Blender - Some Awesome New Features

[efflux]

Her'es my last post on this thread. Modo test with Blender terrain, trees and some spheres scattered around. I forgot to change the coordinates of the texture so the spheres all have the same texture. I pushed Modo here to see what could be done in terms of scale. Massive terrain. You are only seeing a quarter of it. All over dense displacement including on the spheres. Millions more spheres could be added. Of course you'd make those rocks. Then a test with an extremely complex tree replicated into thousands. 500 million polys and not pushing my system much at all. 5 billion should be easily possible. The scene is not that cool because I didn't try to do that. Terrain is quite nice though. Just a technical test. I also discovered that you can domain distort textures. This was a big find. I don't need Blender to create terrains. It can be done in Modo. In fact everything can be done in Modo. the Linux version is a masterpiece. The Windows version suffers from crashes. That's what spoils it. Is it as good as Terragen for pure landscape? Not really. Terragen has the best displacements of any app and easy ways to create clouds but some aspects of Modo are actually better for landscaping. Much better surfacing control for example although I know improvements are coming in Terragen 3 (voronoi). Add in the fact that it's a full animation and modelling app. It does FBX and in general does play well with most other apps including Terragen.

[efflux]

Everything I'm doing now revolves around Modo. Luxology have pulled off a masterstroke with Modo 701 Linux. Maybe it's the Foundry guys since their other software such as Nuke runs on Linux but this is the best 3D app I've ever used. It's rock solid reliable. I've used Modo on and off for ages. I lost hope around 301 but finally they've pulled it off. It's awesome. I've upgraded my licence.

[rcallicotte]

Nice to hear, Efflux.  701 was a step in the right direction.

Have you tried moving stuff from Modo into TG?

[efflux]

I'll do that whenever I come up with things that are Terragen Modo compliant. That's a lot though. Terragen HDRIs would be very useful in Modo for example and any content in Modo could be used in Terragen. Modo also has FBX. I have to reboot into Windows to use Terrragen because everything else I do is on Linux and Modo Linux is the best version. Next to that the OSX version seems OK but I find the Windows Modo is quite poor. Very crashy. So I don't mess around with Terragen until I definitely have something of use then I reboot in. That's why lots of renders on this thread are Blender rather than going straight to Terragen because rebooting isn't worth it just for test renders. If it looks OK in Blender or Modo it will look OK in Terragen.

I've seen you sometimes comment on the Modo forum.

Probably I'll be working in Modo a lot now. It will take me a long time to get around it but every app you move to it gets easier because they all do similar things. The real magic in Modo comes in the animation. It looks like this is much easier in Modo than most apps. It's fast turning into the app I always dreamed of. It's expensive but still cheap compared to competitors. A key thing is the ease of workflow from modeling to animation to rendering.

I don't want to plough all my time into Landscape apps. I stopped doing that a while ago. The main reason is that I have other work that can't be brought to life with just landscapes and I have a lot of gripes about the situation with landscape apps. Terragen is still almost there in my opinion. I think Modo 701 is now really there as a totally complete app.

[efflux]

I would also encourage anyone here to spend more time in other apps if they have the time because, especially with Terragen 3, it is really important that Terragen becomes an adjunct to these other apps. That really should be it's job. To handle large landscapes that can't be done in these other apps.

Terragen 3 should in theory be able to create much better terrains as well with the voronoi basis and there is the alpine fractal. That stuff is completely movable between Modo and Terragen along with other data via FBX. Content feeding back into Terragen would greatly enhance the Terragen work as well. It's no good if Terragen is too isolated.

[rcallicotte]

I enjoy modeling and such in Modo, but find Blender is just so fun.  Modo's rendering is nice, too.  Terragen has been sorta the way "in" for me, where I've learned 3D and graphics.  But, it's still an adventure just getting in it and doodling around.  I remember fondly the times of a few years ago where a few of you all were working with all sorts of mathematical formulas and terrains and lighting.  Volker...someone whose name began with M...you, TU, Franck...it was so much fun and learning! 

So I'm looking forward to more of the same, but only more in TG3. 

[efflux]

What you know in Terragen is not wasted for other apps that's for sure. The minute I found you could texture distort one texture with another in Modo that opened up doors because I realised the forms it could take. Modo users don't think of those things. They will use that to say make a brick texture uneven or something but as we know here those sorts of distortions are crucial for creating beautiful textures. I'd rather have nodes in Modo for shader manipulation but the shader tree is surprisingly powerful and easy to use.

