Slower progress: still progress

Kennedy-class Missile Cruiser from the 2300AD Science Fiction Role Playing Game.

Progress continues. It's just harder to see now. I'm more fluent in some areas but maybe have some bad habbits. I'm not using the snap tools enough -- too much placing by eye. Bad habits I'm hoping to drive away.

I'm finding fine-detail work harder going. The old workflow of starting with some polygons and extruding is harder because I find the curve tool to be a pain to use -- it doesn't let you build non-curved polygons very easily. There is a workflow I'm aware of where you add a cube, delete all of it's vertices, then manually lay out new verts - building up shapes that way. That seems a bit clunky - I might give it a go through.

Last night my PC crashed. It then failed to reboot with some very worrying messages about not finding the boot drive. Well after some tinkering in the BIOS, it looks like the machine is forgetting which is the valid boot drive because I can get the machine back by manually selecting the correct drive. Bugger! Hopefully I'll get to the bottom of the problem quickly. BIOS quirk or Master Boot Record curruption. *sadface*

My next hurdle will be learning about texturing, UV mapping (apparently highly regarded in Blender) and the use of the Nodes for material creation.

You see UV

Very early test for an idea I've had for an animation that's been floating around my head for about 10 years. I don't yet understand the ins and outs of Blender's UV tools although the fact that I was able to not make this truly horrible with minimal knowledge and effort gives me hope for the future.

Rendered with Cycles (CUDA) in about 18 minutes.

15minute build project #2

Time that could have been spent improving my table tennis skills - instead I'm spending my lunch break doing quick-fire Blender models. It's a flyer!

A first use in anger...

(this is a cross copy of the latest post that I made to my 2300AD game blog -- because its really all about Blender)

Blender Before
I had a play with Blender many years ago - back when Caligari was still actively developing its trueSpace 3D package. At that time I thought that Blender was an extremely worthy bag of spanners - a wonderful idea that looked and felt like it was trapped in the UI straight-jacket. This was, I must confess, a snap decision based on hours (actually probably minutes) of attempted use. Clearly I hadn't been willing to suffer the mental pains or productivity dips that result from trying to work with a new set of complex tools.



A holiday challenge
It dawned on me that I hadn't really tried to get my head around a new 3D package in well over 10 years. I wanted to remind myself what it's like, having spend many months on more technical learning challenges, like getting to grips with Hadoop and Big Data. Now usually the Christmas/New year holiday gives me the biggest allowance of the year for self indulgence - which has often resulted in days of playing computer games. So this year I decided to invest that free time in learning to use Blender. I assumed that one of three things would happen:

a. I'd give up because of some serious limitations or because it's just so horrible to use that I could see now value coming out of the effort. For the record, about 2 years ago I fell madly in love with SketchUp only to drop it like a burning rock after seeing what happened when a scene got moderately busy.

b. I'd be so impressed with Blender that I'd undergo CGI apotheosis, becoming a Blender evangelist, throwing away all my old tools and floating around the internet of a cloud of Blender love.

c. I'd get to grips with Blender, learn its strengths and weaknesses and then go back to 3DS Max 4 with a new set of tools to call upon when required.

So one month later, which is it?

Well, having a 15-month old son has resulted in a big reduction in the time I had available to invest, so I'm actually only half way through where I thought/hoped I'd be. But I'm still on the journey. Still enthusiastic. So far though, I'm somewhere between b. and c. depending on what kind of 3D output I'm looking to produce. I don't consider myself quite an evangelist -- but I'm increasingly an enthusiast and supporter.

Today, Caligari is - very sadly - a footnote in 3D modelling history while Blender has grown into a very respectable tool that has proven capable of (limited) production-quality output. When the full feature film (http://gooseberry.blender.org/) is finished you can remove that 'limited'.

 Blender still has a reputation for being unfriendly to new users, I still think this is true (to some extent), although I'd add that if you want to do 3d modelling and animation, and you want to produce work that is worthwhile - that people other than your mum will appreciate - then you have to be realistic about the time commitment required for learning the tools and techniques - not to mention to apply and practice 3D art.

Spending an hour per day for 2 weeks, (doing a combination of reading/watching and using) is what I consider a foot-in-the door for learning Blender modelling. At that point you'll know enough to Start up Blender and get working on something without constantly needing to search the documentation or every little thing.

Building for real...

I forgot to post the first 'real' object, by that I mean that I did a Google image search for Roman temples and used several results for reference in building this quick (2-3 hour model). It was great experience although I'm probably not going to finish/fix the model as it served its purpose well.

I've started another model, a much more ambitious 'space plane', again based on some very limited reference drawings (a set of deck plans). I'll post a progress shot tomorrow - which will encourage me to make some progress on it.

