I'm having some kind of problem where Blender crashes with no error log or message while rendering every few hours. It's pretty annoying if I'm trying to run something overnight.

I also wanna make a more realistic effect that would stretch to more lighting conditions and still look good but I'm pretty sure it would take Houdini because I can think of no practical way to do it in Blender. Free version of Houdini lets you export volumes and volume animations to Blender with no restrictions incidentally.

Elukka fucked around with this message at 06:52 on Aug 17, 2021

# ¿ Aug 17, 2021 06:49

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

echinopsis posted:

I�ve had blender crash when pushing huge amounts of mesh subdiv and it�s inconsistent. turning down the dicing ratio (or up as the case might be) fixed it

idk if you�re doing that but it�s one thing if you are

incidentally it�s using a feature that the experimental render options allow for, perhaps that�s why it�s experimental

Nah, this is a very simple and low poly deal with nothing fancy going on. It's literally this and the spaceship's entire material setup is a single principled node:

The other effect I want to do is basically what this funky thing is doing:

https://i.imgur.com/ffDsKZr.mp4

Emitting these expanding cone segments, for as long as a thruster is firing. Here it's doing a lot of very short pulses, but if it fired continuously it'd emit a cone. The only way I can think to do that is with particles but it's really not a good fit since I want it to look smooth and not particley and also Blender particles have an arbitrary max speed of 1 km/s. In Houdini I think I'd do particles and then convert those to a volume. I'd prefer to keep it within Blender though.

# ¿ Aug 17, 2021 07:20

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

Jenny Agutter posted:

https://i.imgur.com/dAoW4TY.mp4

How did you do this? That's really neat.

Songbearer posted:

Are you using volumetrics? I had to change my Compression Volumes (Under Cache/Advanced in the fluid domain) to Zip in order to make my renderer not crash.

Nope, those plumes are just meshes.

Jenny Agutter posted:

you can make a batch file to render frames individually in order to ameliorate blender crashes. check out this thread https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/120266/when-blender-crashes-during-rendering

I didn't even in think of that! It seems like it might be inefficient in some cases where there's a bunch of work it has to do before rendering the first frame (not sure what that is, just something I've ran into) but that'd be a pretty surefire way to get around any crashes. I'll probably do that next time.

# ¿ Aug 17, 2021 22:12

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

Jenny Agutter posted:

shader nodes and math

the keys to everything

What's the driver you used in the value's value? The value value.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2021 04:50

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

I love block torus.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2021 12:57

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

One day there will be GPUs again and I will get something newer than my GTX 970. Although even that is pretty good for GPU rendering and can even run the Optix denoiser. Just doesn't have the magic raytracing hardware.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2021 18:24

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

echinopsis posted:

but one thing - I cant stand the denoiser. I hate the look of denoised poo poo. looks like its a jpeg encoded at quality of like 4 (or of 128)

I dont mind thre look of noise from low amounts of samples. I wonder if any effort could go into making the sampler act more like film so that low samples looked liked of like grainy film. I mean it kind of already does but just more so

Are you using some old denoiser or modern magic machine learning denoisers like the OptiX or OpenImageDenoise ones? They do have limits in that if the image is just too noisy to start with you start losing detail and getting neural net vomit all over the place, but if the detail exists in the first place they usually work exceptionally well. Like this started life pretty heavily noisy and looks fine to me after a denoise:

# ¿ Sep 5, 2021 02:15

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

echinopsis posted:

hmm maybe. I�ve been using whatever blender has.

don�t get me wrong I think they do an incredible job but I personally prefer noise

I mean I use film grain textures in the compositor and add them to most of my renders as it is

It defaults to "NLM" which I think is the old denoiser. You'll want either OptiX or OpenImageDenoise. OptiX requires an Nvidia GPU with Optix turned on in Blender preferences, whereas OpenImageDenoise is Intel's CPU-based solution. Some people tell me OID gets them better results but I don't really know, they both do a good job.

Using render noise as the equivalent of film grain is often problematic because render noise tends to be localized to particular areas. For example, some types of lights make more noise than others, and bounced light is noisier than direct light. If I say have a spaceship lit by sunlight on one side and bounce light off a big space station on the other, the sunlit side will be perfectly noise-free while the space station side may be very noisy.

Elukka fucked around with this message at 12:36 on Sep 5, 2021

# ¿ Sep 5, 2021 12:33

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

Neon Noodle posted:

If you denoise at a really low sample it can look like a painting, it�s cool.

