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RazzleDazzleHour

I made a

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RazzleDazzleHour



I almost never do glamor renders of the things I make for using in Unity but I might go back and do a big 4k render of this one

here's what it looks like in-engine, I made it into a VR game

RazzleDazzleHour

Manifisto posted:

I'm catching up on reading posts, just wanted to say that this is real good. I haven't spent enough time using grunge maps and whatnot, it adds a lot to the look. was this using blender, or some other package?

I've got a student license for Substance Painter which is what I used for texturing. You should be able to replicate some of the effects without too much trouble, the key is to tie grunge maps to ambient occlusion levels and curvature maps so that the dirt automatically goes into the little dips and crevices. Otherwise, just putting light layers of scratches on things and then making them barely visible (or totally removing the color level entirely) and then lowering the normal map on them goes a LONG way

I'm trying to get a job now though so I figured I should use Substance since that's what everyone in the industry uses

RazzleDazzleHour

This was asked a while ago but I do pretty much all my modeling with Maya. I genuinely think Blender has some way better functionality with things like converting curves into poly objects, non-destructive boolean functions, stuff like that. But, after using Maya basically every day for like a year, trying to go back to Blender just feels impossible because of the control differences, even after switching the presets to Maya-likes.

Honestly, I think the #1 thing that will make your renders really good is to improve at texturing. Here's a WIP of a scene I'm making right now, but you can see for the most part a huge amount of it is very basic geometry. The most complicated parts are the wires, which are just long cylinders extruded from curves.



So then you can take shapes like those that are really basic and don't take long to model at all, and then convert them over into something like this



RazzleDazzleHour

Khanstant posted:

This seems like it would be an unlockable ash tray in MGSV. So is that, like, pitting in the material and that smudge near the foremost lip/dip(?) done with just, the 2D image used to wrap around the model or is it something you specify on the model's, uhh, "skin" itself?

There's two ways to do really specific texturing like this and I think you've basically figured out and are trying to describe them both. The model itself is just a small cylinder cup with four booleans used to cut out the holders, so there's very little geometry compared to the amount of detail.



UV projection is where you have a single image file that is wrapped around the object using UV Shells. The way you usually do this is by lining up the specific parts of a model up with different parts of a photograph so that everything fits together. Here's a great example of how to do this in video form if you're trying to build a model around a texture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_ikG-u_6r0

So, for this method, if you're custom-making a texture, once you've got your basic gold shiny layer, for details, you just need to cross-reference where each part of your model in 3D space would correlate to on a 2D image plane. So, you would find the part of the image where the inside of the ashtray goes and drop in your little ash details. Find where the little resting spot would be and draw in your fingerprints. Most of this sort of work is done directly in Photoshop.

The second method is the one that is way more fun and also probably easier and that's vertex painting. It's technically done the exact same way as the last method - all textures will always be a flat 2d image layed onto an unwrapped model. But, you use a program to project the texture onto the model in real-time and you paint on the model itself, which in turn just edits the image file. So, you can just spin your model around, grab a fingerprint-like-brush, and click on the exact spot where you want it to go. Switch over to an ash-like brush, then paint it into the bottom. You can do this in Blender but I use Substance Painter (I have a student license) since it's what the industry uses and so I need to be able to. That's honestly pretty much the biggest reason I haven't switched over to Blender either, very few companies actively use it at their studios.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDWSkCDIu1E

RazzleDazzleHour

I've just sort of started to work with procedural textures with Substance Designer and it's pretty complicated - if you're a hobbyist I wouldn't recommend it unless you're really interested. Following some tutorials can get your some pretty neat results, but the real burden of knowledge is having a fundamental understanding of how all of the instructions will interact with each other, and how to combine them in order to arrive at a desired look. I'm not even really to the point yet where I can make something completely from scratch, unless it's something simple like tiles or bricks.

Procedural texturing is done through step-by-step instructions. It's node-based, just like the shader graph in Blender, which means that you're essentially constructing a final image from a flow chart.



