Photos in Blender

There have been a number of tutorials about using NASA pictures to create a...

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 22:46:57 GMT

There have been a number of tutorials about using NASA pictures to create
a realistic Earth but the BlenderGuru one is the best, in my opinion:

http://www.blenderguru.com/videos/create-a-realistic-earth/

As usual, I departed from the tutorial in a number of ways.

This is from June 2011. Best viewed at full resolution.

Photo by mramshaw

There have been a number of tutorials about using NASA pictures to create a...

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 22:38:18 GMT

As usual, I departed from the tutorial in a number of ways.

This is from June 2011. Best viewed at full resolution.

Photo by mramshaw

There have been a number of tutorials about using NASA pictures to create a...

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 22:45:50 GMT

As usual, I departed from the tutorial in a number of ways.

This is from June 2011. Best viewed at full resolution.

Photo by mramshaw

It seems that bump mapping, at least, is in Cycles. It's not as easy to use...

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 19:26:33 GMT

It seems that bump mapping, at least, is in Cycles.

It's not as easy to use as in Blender Internal, so it took me a while to find out how to do this.

It will be nice when Cycles has full normal mapping, also Cycles does not have as much control (yet) either.

It's a subtle difference, compare this render with my previous one to see if you can spot the differences.

[In my opinion, this surface looks more like wood veneer and less like formica, if I've done things right.]

Photo by mramshaw

Some more fun considering Photography from the ground up. Looking at the fine...

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 20:55:03 GMT

Some more fun considering Photography from the ground up. Looking at the
fine details in a RAW file, noise is always present. The usual process is
to try and reduce any nasty Chroma noise as much as possible, while at the
same time retaining as much 'grain' (i.e. detail) as possible.

Here I am trying the new Cycles renderer in Blender, which is very noisy.
The noise can be reduced at the expense of more render passes, so greater
render times (a brute force approach, really). I started with 50 passes,
then 500, then 1,000 and then I started tweaking things. Finally, I upped
the quality and rendered this image (which took 20 minutes to render, that
being 20 minutes of parallelized CISC computing on my GPU using CUDA and
very fast VRAM memory). I suspect the quality may get acceptable somewhere
at around 10,000 passes. To be fair, this is an indoor scene - which is
where Cycles is supposed to be weak. So, I still don't think CG will be
replacing Photography any time soon.

The older Blender Internal (BI) renderer does a number of things very well,
for instance I think the wood here would look a lot better with some Bump
Mapping - but Cycles does not really support this well yet. On the other
hand, Cycles handles Caustics and GI (Global Illumination) pretty well. BI,
on the either hand, can not really do either of these. But materials/textures
in Cycles involves using Nodes, which work well but require more fundamental
understanding of the issues (basically a chained mathematical approach to
what would be layers in GIMP/PS).

I created everything in this scene from scratch (apart from the fine wood
texture) by following this highly detailed tutorial:

cg.tutsplus.com/tutorials/blender/create-and-render-a-still-life-scene-in-blender-using-cycles/

Having some experience with Blender, I did not follow it too exactly, so
I was expecting the poor quality of my modelling to show up in the render.
However, the exercise seems to have been designed very well, as the Cycles
materials and textures have completely rescued what should have been a
pretty poor-quality effort on my part.

Cycles has the promise of being a 'one-click' solution to the general
lighting problems inherent in CG scenes, whereas BI involves lots and lots
of very laborious tweaking to get good results. In the same way as RGB and
CMYK are different viewpoints on the same subject, each valid for slightly
different things, I think Cycles and BI may co-exist for a while yet. It
seems to me that BI is more of a wave-based approach to light, while Cycles
is more of a particle-based approach, but in either case I think a very good
understanding and eye for the qualities of light is still needed (the promise
of a 'one-click' solution still seems far away. In the same way that both GI
as well as Caustics have only come to be understood quite recently, and mainly
show up with man-made materials under controlled lighting conditions, it is
only possible to represent these accurately with a good understanding of how
they are caused and their physics. Of course, neither are particularly necessary,
so BI is still a good solution for almost all lighting conditions.)