Speaking of fun render glitches, some time back I was trying to figure out how to make a realistic star field, in particular, one that would respond realistically to camera exposure.

I got a pretty good result. It's slow to render and only works for highly specific things though because it's hacky as hell.

At one point I accidentally rendered a sunlit object with a starlight exposure, and it turns out in Eevee light just kinda breaks at such extreme contrasts and you get some really fun effects.

Incidentally, if you've ever wondered if Blender realistically renders faraway objects too small to resolve (i.e. they're smaller than 1 pixel) realistically, the answer is yes, and you can indeed swoop a camera down into a speck of light and watch it resolve into a spaceship. The brightest star in this shot is the actual spaceship mesh 10 000 kilometers away:

# ¿ Sep 5, 2021 14:38

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

fart simpson posted:

howd you get the render distance that far? i thought it was limited

You just have to adjust the near and far clipping planes of the camera (clip start and clip end). For the viewport camera the settings are in N -> View.

You want to keep the two clipping planes close enough, because the z-buffer which determines which things go in front of another things has finite precision. Like if your far plane is 1 billion and the near plane is 0.1 you'll have problems. Basically if you get weird flickering, move them closer.

There are no fundamental limits to scene sizes either, though somewhere maybe around a billion blender units you start running into floating point precision issues and things start jittering around. This scene and the viewport shot itself is about two light seconds across (600 million Blender units at 1 BU = 1 meter) and it behaves and renders fine. I wanted to get realistic lighting for a planet-moon system and I just built it to scale.

I did end up faking the final render for that though because bounce light from extremely distant objects is extremely noisy and you'd need a huge amount of samples. I made a tiny ground truth render and comped the final one together to closely resemble it.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2021 15:51

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

echinopsis posted:

for "hobbiest" people like you and me? eh I prefer the warm analog render

I frequently run into situations where a render would take inconveniently long to make reasonably noise-free the traditional way. Denoising is definitely better for when you want to turn a kind of okay image into a good image rather than an absolute catastrophe to something tolerable, though.

I also often think about doing animations that I then calculate would take like three weeks of render time and then I abandon the idea of raytracing and switch to Eevee. Denoisers don't save me there so it's kinda beside the point but render times can definitely matter in a hobby context.

# ¿ Sep 6, 2021 16:35

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

I got tires.

They bring my computer to its knees because back when 2.8 was released it was so generally awesome that nobody noticed the massive performance regressions that are unfixed to this day. Some fun numbers, in a scene with a subsurf modifier and 2 million tris (with the modifier):

RAM usage on scene load: 3.5 GB
After importing a complete copy of the object into the scene, obviously doubling the tri count: 1.5 GB (???)
On entering edit mode (a 6 second operation): Spike up to 10 GB
After exiting edit mode: Stuck at 6 GB

I then went and downloaded 2.79, a version from 2017. It turns out this model can be appended to this version, modifiers intact and all.

RAM usage: 640 MB

Anyway I'm making a nuclear space truck.

# ¿ Sep 11, 2021 02:11

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

How do you do this in Blender? I know there's CAD software with tools for it but I didn't think Blender did.

# ¿ Sep 21, 2021 21:23

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

I tried to make my spaceship spin and that exposed how terrible the geometry actually is so I stopped.

Subsequent ones should have less terrible geometry. I have embraced the sports car paint of shame, the shiny red matcap which exposes the slightest flaw in surfaces.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2021 10:12

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

echinopsis posted:

you betta fuckin post it haven't you seen the garbage I am prepared to post? you're in good hands

I didn't save it, I just made like ten frames and noped out. The spaceship is the same one I've been posting before.

However in the interests of posting here's another spaceship that's probably a bit cleaner. Also one of the few things I've finished. Wish I had more time for art.

It also comes in red.

Then someone suggested to me I should go full Foss so I did that

# ¿ Sep 26, 2021 09:15

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

Archduke Frantz Fanon posted:

these are cool as hell. how do you approach your designs on them? every time i try to make some space ships its either a boring rectangle with greebles or an enterprise

I usually start thinking about what's it for and who made it. I might have a loose visual idea at this point, or I might not. For that ship the extent of the latter was "I want it to have a pointy nose". Then I think about what kind of hardware it needs to do what it's for. In my case I like to go with semi-realistic engineering concerns, but you can do the same with entirely fictional tech (like Star Trek did - entirely fictional parts and design rules for ships) or with a more intuitive ruleset. Homeworld is a great example of the latter. In any case, having context and restrictions is very important to me to have any compelling visual ideas. I want to have some narrative context for why the thing exists and I want to have rules for how things work inside the fiction. I like worldbuilding so that comes naturally to me.