At the bottom is my final result, which is a cliff-like material. At the left, you start with a simple pyramid, then the next node scatters it randomly. Skip the next placeholder node, and you've got an angular distortion that sort of does the thing when you move a window on your PC and it leaves a trail behind. That's combined from the bottom with some randomized noise so it doesn't look even, and then that process is done a second time from a slightly different angle. However, using the info from the first time, I extract some of the height data from there and use that as an opacity filter so that when I do the process again, it will mostly leave the elevated areas alone and exaggerate the crevices. Along the top, I'm doing the same height-analysis system, but I'm using it to look for general shapes along the outside. Then, I bold them out and use what is basically a Photoshop blending layer to have the edges conform more towards what I outline there. Like I said, this stuff is kind of a nightmare and if you don't plan on going pro you'll probably never have to worry about it, or you can just follow a tutorial to make the desired material.

more falafel please posted:

RazzleDazzleHour are you doing game stuff? I know nothing about art but I've been a game programmer for like a Very Long time

Yeah, I just graduated with a Digital Arts degree but I spent basically my entire last year doing exclusively 3D modeling and texture art for game pipelines. For a lot of my projects, I'll end up doing the final renders in Unity or Unreal just for portfolio reasons. Honestly, basically every decision I make is for portfolio reasons. Here's a scene I took into Unity and converted into a small VR room

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3Nx9n-3cig

RazzleDazzleHour fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Aug 8, 2020

RazzleDazzleHour

I think LazyTutorials specifically do a great job of showing what Blender is capable of. And that extends past the really fancy technical stuff, because the hardest part of learning all of the 3D art software is just knowing what you actually CAN do. 90% of things I've learned have been me trying to do something, wondering "is there a better way to do this?" and then looking up a video/asking someone and then realizing holy poo poo there IS an easier way to do this. I showed that building video to two of my classmates a while ago and we were all like "wait whaaaaaat"

RazzleDazzleHour

Khanstant posted:

explanation

Yeah, you've generally got the gist of it. Here's a step-by-step, it took like a minute to recreate. You start with a cylinder, extrude the top inward and then down to turn it into a cup. Then, make another cylinder the shape of the little holes. Duplicate it, rotate it 90 degrees, then combine so you have an X shape. Select the cup first, then the X, then boolean modifier them. All I did to finish up was add some extra edge loops so it holds its shape once you convert it to a smooth mesh.

Honestly, this is a bad way to do this, though. Boolean cuts will a lot of times (read: always) leave you with bad geometry and N-gons (a face with more than four sides) that you will need to manually fix, otherwise they'll look weird. You can see that in my original, fully rendered ashtray, there's still some pinching around the top lip. Maya works differently from Blender in that in Maya, you usually do the part where you convert a shape from low-res to hi-res at the end of the process instead of at the beginning. So, when you convert your ashtray to a smooth mesh, it will automatically fix geometry the best that it can, and that includes eliminating Ngons. It wasn't perfect, but for a background object you wouldn't see that clearly, it was good enough for what I was doing. For the example at the bottom I threw a quick preset texture on it just to show how little of that original bad geometry actually shows through once you texture something, so you don't really need to be worried about "bad practice"


RazzleDazzleHour

So one big thing I'll say in terms of making the 3D sonic is that you can make an object out of multiple shapes that dont necessarily need to be connected. The head is just a full sphere with cones sticking out of it, so you don't need to start with a head-like-shape and extrude spikes from it, you can just place cones inside of it and call it a day.

In fact, the entire sonic is just whole, barely-adjusted shapes. Blue circle, tan circle, tan half-circle for the head, two entire white spheres for eyes. Actually...



If you're worried about how hard animation might be, don't be. You can import a humanoid skeleton for rigging a model onto it, and it basically just comes down to putting the joints where they should be on a person. Make sure the knees line up, make sure the elbows line up, etc. Then, you can import pre-made animations that are free to download and just plug them in, and the rig will do everything for you. I know the Sonic thing was posted as a "maybe eventually" sort of goal, but this is honestly something you could have looking pretty neat in just an afternoon

RazzleDazzleHour fucked around with this message at 03:59 on Aug 11, 2020

RazzleDazzleHour

well why not posted:

laughing about making a 3D render of an art gallery interior with one of those artworks which look like abstract shapes on sticks until you stand in an exact position and it suddenly looks like a sculpture, except it's "byob"

