Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Neon Noodle
Nov 11, 2016

there's nothing wrong here in montana
off topic but related, there’s a new software synth program called bespoke I’ve been messing around with, and it’s laid out pretty much as nodes. I knew all that blender crap would turn out to be good for something!

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Corla Plankun
May 8, 2007

improve the lives of everyone
bespoke synth looks cool as hell and I bet it is fun but I could not figure out how to do a single thing with it when i first got it 😂

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy

Elukka posted:

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




gently caress these are cool

love the one that’s like a diagram

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
we’re they talking about bespoke in the pics thread a while ago ?


I wanted to look at it but forgot the name and couldn’t find the post. thanks

Archduke Frantz Fanon
Sep 7, 2004

Elukka posted:

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




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

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
27,000 sampels. I left it overnight. wonder if it's barely noticable from 10,000

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

oh i remember that level of Control.

nice subsurface scattering

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
idk what you mean about level of control unless it’s a dig at something


but thanks

it’s volume scattering and volume absorption

“sub surface scattering” in cycles is a hack and i try to avoid it. it’s almost like ambient occlusion but for sub surface effects.


it’s sort of an experiment to see how much you can tell the light is streaming thru the object


the animation I posted early with the rotating cube is a good example of it. you can see the inner opaque blocks creating shadows in the larger block


next step is filling the object with particles that are small and block the light more and see if one can tell

Jenny Agutter
Mar 18, 2009

echinopsis posted:

idk what you mean about level of control unless it’s a dig at something


https://store.steampowered.com/app/870780/Control_Ultimate_Edition/

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
oh. not like level of control over something. what a loving idiot I have been this whole time

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
made a whole bunch of these today, this was the best by far
trying to use those blocks to show off the volume scattering and emission




here are some others just for interests sake maybe





Jenny Agutter
Mar 18, 2009

cool effect. how’d you do the cube scattering?

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
particle system

hardly used them before but I knew it could generate particles spread thru the volume of the object, and used the object render mode and used an offscreen cube

I’d like to have less on the surface, but :effort:

Songbearer
Jul 12, 2007




Fuck you say?
If you change the particle render from Object to Path you can change the Path Scale to a different value and then switch it back to Object, higher scale raises the particle away from the generator and lower sinks them in

The starting scale is pretty low though so this is better for pushing things outwards. If you change the origin location of the cube you can set how far out the object spawns. Combine the two and you have decent control (heh) over the height of the particles

This month has been almost entirely nodes and particles for me so I've learned a few things in that regard. I'll do my monthly update on the 1st

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
something that is doing my head in is that light transports differently between transparent shader and any other shader with transparency.




the FLIP fluids addon's water has this:



and so I wonder if I need to apply the same idea to my own.

anyway.

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
what kind of meaningless individual wastes their time doing this?

https://giant.gfycat.com/JubilantWellwornBunting.mp4

Bluemillion
Aug 18, 2008

I got your dispensers
right here

echinopsis posted:

what kind of meaningless individual wastes their time doing this?

https://giant.gfycat.com/JubilantWellwornBunting.mp4

Wait, how are you animating particles like that? I thought if you gave them infinite lifespan they could only stay in one place after emission?

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
“make instances real” basically turned those particles into 3000 individual meshes lol

Songbearer
Jul 12, 2007




Fuck you say?

echinopsis posted:

what kind of meaningless individual wastes their time doing this?

https://giant.gfycat.com/JubilantWellwornBunting.mp4

A person who is doing God's work


So much of Blender is me going "Wait, you can keyframe THIS?!" and spending 30 minutes loving around

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
anyone know anything about colour management in blender?
filmic is awesome.. but would love to get inside those profiles and gently caress around with them a bit more


or work out how to apply 3d LUTs or some such


i’m interested in emulating film and it makes so much more sense to do it with raw scene referenced data than afterward in a photo app on my phone :cry:

fart simpson
Jul 2, 2005

DEATH TO AMERICA
:xickos:

https://blendermarket.com/products/3dlut-importer

fart simpson
Jul 2, 2005

DEATH TO AMERICA
:xickos:

https://github.com/Suemura/blender_luts_importer

fart simpson
Jul 2, 2005

DEATH TO AMERICA
:xickos:

https://github.com/sobotka/filmic-blender

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
how the heck

i’ve google for it dozens of times over the years


typical fart simpson privilege

fart simpson
Jul 2, 2005

DEATH TO AMERICA
:xickos:

idk im just googling “blender 3d lut” and stuff like that’s coming up

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

Jenny Agutter
Mar 18, 2009

one month out from nodevember...

fart simpson
Jul 2, 2005

DEATH TO AMERICA
:xickos:

Jenny Agutter posted:

one month out from nodevember...

i feel the itch

when do they announce the daily themes or w.e

Jenny Agutter
Mar 18, 2009

fart simpson posted:

i feel the itch

when do they announce the daily themes or w.e

I think they usually have a poll mid October and they announce the prompts on the first. watch @nodevemberio on Twitter or wait for my thread

Archduke Frantz Fanon
Sep 7, 2004


awesome! thank you for this.

