The Blender 3D Survival Guide - Part 13 : Blender Tutorial

Comments

Re: The Blender 3D Survival Guide - Part 13
by Mark Keeler

Paolo, I wanted to thank you for a remarkable series; the lux renderer is still puttering away (and probably will be till 2020) but it all works and I've learned a lot.

As a former senior trainer at MS (SQL) I have to say your teaching style and delivery are fantastic - and I was the one evaluating the instructors. Very, very well done!

Mark

@Mark Keeler
by Paolo Ciccone

Mark.
Thank you very much the feedback, I'm honored. It's great to see that the BSG has helped a little bit in better understanding of Blender. I had a lot of fun in making them and feedback like yours gives me a good motivation to work on the next series, the BSG for Blender 2.5.

Thanks again.

--
Paolo Ciccone
Pret-A-3D
http://www.preta3d.com
http://www.paolociccone.com

Re: The Blender 3D Survival Guide - Part 13
by Jim Hines

This series is awesome - thank you! So many great tips - alt+V - K - the NLA editor with E and S and shift+D - Lux - shift+F - the After Effects exporter script - seriously - thank you for these - Please make some more : -)

I checked out your website and watched your demo - you are very talented and creative and you live in Santa Cruz - don't know whether to love ya or hate ya - hahahaha -

Rock on Paolo -

@Jim Hines
by Paolo Ciccone

Thank you Jim, don't hate me :)

--
Paolo Ciccone
Pret-A-3D
http://www.preta3d.com
http://www.paolociccone.com

Re: The Blender 3D Survival Guide - Part 13
by ahmad Wadiei

Dear Paolo

Thanks alot for your tutorials. May you please have a Tutorial about how to import 2D logo or scan in to Blender in matter to extrude it. May you please tell me where I can find more tutorials about Blender? DVD Video or same. Thanks

@ahmad Wadiei
by Paolo Ciccone

Hi Ahmad. That's a good suggestion, I will consider it for future tutorials.

Thanks.

--
Paolo Ciccone
Pret-A-3D
http://www.preta3d.com
http://www.paolociccone.com

Re: The Blender 3D Survival Guide - Part 13
by Peter Dhondt

Hey Paolo, while waiting for your next tutorial, i'm trying to do the lessons from the "essential blender" course. But i have this nasty problem. When i make a pillar, then make a array of 8 pieces, give them a relative offset of 3, they all line up like they should. When i than make an Empty at the center of the pillar, so i can "bend" the copies, and activate the object offset button and fill in the field "Empty" and do an enter, the copies loose their line and are all around the empty , forming sort of square line. Why do these copies jump to another place. The pillar is made of an array of planes (applied)

@Peter Dhondt
by Paolo Ciccone

Peter, can you post this in the forum with a screenshot?

--
Paolo Ciccone
Pret-A-3D
http://www.preta3d.com
http://www.paolociccone.com

@Paolo Ciccone
by Peter Dhondt

these two links should do it. The first is the pillar and his array .
The second is after creating the empty and activating the object offset.
Hope these pics are clear, if not, please state how the screenshots should be.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/41885555@N05/4796083662/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/41885555@N05/4795450699/

Re: The Blender 3D Survival Guide - Part 13
by Ronald Brady

Paolo, I just wanted to say thank you. I come from a max background, and had previously found myself butting heads with blender. I was suffering from max-think, and your tutorials have been a huge help in moving into blender. Just curious, is this the end of BSG, or do you have more up your sleeve?

@Ronald Brady
by Paolo Ciccone

Hi Ronald, glad that the BSG has been of help. This is just the beginning, I have a lot of ideas for the BSG. It's just that I'm in the thick of developing a plug-in for 3d artists and I needed to focus on that for a while. I wi,, continue the BSG with new episodes. Blender 2.6 Beta 1 is coming up in a week or so and things will start to shape up for the new Blender.
Stay tuned.

--
Paolo Ciccone
Pret-A-3D
http://www.preta3d.com
http://www.paolociccone.com

Re: The Blender 3D Survival Guide - Part 13
by Peter Dhondt

Hey Paolo, if have a nasty problem. I followed your tutorial and all went well until i created the fog box and fired up the luxrender. Since then , all i get is a bleu renderwindow, i deleted the box, but still get the bleu box. I restarted Blender, the luxrenderer but to no avail; i use a dual core 2 with 4 gig memory. I see that the renderr gives EV = -1 , what can i do to see the volumetric light thing...??