Me and my class' senior art exhibition was going to be March 30th and then got COVID cancelled, so the idea of a 3D rendered art museum has been rattling around in my brain for a while

vanisher posted:



cross posting this dirt cake thing

I think the inside part looks really good, if you just scale the texture on the outside a bit it'll increase the resolution so it matches detail levels of the rest

The other thing you can do is take whatever image you're using for the outer layer of chocolate, convert it to black and white, and then hook that up to the roughness output, so that way the surface itself will have different amounts of shine to it

RazzleDazzleHour fucked around with this message at 07:20 on Aug 19, 2020

RazzleDazzleHour

Jenny Agutter posted:

i like this thread. i'm trying to learn blender since i'm stuck in the house. just whipped this up (after following youtube tutorials for several hours)


It's very good!

I'm working on that thing I posted earlier and it's taking forever but I'm finally done with all the modeling and unwrapping so all that's left is the texturing and making decals. Here's a small detail item I spent too much time on considering you'll barely see them

RazzleDazzleHour

Man, LOT of cool stuff here in the last few days!

I'm getting close to finishing my latest project, I've got all the modeling done, I just need to start filling the space with clutter, which will primarily be pieces of paper who photos and writing printed on them and scatter them throughout the room. I did spend the time on getting raytracing working though. I'm rendering this in real-time in Unreal, so you can press play to move through the scene as a game

RazzleDazzleHour

owlhawk911 posted:

i know this is the blender thread but, tell me more about unreal pls? you can just place lil models around and make a lil world?

Honestly, yes. Making a functional "game" is incredibly easy in Unreal, even easier in Unity. I modeled every single one of my objects in the same Blender file so that I can arrange them exactly how I want and to what size I want. Then, I exported the entire scene as an .fbx, then drag that file into Unreal/Unity and it will spit all the objects back out exactly how you had them laid out. Drag in a FPS controller preset and hit play. Game's done, you can freely walk around your environment. I don't know any coding at all and I've managed to make a VR environment where you can pick up and throw objects around a room in both engines.

Unreal is a little more complicated just because of the way applying textures to objects works. Unity has a super-simple drag-and-drop interface out of the gate. Unreal you'll either need to download a material preset online or make a custom shader in the editor, which is very simple once you know exactly what to do but can be intimidating because it's the same sort of flow chart I showed earlier. The biggest benefit to using Unreal for me is access to Quixel, which is a resource library Epic bought out. If you sign a thing promising only to use Quixel resources for Unreal, they'll give you unlimited free downloads of photoscanned objects and TONS of great textures. You need a texture of a grassy forest floor with some twigs in it, you just grab it from the library. I did a portfolio review with someone who said to try to show off more layering work, or like environment layout design. He said it was totally cool to use premade resources for something like that, where you're just showing off how well you're able to compose a scene with various objects, and so I composed two scenes that came out really nicely using exclusively Quixel assets, and it saved me SO much time

RazzleDazzleHour

blaise rascal posted:

thanks!

ooh, I'll have to keep this in mind if I make a photorealistic scene

Question for anyone: Do you like to watch tv while you do blender? Sometimes I like to watch twitch in a separate window. What's a good show (perhaps a lightweight anime) I should use for this purpose?

My brain is completely broken and I have a twitch stream on at literally all times, sometimes more than one or sometimes one twitch stream and a youtube video. I don't have any positive work habits or anything, I just put on the video equivalent of comfort food, something going on that I know I'll enjoy and won't draw my attention from the work. Like, I have the next five days off of work and have a LOT I wanna get done, so I'm probably gonna leave the entire playlist of Giant Bomb's Persona 4 endurance run going for the entire time including when I sleep, and then listen to "Maybe One Day You'll See Me Again" by Viper at least six times. I have a second monitor that is basically on 24/7 background noise duty.


Anyways here's a cool tutorial I think people here will like a lot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEgzuMmJtu8

RazzleDazzleHour

Alright I'll eventually do a final pass on this where I mess with all the color grading and post-processing but otherwise all the actual work is done









RazzleDazzleHour

blaise rascal posted:

Very cool! I suppose this is some kind of Japanese grocery store. If you don't mind me asking, why are there so many lights on the ceiling?

