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On a related note, CG Masters released this video showcasing Realtime PBR in Blender 2.78. And, I just realized, no one mentined that 2.78rc is available now.
Something that many here can probably appreciate is the adaptive subdivision/microdisplacement feature. It's the one feature that DAZ Internal Render Engine had (based on Renderman) that IRay doesn't. Well, with Cycles, we get the benefits of a raytracer like IRay with the microdisplacement of Renderman and... it gives us fine control over how it is applied.
For an example, check out this video by Midge Sinnaeve.
For a clip from the Release Notes:
Subdivision and Displacement
While still an experimental feature that is not officially supported and should be considered incomplete and subject to change, the subdivision and displacement system has been significantly improved.
For more details on how to use this feature and the known limitations, see the Displacement documentation in the manual.
Spherical Stereo
Cycles now supports rendering spherical stereo images for VR. It includes support for pole merging to reduce artifacts when looking straight up or down.
I too had given it up for years because of the klunky interface. I have to admit I'm still not comfortable with it, and still tend to stick with Silo for simplicity of use.
Andrew Price just came out with a tutorial on Adaptive Subdivision and Microdisplacement, the one feature I mentioned earlier that the DAZ Renderman render engine had that IRay doesn't. Again, the Cycles version actually goes beyond the Renderman implementation, at least in the DAZ version in that it has user controlable parameters. Check out Andrew's tutorial if you have time and comment. It would be interesting to hear what you think.
was having some thoughts about Blender this morning. weird eh?
like, will those superfly shaders recently released work in Blender? superfly is Cycles?
could i get poser's Miki3 into Blender, no fuss. could she go out on a date with Leo7 in Blender?
after importing a figure as colladae, what's the first step to gettin the rig to fully functional?
Just got this notice Blender 2.78 RC2 is now available
Bforartists - New blender fork with new (and better) GUI.
More infos here: http://www.bforartists.de/
"Better" = different.
Personally a blue UI is absolutely terrible and the worst possible colour to pick for someone using a computer at night. Someone else might like it, but that doesn't make it better.
http://www.bforartists.de/node/4 This is the only page I could find that came close to having any screenshots but they're basically all illegible. The initial blurb says they removed all the shortcuts (though all the main shortcuts seem to be mostly the same as in Blender (swapped across mouse buttons) in the main screenshot?) and speed focused workflow replaced with "intuitive GUI" which isn't really shown anywhere.
I'm guessing they aren't in the stage of trying to get people to try it yet because that was all the information I could find about what it actually was or looked like short of downloading and installing the entire thing.
Microdisplacent is as cool as frozen whisky! A great development for Blender that I cannot use, while clicking for DAZ.
Greets, Ed.
I've been playing around with 2.78rc2 for the past few hours, mostly the new Grease Pencil (holy wow) and the built in addons like Architectwhateveritscalled which I can't seem to use very well, Saplings, Landscape, etc.
I'm so impressed.
Yes, the whole purpose for a more customizable interface is that people would be able to create (or more often pick) interfaces for their personal workflow and stage of learning.
I have been involved in a major push for this in various forums when it has been discussed, but the one thing that I haven't really talked about is the couple down sides. For one, tutorials would fracture as they would be dependant on a particular interface design. Two, if there isn't a mechanism for automatically updating a base version to a given interface design we face the same issues people with android phones face where they are delayed in getting the latest updates since their 'flavor' hasn't been updated yet. Three, when someone went from a more basic 'learning' version of the interface to a more advanced, there could be bumps in the learning curve while becoming accustomed to the new interface.
In the balance however, I think a more customizable interface is better, but that is an opinion and milage may vary. Also, the challenges presented aren't insurmountable, and won't be addressed if we don't go through them.
In the end, I'm mentioning these points for full disclosure, but still would vote for a more customizable interface. In reference to the original point about better = different as mentioned in the opening, would be a very personal decision based on how a new design moved towards or away from a given person's ideal workflow.
I think that having options for customising the interface is important (and in more intuitive forms than the current shortcuts menu for example.)
My initial instinct that if it has to come as prepackaged interfaces that people have made then it's sort of missing the point. As you say, at that point you just have a bunch of "flavours" of the same base program with different usage / learning paths.
