Friday, December 13, 2019

Blender Animation Nodes

There is so much great info on Blender Animation Nodes, but getting started with them can be a huge step. 


To get Animation Nodes:


Getting started guide:


I needed a tutorial to apply some theory, so I gave this one a try:

And here is my result:

I'm very pleased and I look forward to making some interesting things to put up on the planetarium dome. 

Saturday, November 9, 2019

vokoscreen

How am I only now learning of vokoscreen?

vokoscreen is simple and straightforward
I've been a fan of OBS studio and it still is pretty amazing, but with my new microphone, a Samson Q2U USB, it is giving me headaches on my Linux laptop. It will not consistently keep settings to record video from builtin webcam and the audio from ONLY the usb mic.

I can use SimpleScreenRecorder or recrodMyDesktop if I don't need to occasionally have the webcam video added. Both of those work extremely well.

But of course I want it all, and wherever possible I want it open source. I'm working on some video walk-throughs of interesting blend files I've made to help teach others who might be interested. And being able to record with the least hassle is extremely important.

It seems to be Linux-only which is sad, and I don't even think it's being developed any more. But for now, vokoscreen is just what I need.

Happy Waylena is happy. 


Friday, November 8, 2019

Free SVG

With openclipart.org forever gone, I'm always on the lookout for sources of free vector graphics.

I have found publicdomainvectors.org to be useful. The admins of that site have now created a site closer to the spirit of the old openclipart.org site: freesvg.org

 Free SVG

ShareTextures

As seen on BlenderNation...


Share Textures

ShareTextures hosts a variety of textures. Created primarily for architectural visualizations, the textures are CC0. 

Friday, November 1, 2019

Rotating Earth / Spinning Top

I shared this previously on Facebook, but I'm back to the project.



The blend file is available here:
https://github.com/waystar/Sample-Blend-Files

Drop me a line if you want the PNG frames with alpha background.

Thursday, October 31, 2019

Nodevember!



https://nodevember.io/

I might try some of these, since I want to step up my node-based procedural textures game!

From nodevember.io
I won't have time to do them all, but I'll try to some of them. I will of course be using Blender, but any procedural/node based software can be used.

Tuesday, October 29, 2019

Fulldome Blender 2.8 Workshop GLPA 2019

The 2019 annual meeting of the Great Lakes Planetarium Association was held last week, hosted by the Ritter Planetarium of The University of Toledo.

It was special for me because my planetarium career started at Ritter Planetarium in February 1992. Honestly I had planned to stop conducting workshops for a few years so that I could concentrate on my GLPA executive community duties. But Alex Mak asked so of course I said yes.

The result is a very revised version *NEW!* for Blender 2.8:

https://github.com/waystar/2019-Blender-Workshop-Materials


  • Setting up render engine, camera and outputs for fulldome masters.
  • Setting up layers to separate objects for compositing to get glows or denoising only on some objects.
  • Compositing node setups examples.
  • Basics of materials, with shader node tree examples for incorporating alpha channels and animating fades between textures.
  • World environment settings and node trees for animation.
  • Examples of animating various objects and effects achieved through animating modifiers.


https://github.com/waystar/2019-Blender-Workshop-Materials

Click the "Clone or download" button to download the whole thing in a zip file.

Drop me a line if you find mistakes or OS-related differences. (I test on Linux and Windows.) Also, let me know if you find any of it particularly useful and I would LOVE to see what you make.

And of course, if you are having trouble with something in particular that you are trying to do, let me know. If I can't help get it to work, I might be able to suggest alternate approaches to get the same effect.

Thursday, October 10, 2019

Vahana VR & VideoStitch Studio

Vahana VR & VideoStitch Studio: software to create immersive 360° VR video, live and in post-production.


I ran across this by accident today. I don't yet have a dual camera setup to work with, but I want to be prepared. I ran across a discussion thread talking about the software and then the thread turned to sadness with a post that the company making it had folded. Then at the end was another post linking to another thread cheering the revival of the software as an open source project with the MIT License.

https://github.com/stitchEm/stitchEm


Honestly it has been a few years since I've built my own packages. Hopefully I can satisfy the dependencies through package managers at least. (If I had time to compile everything, I would still be running Gentoo. It ran mighty fast, but compiling time added up.)