For that ship, I started with the pointy nose, then blocked out approximate volumes for its functional bits. I figured out how much volume would be needed for main propellant, maneuvering thruster propellant, weapons, etc. based on some figures and guesses of material densities, and arranged them in some sensible way. I ended up with a core of main propellant, four liquid tanks for the maneuvering thrusters around it, missiles in external pods, and everything else in the nose section. Then I draped a skin over it and had this:

It's really boring at this point. I did some pro concept art to figure out where I wanted to go with it:

Then I applied that, did some scale adjustments on various bits, generally to make interesting bits more prominent and boring bits less prominent. (Side note: I think Expanse ships would benefit from another pass like this) Eventually I got a final shape I was happy with, and started scribbling out ideas for details:

Then I drew normal maps for that detail directly. If I was making a high poly model this is where I would be modeling all this detail instead, but I'm bad at dealing with high poly models. After that, I did the texturing proper.

echinopsis posted:

what kind of meaningless individual wastes their time doing this?

I would probably be able to do a lot more things if I had your aptitude for loving around and finding out neat things!

Elukka fucked around with this message at 13:27 on Oct 1, 2021

# ¿ Oct 1, 2021 13:20

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

echinopsis posted:

as opposed to spending time making worthwhile models and impressing people

if this was chemistry everyone else would be making useful chemicals or vaccines or some poo poo while i am in the corner sitting different poo poo on fire to see what makes the prettiest flame

It's just different strengths. I can make these designs and models, but I suck at experimenting without sufficient direction, and I mostly just find it frustrating and never get anywhere. None of it is set in stone either, I'm sure it's possible for me to learn to be better at experimenting, or for you to combine what you've learned into projects you consider worthwhile.

# ¿ Oct 2, 2021 15:16

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

Kazinsal posted:

as someone who does sci-fi modelling occasionally (though admittedly a much lower detail and more stylized I see stuff like this and wish I knew blender instead of 3ds max. the idea of just casually painting on normal maps instead of painstakingly modelling everything while trying to stay under a certain self imposed triangle limit is extremely foreign to me

That's not a Blender thing, I did that with Quixel Suite's NDO which is a Photoshop plugin that's now deprecated and unsupported. At some point I'll have to replace it with something else, which probably will have to be Substance, which I'm not overly enthusiastic about because it's Adobe and because it's a huge complex suite of software and I feel I don't really need most of it.

I looked around for software that can do the same and it's either too simplistic or incredibly enormous so I probably have to go for the latter. What NDO does is let you just draw as normal, and what you draw is converted on the fly to normal map, and you have a bunch of sliders to adjust just how that happens for each layer. (depth of the detail, whether it goes up or down, how smooth it is, etc.)

e: This is all stuff I just drew in Photoshop and for this kind of thing I find it so much easier than modeling all this detail. Of course, actual modeled detail on a high poly model would still look better... If I was making game models though this would make a whole lot of sense.

Elukka fucked around with this message at 13:53 on Oct 3, 2021

# ¿ Oct 3, 2021 11:07

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

I'm making some trains for some reason.

Also I accidentally understand how suspensions work now.

# ¿ Oct 26, 2021 20:56

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

Have you considered Sheepit? https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com/

I'm curious if anyone has used it. I have no experience with it. The point is that when you're not rendering, which is likely most of the time unless you're echinopsis, your machine will render other people's projects. That builds credits to let you have other people collectively render your projects when you do have something to render, essentially banking your CPU/GPU time for later use.

There's at least one inherent problem - inevitably, your assets must be distributed to anyone involved in rendering them. That's a no go if that's a concern. Otherwise, it seems pretty neat, and I should actually try it some time.

# ¿ Oct 28, 2021 12:47

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

Tried it out on one scene of mine and it was pretty much twice as fast.

In another it was maybe 20% faster.

In conclusion, 3.0 Cycles is a renderer of contrasts.

(Seriously though those are great performance leaps. My bullshit guess from a grand total of two scenes is that more complex scenes seem to benefit more.)