It's based on an image of the Tsukiji indoor fish market, and the place is loaded with florescents. I'll actually just totally pull back the curtain and show you the reference image I used for the scene

RazzleDazzleHour

A beautiful bong. A majestic bong

RazzleDazzleHour

Okay I stopped cheating and finally made something in Blender



RazzleDazzleHour

So with Blender 2.8 comes my favorite feature, which is the "Industry Standard" keybind options, which even more closely resemble Maya/3DSMAX than before. Honestly the default Blender hotkeys feel insane and like they were made for aliens and these feel much better. Alt+Left click to rotate, Alt+Right click to zoom in and out, Alt+Middle mouse to pan the camera without an axis

also the shader graph is very scary and for a long time the best you're gonna be able to do is to just follow tutorials and end up where they end up. Trying to piece together multiple procedures together to arrive at a desired end result is really complicated and will require you to actually know what exactly each node does and how specific nodes interact with each other

RazzleDazzleHour fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Sep 20, 2020

RazzleDazzleHour

Blender is I think the only program where I've opened up a notepad and written down shortcut hotkeys

RazzleDazzleHour

Oldstench posted:

Here's a modern chair thing I made.




Wireframe if you're into that.



This is real cool, did you use physics to do the squishes or make them manually?

RazzleDazzleHour

What the hell N64 models with current material shaders look dope as gently caress

RazzleDazzleHour

owlhawk911 posted:

i'm gonna use blender to put everyone's favourite video game characters in wack-rear end crystal prisons

This is the plot of Smash Brothers Ultimate

RazzleDazzleHour

I will have a Blender project to post Soon™

RazzleDazzleHour



This one's 100% Blender

RazzleDazzleHour

vanisher posted:

I feel like once you can model something and get the materials to look that good there's probably jobs available in graphic design somewhere.


Manifisto posted:

I learned that, no joke, many product catalogs, ikea for example, are entirely rendered

no more photography, bye bye

that way you can make the catalog before you even make the products, and if you need to make a change tweaking the render is no biggie

I made this image specifically as part of a job interview process

The landscaping outside is just a photograph I took and slapped on a flat plane outside the window. The ship hull is actually the one thing I didn't make myself along with the little plant - basically any decoration stuff takes way more time out of your production schedule if you're making it yourself, so most studios have model libraries of free use license items they can just drop in the scene. Making things yourself is way more time and way more of your clients money since they normally pay hourly. Apparently, most interior design production agencies won't even do stuff like furniture themselves, you just grab stuff off of CGtrader and whatnot. You spend 10$ on a nice looking couch there and you've actually saved yourself more money than if they were to pay you even an hour's worth of work. So, the plant I got from Poliigon, and the ship is actually a photoscan replica of a piece of artwork from a museum that was posted to Sketchfab for free use. I got to the end of the render and needed something big to go on the mantle that matched the look and color scheme of the room and really liked it. Everything else like the little fireplace tool set I made myself, I even used a hair simulation for the brush.

RazzleDazzleHour fucked around with this message at 02:34 on Oct 21, 2020

RazzleDazzleHour

Blender has a bunch of really cool things you can do with camera render nodes. One particularly helpful thing is the series of glass hacks in the BlenderGuru archvis tutorials where you can make it so that glass will render reflections, but not light refraction which will add a million years to your render times

RazzleDazzleHour


please tag nsfw

RazzleDazzleHour

roomforthetuna posted:

Was that an actual shape, like could you 3D print it and hold a hemisphere that's a banana from another angle? Or is it actually morphing?

Yeah that's not like an optical illusion spin, the orb is deflating into the banana. Actually, its more accurate to say that it was likely a banana first and then inflated into a sphere, and this is the reverse process.

