Trig Function-Driven Animation in Blender 2.83

Another fine video tutorial from Ron Proctor!

Check it out! You know you want to...
https://youtu.be/uTZ9el8st5c

3D stereoscopic test

Years ago I used Blender to make a stereographic test. It took forever to render a tiny, very low resolution test so I had to drop it at the time. (http://youtu.be/MWpsBb3enek if you want to see it.)

Now it is 2020 and I had some time last week. I couldn't find the blend file from my original example, so I made a new example, again using Blender.  

Really should be viewed with VR goggles, and you'll need to tell YouTube to use a higher resolution setting, but the compression wasn't too kind. Even so, I'm encouraged to continue.

I'm still looking for a way to inject the needed metadata on Linux. I had to do this on a Windows machine because the injector is only for MacOS and Windows.

BTW, I had to render this twice because originally I rendered it side-by-side (SBS) but the YouTube Metadata Injector only accepts top-and-bottom (TAB).

Here's the same frame in each format:

3D stereoscopic test frame, SBS.

3D stereoscopic test frame, TAB

Blendpeaks free add-on for Blender from Oormi Creations

Wow. Saw this today on BlenderNation:

http://www.blendernation.com/2020/05/24/blendpeaks-create-mountain-peaks-in-blender-free-add-on/

It creates a plane and a shader setup for material and displacement. 

I made a quick test using defaults, with a default Sky Texture and the default single scene lamp:

I like it. I like it a lot. In fact, I think I might be a bit in love.

Here's the direct link:
http://github.com/oormicreations/Blendpeaks/releases

And while you're at it, please do check out the Oormi Creations website:
http://oormi.in/index.htm

An excellent guide to Blender nodes

Saw this on BlenderNation today...

The complete beginners guide to Blender nodes, Eevee, Cycles and PBR












Wow. I like this. I like this a lot.


http://artisticrender.com/the-complete-beginners-guide-to-blender-nodes-eevee-cycles-and-pbr/

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:

https://animation-nodes.com/#download

Getting started guide:

https://animation-nodes-manual.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user_guide/getting_started/interface.html

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

https://youtu.be/xcjrD5SwQBw

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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