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy

Elukka posted:


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

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

Jenny Agutter
Mar 18, 2009

echi making that logo in blender got me curious, how did you make the text go around a circle for this

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
um i’m not at my pc to check but I think in the text settings of the text object somewhere you can select a curve for it to follow

so to be clear, i created a bezier circle, not mesh, and then used that


and also, you can use alt+ left or right arrow keys to individually increase/decrease spacing between letters, because circular spacing can make stuff look weird coz the spacing gets hosed up

Jenny Agutter
Mar 18, 2009

oh lol I used a complicated animation nodes setup to do it. still learning!

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
that allowed you to actually animate it tho

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.

Songbearer
Jul 12, 2007




Fuck you say?
It's a couple of days into the month but here's my animation update for September. The animations are largely unchanged from the previous month and are still placeholder, but there's a minute of new footage, the old stuff got tweaked, a bunch of new elements were added and several visual aspects got overhauled:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drv7ZGV-7vQ


Here's a description of all the big changes, forgive the layman speak as I'm also relaying this to less savvy relatives so I'm copy and pasting my facebook post lol

quote:

Time for my monthly animation update! September had a big focus on improving the visuals of the animation, adding more elements to the shed fight and learning a lot about shaders and particle effects.

As always, character and camera animations are placeholder and will be polished, changed and refined as the project continues.

Scene animation on the whole got about a minute of new footage, pushing the progress towards the next part of the project - the final third - a huge leap forward.

So, the nitty gritty:

First order of the month was remaking the shed. Since a lot of the action happens in this small environment, it's important that the location is easy on the eyes and simple to make reactive. Previously, the shed consisted of a square floor and two boxes, one inside the other, with a few cutouts for the door and window frame. While it was good enough to put together what I wanted the characters to do, it quickly became apparent that it was not a convincing location with slapdash texturing and a severe lack of character.

To this end, the body and the floor of the shed was completely remade from scratch. Rather than being simple boxes, the shed is now created from individual planks which can be bent, cut down, notched and deformed to give the location a lot more character and a lived-in look. There are gaps in between the planks, the spacing is uneven and some are bulging completely out. It's subtle, but you'll be amazed what your mind notices and it means that when the area is brightly lit, it's less recognisable as, well, just a box.

The addition of a framework inside the shed to make up supports for the roof, floorboards and walls gives the scene more believability, with the mesh easily being deformable so irregularities could be placed. It's noticable in the doorframe with its added dents and deformations.

The floor recieved the same treatment, with planks extending outwards to make a 3d foundation for the exterior and the interior featuring raised and sunken irregular floorboards. All of the elements of the shed recieved new textures with much more convincing wood effects and the lack of uniformity on each plank makes it a lot more convincing.

Though it won't be too apparent in this instalment, the scene terrain got tweaked around with ditches, hills and dips thoroughout the previously flat landscape. Grass planes were reduced by about 2/3rds to improve scene rendering times and action visibility, but I might raise them later.

A continuation of the scene from the previous animation has Driver be hurled out of the nearby window, the planks nailed into it shattering and scattering as he falls through and Driver slamming into a nearby cross, snapping it in two. The same method as the table in the shed applies to this, with the initial object being duplicated and then manually cut apart into seperate meshes which are independently animated. The clean one is hidden and the broken one is revealed, giving the illusion of a dynamic breakage.

The scene called for fire, lots of it. Initially the candle falling from the driver's hand would have been the cause of it, but such a small flame was already being comically exaggerated in its strength and lifespan given what it goes through during the interaction between Driver and Monster.

Getting the fire to leave the poor overtaxed candle was the easy part - the previous animation had a table leg break loose and land near the shed's threshold, which could then catch alight when Driver's candle rolls free from his hand. What was more difficult was having the fire spread with any meaningful urgency when the driver was displaced from the shed following the Monster being poked in the eye with the cigarette.

