Cycles, Let me add to the hype

hehehe yes its time for me to do some cycles vids. Cycles has been out for a fair while, but was always a moving target where things would change almost daily. Now things have calmed down enough and i have a machine strong enough i can do some cycles vids :)

now please keep in mind,I'm not an expert on rendering so I may have made a few errors in my explanations, sorry for that, but please back these vids up with your own research to get the most out of cycles and what to expect in the future.

so lets get to it and I hope you enjoy these vids :)

--Intro---
http://mfoxdogg.com/25tours/cycles/cycles_intro.mp4
(audio sync problems whit this one, I'm sorry :(, something ran while recording and threw the audio out a bit )

--Shading an texturing--
http://mfoxdogg.com/25tours/cycles/cycles_shading.mp4

--Nodes and Advanced Shading--
http://mfoxdogg.com/25tours/cycles/cycles_nodes.mp4

Open Shading Languge
http://code.google.com/p/openshadinglanguage/

once again I hope you all enjoy these vids

See Ya's Later

GSoC dynamic paint

I'M BACK!!!!! thats right imback, i finally after almost 10 long years got myself a new computer and now im able to get back to doing these tests and tours for you all.

Now the first one of the rank of this new stage is, Dynamic paint, now i have not seen anything about how to use this fantastic new feature which i find very sad,everyone focuses on Tracking which is nice , but all the other GSoC projects seem to be ignored like mocap tools better UV operators and tools, Improved Animations system and Collada support.

Because of this I'm going to try and do a tour of all of these just so the community does not just look them over in passing.

Now back to the topic at hand Dynamic paint, it allows you to paint 1 object with another object, well that's the basic idea but there is so much more you can do with it and allows for huge possibilities and will free up a lot of blender artists who have to bend themselves backwards to get contact textures. well anyway time for some links :) (beware as usual somethings do not go quite according to plan and i do make some weird noises :S)

General Options and basic operation
http://mfoxdogg.com/25tours/dynamic_paint/2.5_dynamic_paint_01%20_01.mp4

Vertex level operations and more brush options (advanced stuff)
http://mfoxdogg.com/25tours/dynamic_paint/2.5_dynamic_paint_01_02.mp4

Image maps and baking to image sequence
http://mfoxdogg.com/25tours/dynamic_paint/2.5_dynamic_paint_01_03.mp4

Blend files of the "one i made earlier" examples
http://mfoxdogg.com/25tours/dynamic_paint/dynPaint_blends.zip

More info and demos videos and development
http://www.miikahweb.com/en/blog

Hope you all enjoy these videos and hope they will help in your own experimentation

PS. my new computer is , AMD Athlon(tm) II X4 640 Processor, 3.9 GiB of RAM, ATI RADEON HD 4350 running Linux - openSUSE 11.4 (x86_64) - KDE 4.6

Its Great to be back :D

I Remeber When .......

Sorry, old blender man reminiscing + rant post. you can ignore it if you want, dosn't worry me just needed to get my thoughts off my chest :)

I remember a time in blender, that blender was considered to be just a hobby tool, not much use to anyone, and in those days, everyone treated each other properly no trolls, no 'thinkmegoods' and everyone helped everyone and was eternally grateful for what they have.

These days, the community is all but a shadow of its former self, many old timers who help shape what blender is today stopped reading Blendernation and Blenderartists out of disgust of what it has become.

Everyone thinks they are a blender god, only because hey used blender for a couple months and managed to render a fruit bowl and think they know how blender works and how it should be. Out of all this decay came the notion that the blender foundation is a huge company with huge resources and they and the coders MUST bow to their every whim and have to be done instantly.

Of course this is certainly not true, Blender Foundation is funded entirely by donations and purchases in the shop. The BF has very little resources and can only hire 2 developers full time and the rest of the developers are all volunteers including myself, and only a handful can actually commit code to blender.

Since we are volunteers we can only work on it in our free time, which is not a lot these days. So be greatful we have remaind disiplined and worked on reducing the number of bugs after the entire 2.5 rewrite which is ~80% new code. You need solid foundations before you can build a building, 2.49 is great evidence of that. But not all is lost New features and projects will be let off the leach after 2.59 which is set to be released at siggraph.

