The Journey to Blender Master

Sunday, 22 February 2015

Messing around with the molecular addon

I decided to try out molecular yesterday after watching some videos on YouTube and seeing the different things you could make it do.

I messed around creating different things, changing settings and re-simulating, and formulating ideas for how I could use it later for other things.

Before I had started using molecular I had been trying to think of a way to implement an idea of using particles to remove parts from another object. When I had reached a roadblock due to either me not knowing enough about blender or blender not being able to support it, I decided to go to the web and found the Molecular add-on.

I had seen it used before in other videos but didn't think I'd take the time to see how to use it until I knew more but molecular allowed you to make solid objects from particles and then you could use collisions to move them away.

I started small, very few particles and no object colliding with the cube, just to get the cube working exactly how I wanted.

simple render:

I really like the look of renders without any colours or shaders, it's so simple yet all the interactions of the shadows and shades of grey give it complexity.

I then increased the resolution (number of particles) used but the way in which it worked at such a simple level doesn't scale to higher levels (following the properties of particles in the universe).

increased resolution with incorrect outcome:

after changing some settings it behaved near to what I aimed for but it still wasn't correct:

I then changed the tension between particles, Increased the breaking limit and selected another option which allowed me so set properties for when a particles is compressed, where I set the compressed particles breaking limit much lower, giving the effect of only particles in almost direct line of the ball getting removed from the cube.

The finals renders showing the effect working correctly:

I also tried to create a tiny animation but during the night while it was rendering the pc ran out of memory and blender crashed, I will try again with lower settings and fewer frames but until I upgrade my ram and gpu, I doubt I could render an animation.

Edit:

I saw the option before in the collision panel to kill particles, but for some reason I didn't think that would be the best way to create the effect.

Setting the kill particles to on seems to work better than I thought and creates the effect nicely, I most likely didn't have to add the compression settings and tweak the others, all I really needed to do was get the cube to maintain it's shape correctly and it would be done.

Re-render with the change:

Wednesday, 18 February 2015

WIP zero gravity fluid simulation

I've been working on creating somewhat of an effect similar to those see through plastic balls with glitter in them or a snow globe.

While I've been able to reproduce a similar effect, I've also been constrained by the amount of graphics card memory it requires. I currently have a gtx 570 which only has 1280mb or ram, and while that may seem sufficient, blender can only use an amount lower than half of that by the looks.

All my WIP posts are projects that I'll either increase the quality once I get a new graphics card or once I know more I can make them better.

the first image seemed to happen from having a subdivision modifier on a fluid and baking a new animation with it.

the second image is the fixed and working version.

I also made a quick animation of the full simulation:

Tuesday, 17 February 2015

Swirling Zero gravity fluid problems

Yesterday I was messing around with forces, control particles and fluids.

I found that particles and forces are very finicky, and slight changes in 1 force could throw the whole thing off.
After a ton of tweaking and adding a few small additional forces to constrain the particles, I produced a result which looked reasonably good.

There was just one problem , Rendering. I setup everything to do a render and once I clicked the button my machine whirled away calculating everything to be able to create the render, There was just one problem, Cuda was out of memory.
What was going on?
I had never had this problem before, even in the other fluid simulation with the glass.
I had to simplify my scene, reduce the amount of particles, turn down the resolution, turn down the amount of samples; each giving just that little bit more memory which I needed so much just to render.
In the end I had to resign as it was getting late and I could be messing with settings till all hours of the morning.

Today there will be another renewed push to create that render and I'll post it then.

Sunday, 15 February 2015

Windy hair animation

After making this render and animation, I've learned tons about the nodes in the node editor although there is still lots more I still don't know.

Rendering an animation is really intensive, you're rendering you scene for every frame so the amount of time it takes is so much longer, I ended up stopping the render of the animation in the middle as it took over 6 hours just to render 66 frames.

The animation:

WIP Hair absorption

I've been watching some vids on absorption using cycles but failed to find anything on implementing it in hair, so I began messing around with lots of nodes and I've managed to get it working.
By using the Hair info node, you can get the thickness of the strand and then you can adapt the normal node structure used for absorption replacing ray length * backface with thickness.

I've done a quick WIP render of it working and I'm busy with a quick little animation
low res render:

I'll post the animation once its done rendering.

Saturday, 14 February 2015

The First post

I've been on and off Blender for a few years now, generally having little to no advancement in using Blender, but recently Blender has become a bit more user friendly.

The things you can make using the Cycles renderer really piqued my interest and it has given me somewhat of a renewed drive to become better at using Blender.

This Blog will be the Documentation of that process.

To start of with I've got 2 renders to post, these renders were created from following a few BlenderGuru Tutorials.

The graphics card i currently have is a Geforce Gtx 570

The first is an abstract Background of Fibre Optic cables with blue light shining through them:

This was made yesterday