Blender - Some Awesome New Features

[efflux]

I'm spending time in Blender at the moment. I got into this after trying to create trees. It turns out Blender has a script for trees. It's quite good. Similar to Arbaro. I'm now getting deeper into Blender and especially to do with landscape type stuff. There are some limitations of course but working with vaste populations of objects is not one of them. Blender is really great for that. Millions of rocks or trees etc. I'm experimenting with clouds as well since this is a big weakness of any non specific landscape app.

I wish TG2 could ouput proper HDRI environments. That would be a very useful function since TG2 can handle large vistas of mountains and sky.

One thing I can say is that Blender's day has come. Just check out these two threads, especially later in the threads and especially some of the work in the UV and displacements thread. That is very clever. Cycles rendering engine is awesome. Really beautiful renders.

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?273033-Sculpting-with-UVs-and-displacements

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?264568-Dyntopo-tests

How this relates to TG2 I'm not sure but it might be a while before I use TG2 again due to being bogged down in Blender. Maybe I can bring things back to TG2. Other big 3D apps have serious problems now. Blender makes redundant some purposes for using those.

[rcallicotte]

I keep going back to Blender and the Blender community for great software and excellent tutorials.  What a great option!

[efflux]

One of the problems with Blender was difficulty in finding out how to use it. All these apps are like this. Maya, 3DMax etc. you don't just dive in and play around, it has to be learnt but now I see a huge amount of info about doung various stuff. This part isn't a problem now.

[Oshyan]

Terragen 3 will have a spherical camera, so you can output 360 environments quite easily.

- Oshyan

[efflux]

Great. I've just seen about TG3. Linux node rendering as well. That's cool. Of course I'd like a full Terragen on Linux but I understand the priorities. I'll probably be working away in other apps even when Terragen 3 comes out but I need to do that to get the content I really want. I've got tired of the pure landscaping thing and it doesn't please me to just use ready made content to put in the scene.

[AP]

I thought Ubuntu read the windows files system, read and write.

[efflux]

Yes, linux can read and write Windows file systems. Windows can't read Linux unfortunately but that's OK. I do everything except TG2 in Linux so I'm on Linux all the time. It would be nice to have TG2 on Linux. The rendering node isn't an added bonus for my use but cool that we will have it. I know it isn't a priority to have full Linux TG. That is until more people are using Linux.

There are a number of ways Blender can play with TG2. I'll probably show results from that soon. You can make terrains in Blender. I've had large ones good enough to use as TG2 heightfields. I've yet to test how good this works in terms of getting them out of Blender into TG2. In Blender you can create large mesh terrains or any mesh then burn the displacement into a bitmap in some interesting ways. Because you can see and edit the mesh, you can do a lot before making the bitmap which can be exported in high bit depth. Editing a large terrain could be slow but you could also do tweaks in 3DCoat. Blender has a stack of fractal power so you can make terrains or a bunch of textures that you can't do in TG2. Blender is powerful in terms of procedural textures. There are some limits with displacements which is maybe why people don't use the procedurals that much but then again the same limits apply for bitmap displacements. I think it's more lack of knowledge about the power of it. So you could have exactly the same scene in Blender and TG2. Could be useful.

[efflux]

Basically what you can do is make any mesh and burn it to bitmap for heigthfield. You can add any shape you want to it since Blender is a modeller. It should work fine as long as the bitmap has no problems and burns into the UV nicely.

[efflux]

For people that use heightfields in TG2. What kind of resolution do you use? What can TG2 import and deal with? I never used Heightfields much.

[TheBadger]

this may be of use to you or others in terms of modeling and trees. THis seemed like the thread for it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxAsfqqeAUM

and this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvGX8ShwzKo

[efflux]

Hi Michael.

I've seen those. The landscape one has a bunch of flaws. You can do way better but it all takes time to figure out. I've got great terrains in Blender. The addon for creating terrains has some problems. I'm not using that. I'm making terrains as displacement modifier. these can then be burned as high bit depth maps for heightfield. In Blender you have all the node functionality missing from Terragen.  Curve graphs, colour ramps etc. You can assign shaders by altitude and slope. I'm working on it but there is no doubt that there should be a way to get great terrains out of Blender that Terragen isn't capable of. Still a few problems to work through though. The main reason for the potential is Blender's fantastic fractal power. I think you'd have go to something like World Machine to get similar or for some types of terrain, better since Blender won't do the erosion type stuff.

One example of what people aren't doing is that the mesh is totally controllable wherever it is in the scene. The procedural texture space always remains the same so once you have your terrain shapes you can fine tune the mesh. Close mesh has lots of detail far mesh doesn't need to. The terrain shapes don't change just detail. This is Blender specific though. I'm working on how to better edit terrains for use in Terragen.

As for trees. That obviously gets complex. I'm not working on that at the moment but it turns out you can create arrays of leaves along branches and it's super effective. These objects can be linked to the branch and this means any shaping of the tree keeps the leaves attached. Simple plants that can compete with Plant Factory are definitely possible right down to all details of leaves etc. Bigger trees with a lot more leaves gets more complex if you work from scratch.

[efflux]

One thing is clear. As long as I don't come across any major hurdles, I think I can revolutionise the way Blender is being used for landscapes and this means content to other apps as well.

[efflux]

Here's a quick preview of things I'm working on. It also demos a problem and Why I'm not using that addon you see in all the tutorials about landscape. The addon does something that creates a grid. It's not a poly grid either, it's lower level in the mesh. You can see it in this render. It may be problem that is solvable but I've moved to manually creating terrains as displacement modifier. This turns out way more powerful because I can blend up all sorts of forms in node graphs.

Blender is a serious app. Don't go by a lot of the work you see. A lot of amateurs use Blender. That's good but it means a lot of unskilled work.

[efflux]

I've learnt everything Blender does. It took some time and I'm ditching Blender. Everyone if faffing around with the dynamic topolgy and Cyles renderer but other problems exist and are getting neglected. The texture nodes for mesh displacement modifier don't work. This kills off  complex terrain adjustments but worse, the new Cycles render nodes ditches all the basis functions in the Musgrave fractal. Ludicrous decision.

Over to Modo now. Looks like Modo 701has some serious texturing power including an insanely powerful gradient editor. Also, Modo handles vast poly counts which is always a plus. It will probably take me months to learn all this. If Modo can't cut it I'm ditching 3D forever.

[Matt]

Efflux, you work fast! How did you go from "One thing is clear. As long as I don't come across any major hurdles, I think I can revolutionise the way Blender is being used for landscapes and this means content to other apps as well" to "I've learnt everything Blender does. It took some time and I'm ditching Blender" in only 13 hours?! It's impossible to figure out what software you like and what you don't

Matt