Blender - Some Awesome New Features

[efflux]

The other great terrain generator is Mojoworld but that's a tragic disaster area. I'm not sure I can handle using it although I have installed it on Linux wine. I don't think you can even buy it anymore. Really pathetic situation for such a great app. You could take the guts of Mojoworld and make it into an awesome Photoshop texture generator or something. Tragic waste. It should be open sourced if it's not going anywhere.

[AP]

I played with MojoWorld for a short time but i never could get used to the workflow. The last i heard Doc Mojo posted a reply at the Renderosity forums quite a while back. What is silly to me is, if you are the creator and owner of a software company who suddenly disappears for months, years then in very rare instances shows up briefly at some forums to then stay silent again is shear negligence. What is even worse is the user base had questions that were never answered. To act like everything is a secret and deny your users who payed for your good does not make any sense to me. Why continue with the product then? Why not just shut your operation down, give your user base some answers and do something else with your product rather then leave those users high and dry to hang.

[efflux]

Yes, it's ridiculous. I understand if there are financial problems. I think there were financial backers for Mojoworld and that may effect what can be done but what greatly annoys me is that the Mojoworld community was filled with a lot of talented people that put a lot of time in. It's not the cost of the app, eveyone got good use out of it while it was good, it's the time spent. Ken Musgrave doesn't communicate what is happening at all. He also kept selling the app at the same price. He could have at least reduced the price in respect of it's dropping usefulness. It stil is an awesome texture generator but it's obviously not streamlined for that in it's UI so most people will not learn how to set it up just for textures, terrains etc. If you want to create brushes for say ZBrush of 3D Coat or simply texture stamps for use in any 3D model, I don't know of any other other app that can create such beautiful textures. You can create awesome terrains in Mojoworld but very rarely do you see that being used in other apps. Then Dmytry Lavrov made that awesome volumetrics plugin. More waste of time because that was never integrated as well as it should have been. In an ideal world he'd have handed Mojoworld over to Dmytry to continue the voumtetric rendering work.

The lesson to be learnt is never spend a whole bunch of time in apps that don't have alternatives so you are utterly reliant on them. This is true of Terragen as well but hopefully Planetside's business model won't be like Pandromeda's. This is one reason why Learning Blender is a no brainer. Blender is not going anywhere. It will always be around and always useful. It's ever increasing in power and user base. No take overs, bankruptcies etc. The worst that could happen is that Ton Rosendaal gets run over by a bus or something but I don't think that would even stop it.

I'm actually changing direction. It's not because of the above reason but I'm moving more into animation. I need to bring in all the other angles of my artwork. I even do music so it's logical to move to time based stuff. This doesn't mean I'm ditching using Terragen. Terragen does integrate better with other apps compared to say Mojoworld that's for sure and version 3 it seems will improve that. The point is that now things are much easier for more standard modelling, animation and rendering. I tried ZBrush recently and I was very disappointed. It seemed like the same app it was years ago. I think 3D Coat is better. ZBrush's UI is shockingly confused. In 3D coat it is incredibly fast to design a character, retopologise it and texture it. I'm not in Weta style super realistic stuff which 3D coat might not be powerful enough for but I think nothing tops 3D Coat if your'e designing simpler more cartoon like characters. All we need now it for Ptex to take over. 3D Coat does that but the apps you would import into are few and far between as far as Ptex support. I think it's being worked on for Blender. Modo needs it badly. Modo has FBX though. Modo actually plays extremely nicely with Terragen. It can handle huge scenes so that's a boost over Blender. I'm not going into any other apps now though. I have everything I need and on Linux which is the dream come true now with Modo. Modo is now a great app to bring everything together.

[efflux]

I'm back in Blender yet again. I tried doing terrain in 3D Coat but it wasn't in the same league even although I have massive extra res. I've made some new discoveries. I'm posting another Blender terrain to show this. This is completely hand sculpted in dynamic topology. I'm finding that the facets created aren't necessaily a problem. You'd just artfully reduce them wherever you wanted. The small scale noise is in fact extra displacement detail done in Cycles displacment. This part is fully controllable via slope and altitude etc. However the main breaklthrough here is that you don't have to create bitmap brushes or even 3D brushes the way you might do in 3D Coat or Zbrush. Blender paints direct with the procedural fractal with a brush. This is awesome because you can change fractal parameters as you paint. It's not restricted to whatever form you created with a bitmap brush and thus repititous. You can see a little variety here like at the bottom right but it's just a test and I didn't work further. The possibilities here are enormous. It's just a pity the dynamic topology part can only go so high in res. You have to add extra details with Cycles.

[efflux]

The point about the smoothing is you don't use it not even at final render time. The facted faces of Blenders unsmoothed dynamic topology are brilliant because you create really geometric poly shapes. These are rock like but when you up the dynamic toplogy detail level you don't lose that rocky sharpness it just paints detail over it. 3D Coat now has this dynamic topology but it doesn't have the fractals that's why Blender wins every time. It will beat out Mudbox and ZBrush as well because as far as I know you don't have a bunch of high powered fractals to use a brushes.

This is all exportable to TG2 now but TG2 heightfield won't match Blender or imports of pure mesh to Modo. I've completely eradicated the vertical limits. Maybe TG2 can do vector displacement maps? I saw a thread on that but it seemed there may be issues. Is this just with objects?