Other news:
I still get completely stuck doing simple stuff --- like creating flexible pipes. I find the bezier curve tools a bit tricky to use. I feel like there should be a set of curve creation tools that let you start with no curving, then once you have a shape knocked out you'd go back and chamfer or curve selected points. That's the Max user talking and I probably just need to go back and read the available documentation again.

I'm starting to forget the stuff I learned in the first week or two. Doing searches for basic stuff like 'how to separate stuff from a mesh' - "P" apparently. Clicking "P" appeared to cause weirdness. I need to try and recreate and investigate. Could it be a bug? *gasp*.

I don't think that Blender has ever. EVER crashed -- maybe once, and probably boolean madness was involved. Still, this application is as solid as a rock.

CUDA speed!

15-minute Spaceship project.

I thought I'd do a comparison between CPU and CUDA powered Cycles rendering:

Final Quality (CPU i7 3770 3.50Ghz): 2:46s
Final Quality (CUDA Nvidia GTX690): 45s

Holy moley! That's a non-trivial performance lead from my graphics card's computation engine. I realise that currently there are caveats to this performance benefit --- it's only reliable for use on basic scenes. Still, it bodes well as CPU performance appears to be in a bit of a slump compared to graphics card architecture.

15 minute project (lunchtime)

Last night I finally watched a tutorial about Cycles:
Blender Journey - Introduction to Cycles

Why didn't anyone tell me that you don't use lamps with Cycles?! Honestly!  Well, I'm now even more impressed with Cycles now I'm using it semi-properly.

Tip: Inset by individual face

1. Select the faces on which you want to place insets.
2. Here's the part that had me scratching my head -- Press Alt+E. This brings up an Extrusion menu allowing you to select "Region" or "Individual Faces"
3. Press "I".

Alt+E brings up a menu for the selection context.

Applying insets on a per-face basis: big time saver!

This saves me a lot of repeated action trying to copy insets across a number of faces in my mesh.

Spinning and mapping

Test vases containing magic lights

Today I did some practice spins --- it seems so obvious now. The resulting vase was pleasing enough to justify doing a test render using texture maps. Right, so how do I do texture maps? Well it's pretty straight forward to get the basics.

Troubles
I didn't understand why my initial renders didn't show anything past the edge of the furthest away vase - the answer was obvious, clipping on the camera settings?

Untroubles: Yesterday's min-rant about not being able to easily apply a shaderless texture (for a background scene which would be presented with it's own light values). Well looking at the comments in the tutorial someone suggested changing the object's Ray Visibility in the Properties tab, disabling Diffuse, Glossy and Shadows. It works, it's easy.  Sorry for doubting you, Blender!

Object Properties for Ray Visibility are a quick fix for shaderless materials in Cycles -- I think

Spin one and other hair pulling lessons

Spinning too several readings of the Blender docs to understand my mistake...

History is made -- my first spun object. Blender managed to make what is the simplest modelling tool on the shelf into something uniquely hard to use --- to be fair only because like with many Blender operations it makes sure that it doesn't work quite like other packages.

1. Start with a shape (open along the spin axis)
Online tutorials suggest that you create a spline by deleting the vertices of a cube and the hijacking the cubes entity properties -- a bit of a clanger piece of functionality from the start --- maybe there is a way of laying down raw vertices but I can't find it.

2. The spin will take place from the 3D View in which you invoke the spin operation --- which is what was causing my hair pulling. I'd not extended the toolbar within the right view so I was trying to spin along the wrong axis.

3. Get the 3D cursor right onto the edge of the line by using the snap cursor to selection (Shift+S -> Cursor to Selection).

4. Spin! Then modify the spin parameters such as the number of steps and degree of spin.


Phew! Earlier this morning I discovered how to present an unshaded texture map (a background image) on a plane using the Cycles renderer. It took an 8-minute video tutorial and the rather involved use of a several nodes. Ouch! For such a simple requirement that's a rather grueling procedure.

Time is running out. I'll be back to work in a few days and Blender won't be getting much of a look in until a hefty amount of technical writing is completed.

The scene outside the window looks like it's being pumped through a filter. At least it's not shaded!

Cycles - Pretty Good Renders

Cycles. Capable of ruddy nice renders. A bit slow though...

Samples: 60 (Final) Render time: 1 hour 6 minutes 

Samples: 12 (Draft) Render time: 14 seconds

Other news: I purchased Blender 3D Basics by Gordon C. Fisher (for all the wrong reasons - like buying a self-help guide for something you want to fix with a quick no-hard-work-required solution). By the way, at the time of writing it's being sold at a massive discount on this site -- much cheaper than the Amazon store version that I bought...

The book's good, but I've always struggled to go through lengthy tutorials that don't give me an output that I want to create. My perfect 3D blender book would be full of quick 5-step tutorials like "How to extrude a selection of faces along their normals" or "How to quickly create simple 2d shapes without lots of needless pulling and pushing".