For the suspension of belief to not snap under added pressure and for some more comedy and anticipation to be added, three more elements were introduced to the scene:

A shelf, two wall brackets and a giant cannister of Auntie Ediths' Family Recipe Superslick Oil (Highly Flammable!), perched precariously right at the front of the shed. The cannister was tons of fun to model and for something so simple I'm proud with how it turned out, retaining a cartoony appearance while clearly being something that just begs to be abused at some point in the scene. Non-diagetic lighting draws the viewer's attention to it as the driver enters and it is visible during key points of the scene, which will hopefully build anticipation up for the viewer as the fight goes on.

Shortly after the driver is stabbed in the leg by Monster and hoisted up, he lands a swing with the saw he has retrieved, lodging it in Monster's foot joint. The moment the driver gains purchase with his foot on the wall to elevate himself was the perfect opportunity to have the shelf come free from the wall, inspired by all the dodgy shelves I've seen in my life. There have been some inspiring examples.

The shelf falls, knocking the cannister free which then dribbles out oil particles as it falls, creating a puddle of oil where it comes to rest.

The shelf itself (Textured to appear as if oil has spilled onto it in the past) acts as a fuse, extending just far out enough to catch fire from the table leg. This allows the fire to reach the oil spill with spectacular results!

In order to have the fire in my scene, I had to do some investigating. Blender supports volumetric fire which automatically creates spectacular fire effects using particles, but experimentation in the past have revealed them to be - in layman's terms - a gigantic pain in the arse.

A fantastic video tutorial taught me how to do flames as procedual textures, which has now become a source of major fascination to me. They require very little in the way of processing power while being insanely flexible.

With a few exceptions, the fire effects consists of three flat surfaces which project animated textures. Camera trickery - for the most part - gives the illusion of a 3d flame which can be modified, recoloured, resized and detailed according to my needs. The oil spill, which ignites into one of these flames, is also generated from a procedual texture which allows it to initally pool and later light up when instructed to.

Refining, placing, lighting and setting up particle emitters for the shelf fire and oil spill fire ring took up the second half of the month.

The things I learned from this allowed me to further refine two parts of the environment: The stars in the sky, which now twinkle subtly (an effect I wanted since the beginning) and have varying depths to make them even more convincing, and an overhaul to the ground fog in the graveyard. This was important as fog was clipping through the shed, which was an interesting - but unwanted - side effect of having an animated volume. The new fog is a lot less fantastical but I think it suits the scene better, and cunning usage of some technical wizardry stops fog from creeping in on the shed where it's not wanted. The dark circle surrounding the shed in exterior shots is a side effect, but not an entirely unwelcome one.

With many of the elements of the shed fight in place, I can now continue the animation towards the last third where the struggle between the two characters comes to an exciting conclusion. That's still a lot of animation work, ignoring all the additional details and riff-raff I want to add to the scene (and the fact I haven't actually done the start of the animation!!), but for the lack of forward progress in the scene the technical things I've learned have been invaluable.



and as always here's last month's again for comparison:

url'd so people don't think this is my new one tee hee

Jenny Agutter
Mar 18, 2009

Songbearer posted:

It's a couple of days into the month but here's my animation update for September. The animations are largely unchanged from the previous month and are still placeholder, but there's a minute of new footage, the old stuff got tweaked, a bunch of new elements were added and several visual aspects got overhauled:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drv7ZGV-7vQ



very nice progress, the environment looks much better!

Bluemillion
Aug 18, 2008

I got your dispensers
right here

Songbearer posted:

It's a couple of days into the month but here's my animation update for September. The animations are largely unchanged from the previous month and are still placeholder, but there's a minute of new footage, the old stuff got tweaked, a bunch of new elements were added and several visual aspects got overhauled:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drv7ZGV-7vQ


Here's a description of all the big changes, forgive the layman speak as I'm also relaying this to less savvy relatives so I'm copy and pasting my facebook post lol

and as always here's last month's again for comparison:

url'd so people don't think this is my new one tee hee

The shed is looking great. It's really easy to follow what's going on in the fight. Time to critique something that's beyond any project I've attempted so far.
-That texture on the wall when it's lit up at the end needs improvement.
-I think the problem with your animations not flowing smoothly is due to the default Bezier interpolation mode. I can kinda see how your animation speeds up and slows down at each keyframe.
If you go to the dopesheet window, under Key there's interpolation mode. If you select the relevant lines and switch that to linear there won't be that acceleration/deceleration around each keyframe and things should flow smoother.
-Is that fire fountain at the end supposed to be some sort of spell? Some kind of geometric pattern/runes would help sell that.

You've got a fun concept, good characterization, clever monster design. Keep up the good work!