If and when I manage to trying it out, I will be sure to update.

Thursday, October 3, 2019

Update on class: 3D Data Visualization for Science Communication


I am still here, I promise! Been away from work and prepping for the upcoming GLPA conference.

In the midst of all that, I've been taking the Coursera class mentioned last month. Although the instructors emphasize Houdini because that's what they use for cinematic rendering, they do mentioned Blender frequently. I have installed the apprentice version of Houdini (yay for Linux version!) but haven't had time to learn it. Thus I am doing the assignments in Blender.

Solar System render from specific assignment parameters using textures provided.














The instructors are doing a great job of breaking down concepts and using those concepts as they explain how and why they decide on approaches to their work. The quizzes are challenging and thought provoking.

In my own work, I mostly create science illustrations rather than visualizations. Even so, I find myself putting more focused thought into my work now. And I like that. I like that a lot.

Monday, September 16, 2019

3D Data Visualization for Science Communication class on Coursera

It's not solely FOSS stuff, but I'm taking this course:



The instructors are part of NCSA's Advanced Visualization Lab team, and they are pretty amazing at what they do. I've met them both previously on several occasions and each time they've been happy to talk shop and answer my nerdy questions. 

I'm pretty excited about this, and will let everyone know how it goes.


Friday, August 9, 2019

GIMP + G'MIC = Filter Fun!

GIMP 2.10 is so good that I urge anyone still using the older versions to update. 


And if you're using GIMP (or Krita), then you absolutely must get G'MIC. Anyone manipulating images should have these tools available.

Fun with G'MIC filters in GIMP:




Thursday, August 8, 2019

Another great resource for learning Blender 2.8

First Steps with Blender 2.8

I'm half-watching these and listening as I do other things, pausing to note differences from 2.79 that I know will trip me up.



From the official Blender YouTube channel

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLa1F2ddGya_-UvuAqHAksYnB0qL9yWDO6



And don't forget the series by Ron Proctor:  Introduction to Blender 2.80






Monday, July 15, 2019

Blender procedurally generated circuit board...

I saw this today on BlenderNation.

A very easy to follow demonstration of setting up nodes in Blender 2.8 to create a circuit board texture from Leroy Xie.

Direct link: https://youtu.be/9iO-7RbDSw8


https://youtu.be/9iO-7RbDSw8



Friday, July 12, 2019

Blender Beyond Beta - 2.80rc1



Blender 2.80 Release Candidate 1 is out today.



It's looking mighty fine and the UI has been redesigned to work the way users of most commercial software packages expect. 






Give it a try! 

Download it from www.blender.org.
Extract the downloaded file, then run Blender straight from the extracteed folder.

Monday, July 8, 2019

Blender modeling tools

Saw this today on BlenderNation:

https://artisticrender.com/more-than-30-blender-modeling-tools-explained/

Erik Selin created this outstanding list describing more than 30 Blender modeling tools.

Monday, June 24, 2019

I saw this posted on Blendernation this morning:

ToxicTuba shares a list of Blender texture resources that are well-worth checking out.


Saturday, June 15, 2019

Godot Engine on a rainy day

A year ago I started looking into Unity and quickly put it aside because other things came up and the frustration in learning did not motivate me to get back to it.

Here I am a year later, playing with Godot Engine on a rainy day. It is open source under the MIT license.




I must say that Godot is very clean and is working great both on my Windows 10 laptop and on my Linux machine. I've never used GDScript before, but the built-in editor is super helpful.

I'm in the Hello World stage of learning, but the early tutorials are already making so much more sense than I'd expected given my troubles with learning Unity. To be fair, it doesn't necessarily mean that Godot is better than Unity. But it does mean that I can recommend the online tutorials in the Godot Engine documentation.

Wednesday, June 5, 2019

At the SEPA MAPS 2019 conference

My friend Ron Proctor gave a great talk on Blender 2.80 today.


He has some Blender 2.80 intro videos available.

Check them out:
Introduction to Blender 2.80 - Ron Proctor

Friday, May 31, 2019

I really need to get back to this project.

Last year's upgrade and other things put this project on hold. I'm definitely going to resume working on it, especially since I've already put a lot into it.

A few production test stills made last summer before I had to put it on hold.