# ¿ Dec 4, 2021 00:04

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

Bluemillion posted:

Also having something the actual size of the earth involved here seems like something could go horribly, horribly wrong.

It's mostly fine. Adjust your viewport camera clipping planes (N -> View) to actually see it though. Push the near plane further if you increase the far plane a lot so that the distance between the planes isn't terrifyingly high. You'll know it's too high if you get z-fighting.

In my experience practical scene size limits before you get to serious floating point issues are somewhere in the 1-2 light second region, so you could possibly squeeze a real scale Earth-Moon system in there. Planetary scale seems to work easy.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2021 15:37

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

Making a recreation of this Homeworld ship. Not a great fan of the version in the remastered game, so I'm making my own.

This is the original from 1999. It has a grand total of 205x205 pixels of texture space, but they packed a lot of detail in there. I'm turning all that into mesh.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2021 07:30

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

Meanwhile, when I've left a project in a state of some topological frustration and return to it a few months later

# ¿ Dec 16, 2021 14:29

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

Impromptu spaceship doodling

# ¿ Jan 15, 2022 22:53

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

I was gonna make a quick spaceship but instead I spent all my time making its turrets mechanically workable

# ¿ Jan 25, 2022 10:37

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

Jabor posted:

I like the mechanic for scale. Looks neat.

Given the relatively small bore I assume it's some sort of particle beam thingy?

Yes! It's an electron beam. You'd think electron beams would have poor range because they self-repel aggressively, but someone who works with actual particle accelerators tells me you can make them so relativistic without too much trouble that they just don't experience enough time to repel appreciably even over light seconds.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2022 11:46

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

Bluemillion posted:

Making the supports a bit taller would allow that back part to swing underneath and allow it to aim up.

It's got a lil tub for that. Not only can it aim up, it can flip all the way around so that it doesn't lock up at 90 degrees. Excuse the rough geometry.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2022 17:39

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

I'm making a 40k ship now for some reason and it's a huge trap and I will be stuck doing detail forever

# ¿ Jan 29, 2022 09:10

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

Maybe! I'm working on the bigger detail now that I gotta do by hand but there's gotta be a lot of repeating stuff and scattered stuff and whatnot in addition. I don't really know what geo nodes can do yet though.

# ¿ Jan 29, 2022 18:17

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

But I need artisanal greeble

Actually that might be very useful, some extra detail to encrust on top of the handmade stuff. I never noticed that one existed.

When I was doing those sensor spires I found there were no good references for them so I made my own concept art by slapping a sensor mast off a naval ship onto a cathedral spire.

# ¿ Jan 29, 2022 22:42

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

I mostly like making realistic space stuff but this absolute nonsense for a change is pretty relaxing.

I sketched out this plasma cannon for another ship because there didn't turn out to be any existing design for it.

# ¿ Feb 24, 2022 19:13

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

Captain Pike posted:

This may be the dumbest question in the world, but is there any chance the 'Blender Game Engine' will ever be viable, maybe for like super simple webGL interactive things or something?

It's not a thing anymore. They discontinued it some time back. I think it was the right choice to be honest. There's a certain attractiveness to doing everything in Blender, but a side project like that is never going to hold a candle to a dedicated game engine, and I think Blender development is spread thin enough as is. There are some features that are much closer to Blender's core functionality (like particles, or vdb volumes) that just stay neglected for years.

# ¿ Mar 18, 2022 21:02

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

Nodespeople, I require your aid once again

How could I create something like that pattern on the sail there? Shimmering hexagons type deal. Doesn't necessarily need to animate since I'm not sure I'll be able to use that, though it wouldn't hurt. Doesn't need to match that exactly either, just the same kind of vibe.

e: Actually this is one of those cases where I immediately get ideas as soon as I ask the question. Hexagon image, various optionally moving procedural cloud textures on it?

Elukka fucked around with this message at 00:28 on Apr 8, 2022

# ¿ Apr 8, 2022 00:25

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

^^^
Thanks, I'll give your ideas a try when I stop getting distracted.

Today I learned Freestyle is fun. Mesh is not mine, I just kitbashed bits from the video game to put together a ship.

# ¿ Apr 17, 2022 17:19

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 21:54

Elukka: Feb 18, 2011; For All Mankind

warhams

It's mostly Blender! Just some text and icons on top.

# ¿ Apr 20, 2022 17:18

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > blender is proof that software can be good

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