I'd definitely welcome more options and more intuitively presented ways to customise the base UI (say some sort of starter wizard/tutorial on first install that lets you pick things you like, and that you could open again later.) However, when I see these different versions at the moment with their own "better" control systems I'm put off trying them at all, even if they have some nice features. I've already set up the base program the way I like it and so see no reason to learn someone else's system.
I do think it's a shame that there are all these addons for pie menus and space menus that aren't really very well.. integrated isn't really the right word, but I mean I've been using Blender for a YEAR and I only just found out that they've been sitting there waiting to be activated the entire time. It leads me to think that many of the issues with customising Blender are that options exist but many users just don't know they're there, or they're a headache to set up in order to start to get used to using.
I really like the pie menus. They've updated them for 2.78 (the first official version was released today) and they have quite a few more options.
Just discovered how powerful is a combo of Blender and 3D Coat. Terrain (Lanscape) generated in Blender, painted in 3DCoat and rendered in Daz Studio iray.
Architools in Blender are awesome. I generated lamps and stairs in Blender, exported to Daz Studio, applied iray materials and rendered there.
I should clarify something here. The goal of the group making Blender more customizable is to allow individuals to remap the interface without having to go into extensive python. At least that was one of the main stated goals. The point of the prepackaged interfaces is simply based on the concept that once an interface is easy to customize like that, people tend to create their own versions and make them public. This happened with mp3 players in the form of skins for instance where whole communities shared their skins. There was also a group that did this with the Windows interface.
Yes, there are ways to customize Blender, but they currently require Python and a certain amount of programming knowledge. As to the pie menus, many people use them evidently from what I've seen in forums but many don't. I believe one of the reasons they don't is that the pie menus offer an alternative way of accessing some functions but they still aren't necessarily set up in a way that helps the people who looked at them and decided not to use them. A lot of thought has to go into how to organize menus, sub menus, etc... to make a workflow more efficient and just being 'different' isn't necessarily better.
In a way, opening up interface design to the public could be a radical new way of doing interface design for applications. It could broaden the scope of what is thought of and tried out in this challenging area of application development. It's just that I thought it only fair to point out the potential downsides.
Today my child, who downloaded Blender some time ago, showed me this. He just turned nine. (I keep thinking of him each time I see the subject line for this thread. I don't know anything about Blender myself, except 'modeling software'.)
I know what you mean. I'd been modeling for years already when my son showed me an awesome spiral staircase he did with Blender for a game level he was making. Either young minds can grasp these types of concepts easier or it just comes easier to some people. I've pretty much had to fight for every model I've ever made ;).
Laurie
I think beside learning faster (synpses still building up not dying off) it also hast to do with much mor time fiddeling around with stuff.
Worth the moment to check out: Cycles Smoke and Fire Demos by BlenderDiplom
Warning: random pondering thoughts ahead~
I have to wonder if it's to do with having fewer preconceived opinions. I know people have more trouble picking up video games when they have expectations about how things should respond as opposed to those who will accept the game's mechanics as they are and play off them.
Most of Blender came super easily to me once I understood the basics, but there are still many areas, like rigging or rendering, where I sort of understand them in an outside way but then I know easy ways to get around them so I never really learn how to do them in Blender and it remains as a sort of vague wall.
In the ZbrushCore thread people were saying Blender was not an acceptable alternative because it was "speed based" with hotkeys and the UI was terrible. Today I went and watched a Zbrush starter tutorial to see how it worked and was surprised to learn that not only does Zbrush still use hotkeys, the keys for sculpting are THE SAME keys as Blender. And that Zbrush renamed a bunch of functions that are the same in almost every other program for no apparent reason.
This leads me to think that peoples' difficulty in learning one app or another must have a large subjective element to it whether they're aware of it or not.
Adaptive microdisplacement, an experimental cycles feature allows creating complex geometry on the render engine side rather then in the base model itself. It of course has to be set up and controlled from Blender before sending to the render engine, including things like mean crease edge settings, but the potential for this added level of detail done on the video card and adaptive to distance from camera (further away objects get less geometry) has phenomenal implications.