So what im trying to get at here, is Please do not treat us as slaves, we have given up our free time for you, we design blender for you, and we aim to make you happy and please stop this arrogant crap you may have an idea, cool :) , but don't get upset that its not implemented straight away. We are doing the best we can, and be grateful that blender is free (both speech and beer) and always will be free, and just say thanks once in a while :)

Ok sorry for the long rant there, its an issue that has been one my chest for a long time, even reading that they didn't care about poor joe's health they just want bmesh now, now that is just not on that is not the blender way.

addons, Ivy Generator

A fair while back i mentioned that the program thats generates nice ivy/vines over an model has started being ported over to an addon for 2.5. Well things were quiet for quite a while. and started twice.

But now this latest version has finally reached a usable state and i have to say it works really well, a few missing options and functionality for sure but it is still a fantastic addon. As usual here is some pictures :)

--EDIT--
To use this,
-you first select the mesh
-set the 3dcursor to where you want it to grow from (use autodepth)
-the 3dcursor has to be either on the surface or very close
-now add->curve->ivy
-set your options and away it goes, this may take some time

To use this addon you need an development/svn build (grab one from graphicall.org) it will NOT work in latest stable as some utility functions were written since stable that this addon uses







addon can be found here (registration is needed)
https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-extensions/branches/ivygen/truman_ivy/

PS. I know i have not done any videos recently, thats due to computer issues,
soon i'll have a new machine and can't wait to get back to making the vids for you all, even planning on doing some vid tuts. oyu'll hear from me soon, i have not forgottewn you all :)

Particles Adaptive Subframes

Sorry for being so long between posts , anyway, time for some cool stuff, especially GSoC shaping up to be a good one :)

Recently there has been a little development is the realm of particles, particularly Fluid (SPH) particles, anyone who has used fluid particles have all encontered the problem of exploding fluids, where wdroplets would just explode for no real reason, and the solution to this was increase the subframes, which rarly if ever work and add on a huge amount of simtime.

Now there is an option to apply the amount of subframes dynamiclly and mathermaticlly, using the velocity of neighours and distance, and all these fancy calculations, to give very nice and stable simlation with little or no cost in time.

As usual pictures speak loader then words so below is a comparison vid, with resulting sims and time to simulate.



full res vid
http://mfoxdogg.com/development/particles_adaptive_subframes.avi

Patch and more info/details
http://projects.blender.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=27442&group_id=9&atid=127

Hope to get back to doing these again so keep watching :)

See Ya's

Blender 2.5, Addons

Hi all, it been a while.

recently Rigify, the automated rigging system was revamped and was recently commited to svn i was going to do a little demo then i realised that i havn't covered Addons much so i decided to do some vids related to the available addons.

in these videos i use addons from the contib branch of the bf-extensions svn tree, get them using the following command.

svn checkout https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-extensions/contrib bf_blender_extensions

(or equivilant)

General overview of the smaller addons : http://mfoxdogg.com/25tours/addons/addons_overview.mp4

Mesh Tools addons : http://mfoxdogg.com/25tours/addons/addons_meshtools.mp4

Finally, Rigify : http://mfoxdogg.com/25tours/addons/addons_rigify.mp4

Hope you all enjoy them and dive in yourselves to try out the magic of 2.5's py API and really push the addons and the API :D

See Ya's Next time

Blender2.5 and Vray

Vray is a raytracing based renderer thats is used by millions and is extremely powerful and quite fast, with huge amount of options for maximum flexibility, an handles large scenes with absolute ease. I have been using it at work to render scenes and we barly scratch its surface, even have 1000 page Guide on how to use it and what the settings do.

http://chaosgroup.com/en/2/index.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_hXoTEjT0Q be sure to checkout the recommendations as there is quite a few showreels

For the longest time I have and many other blender users wanted a good export script to Vray (there was one for 1.8 :S) to the extent that i tried to make one many moons ago. But finally our long wait over! :D.

Bdancer has been working diligently on a 2.5 addon to allow you to render in Vray and it finally reached a state that i can actually start using it, and i have got to say, i absolutly Love it!. this is one of the best addons i have seen being made for 2.5 as the intergration is so well done and is pracricly seamless without hiding all the options and tools for those who can use them but also providing sane defaults for those who don't.

Ofcourse there is some gotcha's in the addon like only image textures are currently supported, and some options need to be turned of in blender render like colour correct as it cannot be seen in vray mode. Also you need the vray stand alone, which only comes with the maya plugin, not max.
The Git repo and more info including instructions and known issues can be found here
https://github.com/bdancer/vb25

also if you have anyquestions or want to report somthing please report it at that site.

now for me to stop and to show you some pics :)








Hope you all give Vray a try and give nice feedback to BDancer for all his hard work :)

See Ya's