RazzleDazzleHour

https://www.twitch.tv/tpain

Someone tell TPAIN to post his donut in the thread

RazzleDazzleHour

RazzleDazzleHour

[kicks down door] I've figured out how texture nodes work



everything here is a texture, I didn't draw anything

RazzleDazzleHour



It's pretty simple, but I do want to mention that pretty much everything I made here is some sort of hack based on the series of tutorials someone linked here earlier, the Ghibli ones. The water splashes and the effects around the rocks are both using pretty much the exact same setup, with one difference I'll mention later. All of the water effects are based on the first ten minutes of this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZsfr5f273c

The node setup I showed above is for the rain splashes. The exact scale I set it at is the only scale number where there will at some point be no wave texture visible. Then, you just animate the phase offset starting at when the wave is at the center, and then ending after it expands and disappears. In the video they do it differently using a # tool, here I just manually set the start and end values. Then, you can just move the ending keyframe around to make it faster or slower. Then, I made like ten different versions of the texture, all identical, and then moved around the start/end times so the animation starts at different points in the overall loop. So, the scene is filled with dozens of transparent circles playing animations at different intervals.

To make the ripple effects around the rocks, you just use the exact same node setup but gently caress with the scale so it shows multiple ripples instead of just one. Then, you animate it just like he describes in the video. The key to making it "loop" is to define how many frames your overall animation will have, and to set a number after the # in the phase offset that will cause the image to look pretty much the same at the end of the animation as the beginning so it looks like it loops. Mine isnt exactly perfect but I didn't really care

e: the rocks are based on the rock texture video this same person made, just messing with a lot of the values and adding some more ramps. The main body of water itself is actually based on the rock tutorial also, to animate it I just set three keyframes on the scale parameter, the first two being the same and the one in the middle being larger so it loops. Grass is the same as the rocks except simplified so it has a smaller color and value range.

RazzleDazzleHour fucked around with this message at 03:07 on Jan 25, 2021

RazzleDazzleHour

All of my lighting setups are incredibly simple. Basically what I do is place all of my scenes inside of big cubes and then, using loop cuts, cut out a window for light to come in. I don't even use a sun lamp, much less smaller spot or area lights. Instead, I go to the World settings tab, set a custom color (usually a VERY light blue), and then crank the strength up to 20 and then lower it from there as needed. For this one, I set the world ambient color to green because that was the primary color of the background image I was going to use outside the window, and then added a very very faint orange light directly above the scene just to tint things a little bit. Orange and green are almost opposite/contrasting colors (red/green is close enough) so I knew they'd go well together, but the light wasn't strong enough to cast new shadows or anything. For the image I placed out the window, I just disable cast shadows so it doesn't impact the light going into the room at all

RazzleDazzleHour

I tried sculpting some stuff the other day but got bored of trying to figure it out but I need to crack open some tutorials, its been years since I used Zbrush

RazzleDazzleHour

Nodes are one of those things that look completely insane and unnatural until eventually you mess around with them enough and suddenly they click and you realize how the process works. The biggest hill to get over is figuring out that it's very easy to make simple designs that look really good (sand is super easy, rocks are super easy), and then you just combine them to make them more and more complicated. There's a lot of tutorials online that will just straight-up show you what combination of nodes they use, and then you can tweak their setups to figure out what role each node plays and figure out how to tweak it to your liking, then eventually move into combining multiple tutorials into more and more complicated shapes

RazzleDazzleHour

Ive tried to make the same project for a few weeks now but keep running into walls with Eevee trying to make the water exactly the way I want it. I've got four versions of this project where I eventually figure out that getting water to be both transluscent and have accurate reflections is going to be a nightmare/impossible so I end up quitting and playing Autochess instead or something. Maybe I should hop over into Unreal Engine because I know that would render it out the way I want it. Cycles would technically work but would take forever to render a full animation.

RazzleDazzleHour

Yeah I've tried that strategy already, it just doesn't look good. You might have to crank your gamma up, I've been told my computer screen is super bright so all my screenshots are really dark for other people but here's what I'm working with



Basically I'm working with three overlapping planes here. The bottom one is a base color with a small animation to it (not pictured) to represent caustics and a sub-surface color, but there's an emission shader hooked up to it to make it shine through the second layer, which is translucent layer I can adjust to make it work the way I want to with whatever the final lighting setup will be, but this is a surface-level layer where I'll add all the surface details like lillypads or the rain droplets. The third layer is a totally clear glass layer that I want to just use for reflections.

RazzleDazzleHour



Still have not worked on my "for fun" project...........

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RazzleDazzleHour

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPITn3k1mD0

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