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Komojo
Jun 30, 2007

go play outside Skyler posted:

Hell yeah curvature talk give me more of that poo poo, it's fascinating

Bézier curves are polynomial functions, and the smoothness of the curve depends on the degree of the polynomial.

Suppose you have a 3D camera that is following a path. With only linear interpolation, it would move straight lines and you would see a sudden jump in velocity every time it goes through a control point. If you combine two linear interpolations you get a quadratic curve; this would show a constant acceleration for each segment of the path, but as soon as you go from one segment to another the acceleration would suddenly change. For smooth acceleration you need at least a cubic Bézier curve, which is the most common type.

The curvature at any given point be defined as the inverse of the radius of an osculating circle tangent to that point. There's a handy formula on Wikipedia for computing the curvature if you know the first and second derivative, which is easy to compute for Bézier curves.

So just because it is so interesting, I wrote a Python script that can visualize the curvature of a Bézier curve in Blender. It looks for a curve called "BezierCurve" and then creates a new object called "DebugMesh" which shows the curvature overlaid in 3D.



code:
import bpy  
from mathutils import Vector  
import math

scene = bpy.context.scene

# Bezier curve function
def Bezier(p0, p1, p2, p3, t):
    u = 1 - t
    b0 = u * u * u
    b1 = 3 * u * u * t
    b2 = 3 * u * t * t
    b3 = t * t * t
    return (b0 * p0) + (b1 * p1) + (b2 * p2) + (b3 * p3)
    
# Derivative of Bezier curve function
def BezierD1(p0, p1, p2, p3, t):
    u = 1 - t
    b0 = 3 * u * u
    b1 = 6 * u * t
    b2 = 3 * t * t
    return (b0 * (p1 - p0)) + (b1 * (p2 - p1)) + (b2 * (p3 - p2))
    
# Second derivative of Bezier curve function
def BezierD2(p0, p1, p2, p3, t):
    u = 1 - t
    b0 = 6 * u
    b1 = 6 * t
    return (b0 * (p2 - (2 * p1) + p0)) + (b1 * (p3 - (2 * p2) + p1))

# ShowCurvature: Generate a new object that shows the curvature of a Bezier curve
def ShowCurvature(curveObjectName, debugObjectName):

    # Create the mesh object
    bpy.ops.object.select_all(action='DESELECT')
    if (scene.objects.find(debugObjectName) >= 0):
        debugObj = scene.objects[debugObjectName]
        debugObj.select_set(True)
        bpy.ops.object.delete()        

    debugMesh = bpy.data.meshes.new(debugObjectName+"Mesh")
    debugObj = bpy.data.objects.new(debugObjectName, debugMesh)
    col = bpy.data.collections.get("Main")
    col.objects.link(debugObj)
    debugObj.select_set(True)

    # Read the Bezier curve points        
    curveObj = scene.objects[curveObjectName]
    spline = curveObj.data.splines[0]

    # Add curve points to new mesh
    verts = []
    edges = []
    faces = []

    numPoints = len(spline.bezier_points)
    edgeIndex = 0
    for curveIndex in range(0,numPoints-1):
        p0 = spline.bezier_points[curveIndex+0].co
        p1 = spline.bezier_points[curveIndex+0].handle_right
        p2 = spline.bezier_points[curveIndex+1].handle_left
        p3 = spline.bezier_points[curveIndex+1].co

        DETAIL = 256
        SCALE = 0.5
        for i in range(0, DETAIL+1):
            t = i / DETAIL
            
            # Find the derivatives
            d1 = BezierD1(p0, p1, p2, p3, t)
            d2 = BezierD2(p0, p1, p2, p3, t)
            
            # Find the "out" vector
            sideways = d1.cross(d2)
            out = d1.cross(sideways).normalized()
            
            # Compute the curvature
            a = ((d2[2] * d1[1]) - (d2[1] * d1[2]))
            b = ((d2[0] * d1[2]) - (d2[2] * d1[0]))
            c = ((d2[1] * d1[0]) - (d2[0] * d1[1]))
            k = math.sqrt((a * a) + (b * b) + (c * c))
            k /= math.pow((d1[0] * d1[0]) + (d1[1] * d1[1]) + (d1[2] * d1[2]), 1.5)

            # Add a line segment            
            d0 = Bezier(p0, p1, p2, p3, t)
            verts.append(d0)
            verts.append(d0 + (out * k * SCALE))
            edges.append((edgeIndex, edgeIndex+1))
            edgeIndex += 2

    # Create the mesh                
    debugMesh.from_pydata(verts, edges, faces)

ShowCurvature("BezierCurve", "DebugMesh")


For NURBS curves the math gets a bit more complicated but the basic idea is the same.

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply