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.

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.

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.

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!

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