Hi, I’ve been putting together more env-art videos during last weeks , here’s a round-up (2 already posted, 3 new : design, dirtmaps, mapping and stencils)
It’s again a mix of tutorial and diary : in part it’s explaining and telling how scripts and techniques work , in part just recording the process and how i organized my part.
Of course it’s not a full overview off the whole process/project: I stop at the stuff I actually dealt with, other parts/assets share some techniques but are very different in others (like robot -with different use of dirtmaps , painting and box mapping – and church – for the different use of photo textures ), and -about rendering- there’s the whole step of projection / matte painting between the materials I mention and the finished frames, then the aspect of integration with live footage and much more… there’s quite a few tutorials I’d have to see myself! after the rest of the team is done with the project :)
INTRO, OVERVIEW and DESIGN :
TEXTURES; SHADERS and MATERIALS :
Hope you enjoy the videos, the batch-bake and object-pack scripts mentioned in the vids and the 3-steps-blend node for dirtmaps, are available for test on pasteall here (nodegroups and scripts in a single blendfile ) The file is a preview, there’s more work to do on the whole thing (nodegroups, scripts, general workflow ) so I look forward to comments here, then after Mango prob. a thread on BlenderArtist and then getting the scripts in trunk, make more polished test scenes, etc..
Great stuff, bravo Francesco, a bit low video quality but still understandable.
Keep rockin’ guys.
Regards
*Nicolò, sorry, voice made me wrong :)
Cheers
Have you tried 720p playback ? that should be good , for simplicity i recorded with my usual screen res (full hd) then scale for web , but indeed at 360/480 it gets blurry , especially blender ui and text..
BTW, I’m recording to h264 lossless (ffmpeg screencast , working nicely) then compressing for upload ( h264 again but that’s trickier to get right ..maybe i should feed youtube a bit higher q. videos)
Yes i tried, on a laptop with 1280×800 monitor and on a desktop with 1920×1080 monitor, no way. But don’t worry, with voice over is clearly understandable.
FYI, the problem is just on the last two videos. Fonts are extremely aliased and “destroyed”, first 3 vids are ok.
Cheers
uh-oh … you’re right ! this is it : when i downscaled to 720p in last 2 videos i didn’t have antialias on! argh!
(and yep , all was edited in blender sequencer )
I’ve had some issues with sequencer running out of memory exporting 25 minutes at once -only recently- trying to work around that, i messed up.
Oh well, i’ll re-export properly somehow and update.
Updated the last video , exporting for web went ok straight from Blender this time
edit : updated the other buggy video too , this pages shows fixed videos now.
A lot of stuff to watch! Thanks!
YEY! Thank for share, it will be help my last student project :D
I have a question… looks like you are doing a heavy use of dirt maps and the workflow is quite extense… so my question is… why you haven’t programed a cavity shader or something like that directly in Cycles? Zbrush has something like that and many other softwares. It’s a very common technique and would be good for you to have it hard coded for these kind of projects.
Hi good point, simple answer : i can’t code it myself (i can do only basic python :) ), and as request it wasn’t high priority enough for Mango (not even for me or Kjartan who have been using dirtmap , and raytraced AO was doing a good enough work)
But as i said in a video , if any coder is interested it could be a nice tool to work on.
About Zbrush and cavity shaders : screen space AO would be cool as a viewport effect for sculpting .. but also practical if usable as mask for sculpt/paint.. and if bake-able a great source for dirtmaps too. (this is similar to 2d filters in game engine being made available for viewport..)
But Zbrush cavity afaik is not screen space , it’s basically vertex color AO .
Which reminds me : this i could actualy try to script : using the remesh modifier (only temp.) to give objects a dense , uniform mesh , then running vert.col.AO and a bake that : it should give a pretty good dirtmap too.
As soon as i manage to work a bit more on dirtmap script (late sept..) i should try to add that as alternate method , togheter with adding the Ideasman42’s object pack script in the batch .. that should make the workflow quite nice.
Thanks for reply, I just think would be cool to have the right shader nodes to build a cavity shader, that would bring more flexibility to Cycles to create some other crazy stuff.
Awesome videos. Thanks for taking the time to make these and posting the scripts and nodes.
Great videos! I really like the approach for dirtmaps.
Trying the blend against latest svn (2.64 RC) the batch bake fails on “use_color_management”.
Commenting out anything using color managment will crash blender instantly when hitting bake…
Just thought you might want to know !
Will this add-on be updated for 2.68? I could really use this :)