Blender - Some Awesome New Features

[TheBadger]

^^HA! Yeah! I know what you mean. I read that the reason that autodesk does not take the best parts of Maya, Max and softimage, and spin them into one new super package, is because the user groups would cry about it.
I read that the idea is that users would be upset about having to learn a new UI and such. But what could they do about it? Protest by buying a competitors soft and learning a new UI? Its silly.

I really wish Autodesk would do that. It would go along way towards standardisation in the industry. But I think Ill never understand why anyone does anything.

[Dune]

On the other hand, if you have some software that does it all, it is probably way too heavy to even load, let alone work in it. Lots of stuff you don't need and have to buy because it's included. Like building buildings, trees, moving water, explosions and terrific landscapes, and animate that all into a fully fledged feature film, all in one TG5.

[efflux]

All Planetside has to do is to implement the needed features. This is why I'm doing this in Blender instead of Terragen. Of course these terrains are usable in Terragen then I can add what Terragen is good at. Clouds, infinite terrain, cool atmospheres and vey good displacements.

This is pretty cuttying edge though because I've been forced to use the new experimental features in Cycles i.e. displacement and this isn't without problems. For some reason the realtime GPU preview is much more displaced than the final render. Also, I actually don't want these terrains as procedural displacement. I need to burn them to UV so as to be able to export them as high bit depth displacement maps or use these to mesh modify a terrain in Blender then add another level of displacement detail. This method also allows overhangs and bridges since it's mesh. You can also do slope and all that stuff in Blender.

Where Terragen collapses is lack of fractal variety, lack of different basis functions, no totally open inputs to drive any of the fractal parameters, locked up positioning, no curve graph and no colour gradient. This is all severly crippling of Terragen's potential in particular for terrains. The Terragen fractal in it's present form excells  at surface detail but is not so good at defining larger form variety. We have the Alpine fractal but that's not very editable. That's OK to have a shader like that as long as we have other stuff that is powerful for editing.

[efflux]

On the other hand, if you have some software that does it all, it is probably way too heavy to even load, let alone work in it. Lots of stuff you don't need and have to buy because it's included. Like building buildings, trees, moving water, explosions and terrific landscapes, and animate that all into a fully fledged feature film, all in one TG5.

It's true that Terragen is mucg better when dealing with large terrains as far as ease of editing etc because it can get a bit slow in these other apps and obviously Terragen is pretty much infinite. Blender can get sluggish but the terrains above are not too big to cause this. You might want more than that though. Modo is pretty good at very big mesh though.

The terrains above caused no slowdown at all because they are render level displacement. It doesn't get worked out until render time.

However, what Terragen is definitely not better at is handling tree and rock populations or whatever objects you are multiplying. Both Blender and Modo are massively superior for that.

[efflux]

The two terrains above used about say 50MB max of RAM to render. Once I get that to mesh it will climb. Depending on mesh subdivision maybe a few hundred MB or into GB. There are three methods in Blender now to shape things. You sort out a base terrain as mesh. The method I used above will probably be the creation method before I turn it to bitmap to displace the mesh which can be made a pernament mesh modification. This base terrain would be kept reasonably simple and not high detailed. This opens up the modifier for further fractal mesh displacement which could result in very cool effects like huge overhangs because then you are working with a mesh where normals are no longer coming from a flat plane. You could create bridges or caves etc. The final level is this new feature of proper displacement at render time. I think this can all be achieved with room for millions of objects.

Modo is limited at the creative end of mesh creation in my opinion although it has very cool materials now. Not like Blender for creating terrains at all. In Modo it's a question of bringing in a big terrain and using materials on it with populations of whatever. Modo should excell at the mesh handling. It seems to be able to handle insane replications. You can take a million poly object and seemingly replicate it into thousands. Literally going into billions upon billions of polygons. I've not even seen this pushed to limits.

Clouds are possible in both Modo and Blender but that's where Terragen is much superior. However, that can be used as HDRI background in both Modo and Blender.

There are many ways this could all be mixed up. It would much preferable though if we could create lots of variety of terrain in Terragen easily. World Machine and Blender are both much better. Some apps just excell at certain things and always will. World Machine creates really nice erosion for example.

[efflux]

I read somewhere that The Foundry wanted Cycles renderer for Nuke but Ton told them where to go. Nuke is £2500. They had to settle for the Modo renderer so they bought Luxology. If this dosn't tell how mad this whole area of software is I don't know what does. These big compaines are going to be in trouble eventually.

[TheBadger]

"Ton "? whats that?

What do you know about "Arnold" renderer?

[efflux]

I don't know anything about Arnold renderer except the results look really good and apparently it's supposed to work in a similar way to Cylces at least in terms of the way the displacements work. I just read that on a forum though.