I'm using Blender 2.79 for this project. Newer projects will likely use 2.80. 



 
So far I've also used Gimp, Inkscape and Synfig on this project.












Thursday, May 23, 2019

Final(ish) update for Hugin and Blender Eevee



Additional testing held up. Distant fuzzy stuff at the edges blended nicely.


As expected, anything near intersection edges with glowiness would blend oddly, although not nearly as bad as I thought it would be.

That means rendering out separately the things to have glow applied and then do glow in compositing after stitching.

This will require serious planning but will still be worth it for the speed advantage with Eevee.

So in conclusion, I can happily add Eevee + Hugin to my production workflow.

Saturday, May 18, 2019

Hugin and Blender Eevee Fulldome Master Update

It worked!

Recall that I was testing to output 6 cube faces from Blender 2.8 using the super-fast Eevee render engine. Instead of 90 degrees, they covered 110 degrees so that Hugin would blend the edges.



It worked originally BUT there was a problem with the enblend program that put strange artifacts when run from the command line. Turns out that there is a newer way to use Hugin from the command line, a program called hugin_executor -BUT it didn't allow for specifying input filenames from the command line.

Sooooo... I set up the script in Linux to copy the 6 cube sides to a scratch folder and rename them to the filename in the PTO file. Then it blends the 6 images into a fulldome master file and moves onto the next frame number in the sequence. 

My script needs cleaned up a bit and it isn't pretty to look at. But it works and I can set it going and walk away from it while it does all the work. 

Now I need to test it with a variety of scene types to see how the seams turn out. Even if I can't use this for all cases, it will still work for enough situations to have made this worth my while.

I'll keep updating on this, and will share the scripts and make a tutorial or how-to if there is enough interest.

Wednesday, May 15, 2019

Using GIMP to slice images




A very cool effect in our digital planetarium is to take slices of an image and use them to seemingly build or break apart the image.



In our Digistar system, I create an empty object to be the parent of all of the needed image planes and position the image planes accordingly.

By keeping the image slices organized in folders, the separate image planes can be assigned slidesets to advance or reverse through a set of images.









To make the image slices, I use GIMP.
 


There are lots of ways to place guides for cutting. I'm accustomed to a script that lets me put the guide positions in by percentage. I don't speak German, but the script maker does. 


I check the boxes to indicate that I'm setting the guides by percentage, then I enter percentages and select horizontal or vertical.


My guides are in place.



Select Filters > Web > Slice


Because the slice tool is meant for web work, an html file is created. I just delete that later.

And then I have a folder full of sliced image pieces!


OLIVE video editor

Very promising FOSS video editor:

www.olivevideoeditor.org

Saturday, May 4, 2019

Testing with Blender and Hugin

Blender 2.80 features the superfast render engine Eevee, but there's no fisheye camera as there is with the Cycles render engine. So it's back to the old-fashioned method of rendering out panels to be stitched together.

Instead of rendering out 90 degree panels, I'm trying 110 degree panels and then using Hugin to stitch with blending. To reduce nastiness of seams, at least making them less obvious.






One frame at a time works great, but scripting it to run from command line and iterate through the frames isn't working so great. Yet. There is a newer Hugin command-line program called hugin_executor.exe that works exactly like stitching from the gui, but I haven't figured out a way to pass along different input files than the ones saved to my custom PTO file. I might try a script that copies each set into a scratch folder and renames them into what the PTO file wants, then renames the result and puts into a results folder.

Blender
Hugin

Wednesday, April 24, 2019

Blender workshop at the 2017 Pleiades Conference

This was another great memory.

I had lots of wonderful help running the workshop, and I was very proud of the result. The materials include several examples of methods for creating fulldome content with Blender 2.79.



The materials are currently on my GitHub account - click "Clone or Download" to download the whole thing as a zip file.

2017 Blender Workshop Materials

I hope to remake the materials with Blender 2.80. Mostly the same, but the interface and shortcuts have changed. The new features are still evolving and could merit a new chapter.

I'm keeping the Blender 2.79 materials around, though. Folks with older computers might not be able to run Blender 2.80.

Tuesday, April 23, 2019

Memories... From a very early GLPA Blender workshop...  2009 if I had to guess.


Monday, April 22, 2019

Under construction. Or something.