There are a series of videos from nutelZ that explain this feature, starting with settings necessary to start using the feature with other videos (on his youtube chanel) covering displacement tips and mead edge crease settings. (Of course if you follow my Pinterest board on 'Blender Updates' you've seen these links.)
It would be interesting to hear what people think of this feature.
On a side note, I've been waiting for this for quite a while. Somewhere in my posts from a couple (or more) years back I mentioned that two areas I thought 3D environments needed was adaptive detail in geometry (this) and in textures since these would allow highly detailed levels of modeling that had a natural degradation and reduced requirement for resources from the machine similar to a DOF feature. The potential of this is that among other things, anything close would have a high (relative amount of detail which would adapt as one moved around in a 3d environment, always keeping the resource requirements within a reasonable and controllable amount hopefully. For digital art (stills or video,) vr/ar, gaming, etc... these could theoretically be revolutionary.
So, that being said, what do you think, any ideas, ruminations, etc?
Actually the Field of human psychology supports your assertion
it is called "Focus Bias"
in short our responses/preferences are shaped by our experiences
but we often confuse our actual literal experiences
with the experiences those we have only "observed " or read about anectdotally.
After years of Horror stories about how hard the blender UI is
many who actually try blender completely ignore any creatiive objective
objective they may have had for using the program and instead focus
on how the supposed "horrible" UI is going to Defeat them
as it has defeated so many before them.
Anyway back on topic
is it possible to install the latest blender separately for experimentation purposes without affecting my current( 2.72) install???
I definitely felt like when I started using Blender it was some bizarre alien thing that made NO sense and all I could do was place a stupid cursor thing at spots not even move the camera. But once I eventually resorted to reading the manual and learning the controls (and then fixing the left/right mouse thing) I began to realise that the reason it's so alien is that it's designed completely differently from the Windows "standard" we're so used to, but that once you accept that, Blender makes so much sense (at least it does to me and makes me wonder why all programs don't work the same way.) Sure it isn't perfect (all the amazing customisation abilities are there, but aren't easy enough to access, program could be friendlier to brand new users to teach them these things etc.) but I think it's an amazing program IF you are either willing to put the time in to make it work the way you want (understandably many aren't) or are open to accepting that it has its own way of doing things and that those ways may have merit even if you aren't used to doing them that way.
When I downloaded 2.78rc2 it just downloaded as a zip that you could extract to a folder then ran self contained like that. It never touched my 2.77.
Yes. Blender doesn't do a traditional 'install.' There is no reason to download the .exe file actually, it is simply there for people who really can't wrap their mind around the fact one doesn't have to always 'install' software. Blender is totally self contained. This means one can download the .zip file, extract it anywhere and simply click on the Blender.exe file to start it. Not only can we run different versions without them interfering with each other, we can run different versions at the same time as I have done to compare interface changes between versions and for test purposes. They will not effect each other even when running in memory.
The thing is, at one time things like shared dll (dynamic link library files) made sense since storage was expensive. Storage for programs is not expensive for the most part anymore except in specific use case scenarios.
dll files brought on a whole raft of problems related to instability and security issues. The shared dll environment was also invented at a time when computers weren't even networked much less in a public 'internet' space so security was much less of an issue. Between the lack of storage space and the much lesser security issues it made sense at the time.
Having self contained programs in the manner Blender works makes more sense both from a security and stability standpoint but the industry has become so entrenched in the shared dll environment that it has become "the way it's done" dispite it being a much more flawed way of doing things in the modern environment.
I think it's worhwhile to mention that Blender can act as a terrain generator. It has a landscape plugin, a tree generator plugin, as well as city generator (Scene city plugin). And don't forget Blender Guru's Grass essentials which is an awesome packpage to use in landscape scenes.
I was originally going to use either E-on Vue or Terragen for landscapes but realized I didn't need either. Blender has it.
In fact there are certain tools that have not been updated to work in newer versions of Blender...so you need to run an old version to use them. Anyone who does mods for the Elder Scrolls series knows what I'm thinking of...the workflow is to open the game file with the needed tools in the old version, save it as a blend file and then open that in the current version. Then pass it back to save out the file for game use.
Thanks Gedd & IX
I shall go grab the latest official release.