There's no question that Blender Cylces renderer gets extremely nice results and is totally pro quality. It looks very realistic. I think it looks better than the Modo one but it's still early days of development. Modo is quite mature.

Ton Roosendaal is the main man at Blender.

[efflux]

I've also got Mojoworld back running in Linux wine. A bit complex because my Linux is 64 bit but it's working be it with some kind of open GL wine regression. The reason for this is thatnMojoworld is still unsurpassed by any app in terms of procedurals so I can use it to create terrains and textures.

Terragen is staying on Windows though so I have 64 bit version and there are some problems with it in wine anyway.

[efflux]

Another point is that the performance of these cross platform apps is shockingly poor on Windows and OSX compared to Linux. This is most noticeable with Modo when you're dealing with huge data. The Windows version is chronic. Spinning blue circles when you do stuff that pushes data around. This crap never happens on Linux.

[efflux]

^^HA! Yeah! I know what you mean. I read that the reason that autodesk does not take the best parts of Maya, Max and softimage, and spin them into one new super package, is because the user groups would cry about it.
I read that the idea is that users would be upset about having to learn a new UI and such. But what could they do about it? Protest by buying a competitors soft and learning a new UI? Its silly.

I really wish Autodesk would do that. It would go along way towards standardisation in the industry. But I think Ill never understand why anyone does anything.

I think some apps could do almost everything but there are some problems with it. Certain workflows are different even when using similar tools. Modo as compared to Wings3d is a perfect example. I don't like Modo for my purposes but if you were modelling various products, cars etc then Modo is good. Also, there are certain ways features flow through to other areas of the app and that effects design. In Modo for example you can model an object while you actually see it animating. Then you have pretty specialised apps like Houdini. I've watched some videos on that and it loos really cool but is geared towards procedural modelling with physics and such like.

I don't expect Terragen to be able to handle objects the way a modeling app would. That's clearly never going to there. It could be better but my main gripe is terrain generation or any basic procedural freedom to hook nodes up much more powerfully. That could easily be improved in TG2 and not effect any work flow.

[efflux]

Here's another one. Now I'm into using painting. That's why this one falls off to the edge. However, I can paint anything including using a fractal brush. The low areas could be voronoi stones. 3D Coat would be best for that but it seems Blender can handle it not too badly if the result is displacement at render time. Then I can bring in thousands of real geometry rocks, trees or whatever. I can't even show you the full detail. The renders are huge. That's another gain. Super fast rendering when you're scene is limited to a stage set type scenario.

Everything you see in this is everything that is hell in Terragen. To get those steps I'd have to mess around with complex graphs and bias ballony instead of a curve graph. Then you see a proper gradient colour following the fractal. Also not possible in Terragen.

[TheBadger]

Please explain what a curve graph is when talking about procedural terrains. How do you imagine this should look like, and function in terragen... I have heard you and others gripe about this, but I never asked why its so important.

"using a fractal brush"
This sounds interesting. Please explain what it is.

You know, I think the points you are making are that T2 can do most of what you want it to, but just that its too hard, or too time consuming?

[efflux]

Some things are do-able in Terragen but hard. In particular controlling steps but other things are hard as well.

Here's three Blender nodes. This is also the limited Cycles nodes. In the old Blender internal, not only do you have a bunch of fractal shaders but you can choose lots of basis functions. In this fractal node notice that you can plug things into all those inputs. Some of that can lead to very interesting effects. It's not Mojoworld class but pretty good. Next node is the curve graph. In this case I'm using the curve graph to create the terrain profile. Those steps are the steps of the terrain. The graph is showing a range of -1 to 1 Y within it's box but it seems this fractal setup wasn't far into - value so that's why it doesn't go there. Fractals can be all over the place in values depending on your edits. You can control all of that and zoom in and out. The minimum and maximum curve values are editable. This can take the whole curve and make it apply to different ranges. You could for example get it to repeat. You can also clamp the input and output of the curve. Notice all the features that this builds into one easy to use node that in Terragen is a nightmare concoction of blue nodes to replicate. Next node is the colour gradient. It's just grayscale here but as you can see you can create infinite gradients. This could control colour but could also act similar to the curve graph and vice versa. You'll see the curve graph actually has RGB so it can control colours.

[efflux]

Actually, there is also a vector curve graph. That last shot shows the colour one. Maybe that's why the fractal value doesn't go below 0.

One more useful node is a normal direction one. You have this ball and by moving it the normal directions change. For a real world example, say you have nodes that are on a particular slope, you can use the normal node to change the direction slightly so snow might be more piled on one side of a hill or whatever. It's all very powerful.