@Peter Dhondt
by Paolo Ciccone

Hey Peter, there is a simple solution to this.
In LuxBlend, go to the Cam/Environment tab and in the ENVIRONMENT section click on the drop-down list that says "infinite". Change it to "none" and it should work.
That control determines the lighting model of the scene. Infinite creates a lot of ambient light and because you have the fog in the scene it becomes all blueish fog :)

--
Paolo Ciccone
Pret-A-3D
http://www.preta3d.com
http://www.paolociccone.com

@Peter Dhondt
by Peter Dhondt

With these settings , the bleu went away, but i still got the colored render window, but now in gray. But i found the problem after that , just by deleting the camera and making a new one, and bingo, i got the rays coming through !! Probably a Blender - Luxrender communication problem.. so if any one has this same problem, don't panic, do like me..
Keep the guides coming...And between the different survival sessions , what should a man do best to keep practicing blender, is the book of Mr Mullen a good option at this moment for a newbie ?..

@Peter Dhondt
by Paolo Ciccone

Yes, the books by Tony Mullen are rather good. The introduction to character animation is also an excellent tutorial about all things Blender.

--
Paolo Ciccone
Pret-A-3D
http://www.preta3d.com
http://www.paolociccone.com

Re: The Blender 3D Survival Guide - Part 13
by Rod Miller

Ah ha! sure enough, I am getting default-00002.png now, so I think everything is working properly! Thanks Paolo, you rock!

Re: The Blender 3D Survival Guide - Part 13
by Rod Miller

Ok, so I followed your instructions and everything seems to be working exactly the way you said it would, only now i'm getting the "spinning pinwheel" when I mouse over the blender window. Is that normal? I actually remember getting to this point before and I thought that the app had locked up on me, so I force quit it. Perhaps I'm just not being patient enough!

@Rod Miller
by Paolo Ciccone

Yes, it's normal because LuxBlend is waiting for the rendering to finish. I agree that the UI leaves a lot to be desired but it actually works. If you look at the terminal you will see the program progressing and that is your best way of judging if the app is stuck or not. If you run it under Mac OS and you didn't start Blender from the Terminal you can still launch the Console app and you'll see the update messages in real time.

--
Paolo Ciccone
Pret-A-3D
http://www.preta3d.com
http://www.paolociccone.com

Re: The Blender 3D Survival Guide - Part 13
by Rod Miller

For every frame of animation, I get 4 files with these endings... geom.lxo, mat.lxm, vol.lxm, and .lxs I never get a .png or .exr file at all. I must be doing something wrong in the output settings tab of lux? It would be good to get .png files, i would at that point just import an image sequence and be done.

@Rod Miller
by Paolo Ciccone

That's not what I get. Are you sure you're using 0.7RC2? 0.6 has several problems in that area.
This is how I set it up:

- Create a simple animation in Blender.
- Launch LuxBlend 0.7RC2
- Point the output in the System tab to a dedicated directory
- Select PNG as the output format
- Set a number for ssp value. Keep it low to start, just to verify that the setup works. A value of 40 will be OK. Increase later to something like 1200 for good results.
- Click on Render Anim button

Lux will generate a series of files called default.lxs, default-vol.lxv, default-mat.lxm, default-geom.lxo. Only one set. These are the scene description files, no need to do anything about them.
Lux then will start rendering each frame. Keep in mind that you will not see anything in the Blender window, the render is done by the console version of Lux and it will be visible only if you run Blender from the Terminal (Mac OS, Linux) or CMD.EXE under Windows.
You will see that at some point a file called default-00001.png has been created on disk. Lux generates multiple passes per file and saves the result to that file as soon as the pass is done. This happens typically every 3 minutes. After Lux hits the limit of Sample per Pixel, 40 in our example, it will continue to the next frame. For this reason you will see a fram file appear very quickly and then Lux will stay there for a bit. It's not stuck, it's just working on additional refinements of the frame until all the requires samples per pixel have been generated.

Hope this helps.

--
Paolo Ciccone
Pret-A-3D
http://www.preta3d.com
http://www.paolociccone.com

Re: The Blender 3D Survival Guide - Part 13
by Paolo Ciccone

Hey Rod.
I believe that, at this point, it is feasible to render animations on Lux, you just have to be very careful. Version 0.7RC2 is actually faster then before. If you keep your lights to a minimum and set the maximum samples per pixel to a low-enough value, you can get through. One of the positive aspects of Lux is that it can add network nodes with extreme ease. One could use Lux in conjunction with the Amazon EC2 could computing and setup a 40-node render farm for peanuts.
Anyway, once you launch the rendering of the animation Lux should generate a bunch of .png or .exr files, one per frame. Are you getting something different?

--
Paolo Ciccone
Pret-A-3D
http://www.preta3d.com
http://www.paolociccone.com

Re: The Blender 3D Survival Guide - Part 13
by Rod Miller

Hello Paolo!
Excellent job on your tutorials, I finally got through all of them successfully!
I would like to ask you about rendering an animation in luxblend even though every forum i can find says that that's a bad idea just from the sheer amount of time it would take, but I still want to try! I've set up a simple dolly shot past the monkey from tutorial #13, and I've even got luxblend to spit out a bunch of what appear to be animation specific files. What do I do with these files? And is it even worth exploring the animation side of luxblend in the first place?