Luckily, the Cycles people, after starting with a completely new approach
to lighting (it seems that they decided that everything should be an Area
lamp) realized that there was a baby in the bath-water, and reincorporated
all of the tradititional lamps into Cycles. So a hybrid approach is much
more feasible now. You can use Cycles for what it is really good at (being
real-time lighting, albeit very noisy) and then switch over to BI (once the
lighting is set up). Or even composite both of them (with the expense of
duplicating entire scenes) for a fully-hybrid approach (the upcoming 'Tears
of Steel' open movie does this somewhat, I think). However, all of this means
an increase in complexity, rather than a reduction. Kind of like processing
a RAW file as opposed to a JPEG (and now that Blender can handle HDR files,
I may have to look into processing these at some point, although the last time
I tried processing a file in 32-bit mode I ran out of disk space [paged-out
memory swap files] in about 5 minutes).

As always, comments and critique are very welcome, and I respond in kind.

Photo by mramshaw

Cycles (the new Blender renderer) has an awesome ability to chew through...

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 22:32:44 GMT

Cycles (the new Blender renderer) has an awesome ability to chew through Geometry.
It leverages the power of your video card to perform floating-point operations
(in parallel, no less) and performs really well (but your screen will be locked
up completely, as your GPU is busy with other things).

So it seemed to be time to really get to grips with it. I used this tutorial:

http://www.blenderguru.com/videos/create-realistic-materials-with-cycles

After 50 passes, there was still grain, here after 150 passes some remains.
It might be possible to increase the number of passes to fix these 'fireflies'
but the scene looks okay with a few.

Conclusion: materials with nodes are tricky, also Cycles is still changing.
I think I'll stick with Blender Internal for now, but Cycles is impressive.

[Best viewed at 100%, there are actually some boots back there!]

Photo by mramshaw

Another BlenderGuru tutorial, you can find it here:...

Mon, 07 May 2012 19:36:03 GMT

Another BlenderGuru tutorial, you can find it here:

http://www.blenderguru.com/videos/creating-an-underwater-scene

This tutorial was from guest author Chris Monson (http://www.photogenesisdesigns.com/gallery/stills.html).

Models, materials and textures are supplied - the exercise is lighting, particle systems and compositing.

As usual, I have veered off slightly and done something a little bit more my own.

Please view this large, the click-through has details that are lost here.

Comments are very welcome.

Photo by mramshaw

Final render from week 9 (uncomposited). I think I like this one better than...

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 15:06:18 GMT

Final render from week 9 (uncomposited).

I think I like this one better than the composited one.

Photo by mramshaw

Final render from week 9 (Forests).

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 15:02:05 GMT

Final render from week 9 (Forests).

Photo by mramshaw

This is from a Blender tutorial (Chapter 9 of Blender 2.5 HOTSHOT) available...

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 19:14:49 GMT

This is from a Blender tutorial (Chapter 9 of Blender 2.5 HOTSHOT) available for free here:

http://www.packtpub.com/blender-25-project-development-hotshot/book

It's 32 pages long, mostly straightforward, but a few very tricky bits.

Photo by mramshaw

Test rendering of the model of Festung Rothenberg near Schnaittach

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 03:02:54 GMT

Test rendering of the model of Festung Rothenberg near Schnaittach

Photo by Corax

Turntable made in blender. Cube modeling challenge

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 20:02:46 GMT

Turntable made in blender.

Cube modeling challenge

Photo by IkoTikashi

Blending Festung Rothenberg Koordinatenursprung in der Karte festlegen,...

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 13:55:57 GMT

Blending Festung Rothenberg

Koordinatenursprung in der Karte festlegen, Hintergrundbild laden, Referenzobjekt (20m) erstellen, Hintergrundbild auf Referenzobjekt skalieren und Ursprung an den Nullpunkt verschieben, und es kann losgehen ;)

Photo by Corax

"Blending" the Nuremberg Castle

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 12:02:30 GMT

"Blending" the Nuremberg Castle

Photo by Corax

First steps towards a better castle...

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 21:29:11 GMT

First steps towards a better castle...

Photo by Corax

Almost there...

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 01:17:56 GMT

Almost there...

Photo by Corax

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 14:31:00 GMT

Photo by Corax

The "final" model, still without proper textures

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 14:18:11 GMT

The "final" model, still without proper textures

Photo by Corax

Details added, textures still work in progress

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 14:17:45 GMT

Details added, textures still work in progress

Photo by Corax

Fernsehturm close-up - still untextured and missing a few details

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 18:38:37 GMT

Fernsehturm close-up - still untextured and missing a few details

Photo by Corax