[efflux]

Going completely off topic but I'll add some more images here because this is the ultimate example of what is completely lacking in Terragen. Modo has a massively powerful gradient editor. It's all one thing. Gradients, curves and this hooks into anything in Modo. Animation, whatever. Just look at the possibilities on the left. It's insanely powerful. Terragen has two colours in the power fractal and not even curves. Imagine those colour textures on rocks or just as an altitude change. This displacement can be frozen to mesh in Modo. So this could be terrain. The example is a bit spikey but you get the idea. It can be as detailed as needed. Fractals can go down to very high detail.

This is all heaven to work with. Modo Linux is my favourite app now. Just totally awesome.

[efflux]

It's also over now for Windows and OSX. This Modo version is the final icing on the cake. There is absolutely no way I'd consider using those operating systems if I had any kind of professional studio. I've been in Windows a few times recently and it's terrible. The higher you go with the needed memory the worse it gets. Most of these apps perform terribly on Windows compared to Linux.

[TheBadger]

I really dislike these gradient editors. Especially with animation editors.
All the apps have them or will have them. But I think there terrible from a creative perspective. Though I do understand the need for them. Its just that like everything else, they reduce what should be a visual hands on way of working to a less intuitive detached way of working.

An example of something I think works a little better is the way you use key frames in After effects. There you can move objects in 3D space visually. Same with colors and channels and everything else. But it also has a gradient editor for animation and everything else too. At least I have a choice. I dont think its perfect or anything, I just think its more of a visual way to work.

The thing is, the people who make all these softwares are so very smart. I don't understand why they make things so difficult to use for the people who want to use them the most.

So with Terragen Im not saying we should not have the editors your asking for. I'm asking why in the heck you think that the way the editor works needs to be like these gradient editors? There must be a better way in terms of UI and user connection?

I want to make art, not pilot a space ship, do you know what I mean?

[rcallicotte]

@Efflux - Your style surfaces in Modo. 

Not to take this conversation off kilter, but hey, look at this! http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-268/  OMG!!  This is the best program!!

[efflux]

Blender is great. It's a triumph of open source. I intend to use it for some things. It needs a few more features for landscape type stuff. Cycles doesn't have volumetric support yet and the displacements are experimental. The biggest issue I found though was that Blender can handle big scenes if your system is decent but it can't handle scenes of the size that Modo can. I read that they are intending to basically rebuild Blender eventually to improve performance. That will be around version 3 so a long way off. I think by version 3 they can be seriously taking on the big apps. They are already doing this if you are just working on smaller scale projects. Advertising, Archviz, character design etc. You can do that in Blender. It's mainly due to Cycles which is a really great renderer.

[efflux]

I've got that version on my Linux system. Cycles in much faster now.

[efflux]

Another point is that Blender won't be nearly as good a partner for Terragen as Modo but Blender is free and Modo is $1,495.00 if you're starting from scratch. There was a sale on a for a few days so I got the upgrade from 201 cheap.

[efflux]

I really dislike these gradient editors. Especially with animation editors.
All the apps have them or will have them. But I think there terrible from a creative perspective. Though I do understand the need for them. Its just that like everything else, they reduce what should be a visual hands on way of working to a less intuitive detached way of working.

An example of something I think works a little better is the way you use key frames in After effects. There you can move objects in 3D space visually. Same with colors and channels and everything else. But it also has a gradient editor for animation and everything else too. At least I have a choice. I dont think its perfect or anything, I just think its more of a visual way to work.

The thing is, the people who make all these softwares are so very smart. I don't understand why they make things so difficult to use for the people who want to use them the most.

So with Terragen Im not saying we should not have the editors your asking for. I'm asking why in the heck you think that the way the editor works needs to be like these gradient editors? There must be a better way in terms of UI and user connection?

I want to make art, not pilot a space ship, do you know what I mean?

Hi Michael. I actually missed your comment before. The gradient editor is immensely powerful because it can be linked to a noise function. It doesn't have to be insanely complex like the Modo one but lets say in Terragen instead of the two colours for the fractal you had a bar of colour the same as you see in the Modo gradient. You could add points to that and have lots of colour changes. You can also output colour to drive other functions in Terragen. It's also crucial to have some kind of easily editable curve to shape the noises. This becomes most obvious when trying to create profiles for terrain. Essentially that's what I was doing in the stepped terrain thread but I'm sick of all that blue node stuff. That doesn't replace having a graph that you simply add points to like in every single other graphics app whether it's Photoshop or Blender.

Modo doesn't even have  node graph yet it's still fun and powerful to work with.