[efflux]

One more. This will definitely be the last but you can see why I'm going this direction. No heightfield suitable stuff here so this totally departs from Terragen now. I will be able to create hundreds of these especially If I go to Modo. I just need to work on shapes and textures to get better realism.

[efflux]

If you watch this video you'll see why I want to use Blender and eventually Modo. I find Modo not great at creating the content. Wings3D, Blender and 3D Coat are good but Modo is very good to render in and this video was made several years ago. Modo is now really good for this sort of thing. I can't sculpt things totally in TG2. It's impossible and I can't use texture the way I can in 3D Coat.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVU9BVoOhqg

[Dune]

It's awesome what you accomplish here, really tempting to have a go. But I will stick to TG for the time being. Maybe if you'd do a complete tutorial one day, you can get more users into Blender.

[efflux]

I'm back thinking about Terragen heightfields again because I now have an awesome workflow for that. This is it:

In Blender you create a flat plane and subdivide it up. Not massively but enough to get a generalised rock or hill formation. You actually want flat polys to begin with. You add a displacment modifier. This utilises all of Blenders old noise basis so any shape is possible. This displaces the mesh out in a rough rocky form. There is one thing I have to sort here though. We need something to cause a fall off o the edges but that's not critical. That can actually be achieved somewhere else along the line. You can just apply this first rock modifier but it may be worth experimenting changing this modifier after you've sculpted - could be very interesting.

Next step is that you go into Blender's dynamic sculpt mode. Then you can sculpt more detail in with fractal brushes. It can dynamically divide the polys where more detail is going. This is the magic bit because it looks like rocks even if polys are'nt super detailed. It's hands down the best method I've seen for creating rock structures. You still don't go massive poly though. Once you've got something you like i.e. a nice mixture of detail and flat faces you add another modifier for subdivision but not Catmull-Clark because that smoothes the sharp rocks. We don't want that we want Simple subdivision. You apply that then apply another level of Catmull clarke. This does smooth the rocks but not totally. It just gets rid of the sharp edges.

Bear in mind with the sculpting that overhangs aren't wanted for Terragen. It shouldn't be too difficult to avoid that.

There are a few next options. Blender can't do massive poly count for sculpting so we have to do something else for more detail. If we want that. Who's to say loading a simple heightfield into Terragen isn't good. As long as the shape is nice then Terragen can add detail. If you want further detail you can add that with Blender Cycles displacement before baking or just bake it as is or just take the whole model out of Blender and into a sculpting app. There are obviously a few options with where we take the mesh to displacement maps but sculpting apps such as 3D Coat can get into very small detail over the top on the these intial rocks. Whatever way, you can end up with a high bit depth heightfield. It's just a question of making sure a flat map can be made with no overlaps.

It gets truly awesome though if you can just forget about heightfield because you have no limits to the forms.

[Jo Kariboo]

Very nice experimentations efflux !!! I like terrains on reply 65 to 67 !!!

[efflux]

Watch this video because we can do this after Blender has created the rocky structure but of course an app like 3D Coat can go into tiny detail. You could do similar is Mudbox or ZBrush. It also does have some precedural brushes in this new clay sculpt mode. It's a question of deciding the best route to get the displacement map. This 3D Coat dynamic mesh mode is like Blender's but it doesn't create the nice rock like structures. I've tried. It's no match for Blender but you can then go in to add tiny details to the rocks. Much more detail than you see in this video but we need to avoid overhangs. How that gets displacement mapped I'm not sure. It could be done back in Blender if we can get Cycles to accept this second layer of detail for it's displacment. I've had problems with that. Possibly it simply doesn't work but Cycles workaround baking method turns out to be better than most proper baking methods so that would in fact be the desired method although complicated.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEVIK2d9a2E

[efflux]

The guy who did that Modo video just creates block like rocks out of very simply poly forms. He then applies textures in Modo for colour and displacment. That's pretty successful as you can from that video but it's a lot of work and you don't get those natural quirks that fractals create even for displacing simply geometry at the start as you do in the Blender modifier. I'm trying to take this so that it's multi use. You can create heightfields or go full geometry and the complexity is only limited by computer power. That's where the Modo video has a weakness. It's all modelled totally by hand.

[efflux]

Also, I think that some minblowing results could be had by using Blender and World Machine. There is Vue as well but Vue is too expensive. I don't like E-ons bait and switch type marketing tactics.

[efflux]

I've just made another advance. If you Simple subdivide then sculpt again but then apply Catmull Clark this allows jagged rocks then smooth rocks. You can't do this in other apps. Only Blender.

[efflux]

Here's the process and at last a Terragen import. This was a pure fractal sculpt. I didn't use a fractal to form the whole terrain shape before sculpting but that can be done. Yes, there was a screw up. It's due to an odd baking process I used so the terrain is buried but the whole method works. There were also some verticals and I knew that before I did it but it seems they aren't necessarily a major problem. It's always obvious when you view the exr as well. Also sometimes the Bake has small speckles. These can cleaned up with despeckle without harming the exr form. The sculpting in Blender is really fast and as you can see nice rough rock detail is created. This isn't even a large map. It's just a test. All those previous terrains on this thread are usable in Terragen but thos are all just tests. New stuff needs to be done.