Author: Waylena

Planetarium professional since 1992. User of Free and Open Source Software since 2001.

Blender Beyond Beta – 2.80rc1

Blender 2.80 Release Candidate 1 is out today.


It’s looking mighty fine and the UI has been redesigned to work the way users of most commercial software packages expect. 

Give it a try! 

Download it from www.blender.org.
Extract the downloaded file, then run Blender straight from the extracteed folder.

Godot Engine on a rainy day

A year ago I started looking into Unity and quickly put it aside because other things came up and the frustration in learning did not motivate me to get back to it.

Here I am a year later, playing with Godot Engine on a rainy day. It is open source under the MIT license.

I must say that Godot is very clean and is working great both on my Windows 10 laptop and on my Linux machine. I’ve never used GDScript before, but the built-in editor is super helpful.

I’m in the Hello World stage of learning, but the early tutorials are already making so much more sense than I’d expected given my troubles with learning Unity. To be fair, it doesn’t necessarily mean that Godot is better than Unity. But it does mean that I can recommend the online tutorials in the Godot Engine documentation.

I really need to get back to this project.

Last year’s upgrade and other things put this project on hold. I’m definitely going to resume working on it, especially since I’ve already put a lot into it.

A few production test stills made last summer before I had to put it on hold.

I’m using Blender 2.79 for this project. Newer projects will likely use 2.80. 

 
So far I’ve also used Gimp, Inkscape and Synfig on this project.

Final(ish) update for Hugin and Blender Eevee

Additional testing held up. Distant fuzzy stuff at the edges blended nicely.

As expected, anything near intersection edges with glowiness would blend oddly, although not nearly as bad as I thought it would be.

That means rendering out separately the things to have glow applied and then do glow in compositing after stitching.

This will require serious planning but will still be worth it for the speed advantage with Eevee.

So in conclusion, I can happily add Eevee + Hugin to my production workflow.

Hugin and Blender Eevee Fulldome Master Update

It worked!
Recall that I was testing to output 6 cube faces from Blender 2.8 using the super-fast Eevee render engine. Instead of 90 degrees, they covered 110 degrees so that Hugin would blend the edges.

It worked originally BUT there was a problem with the enblend program that put strange artifacts when run from the command line. Turns out that there is a newer way to use Hugin from the command line, a program called hugin_executor -BUT it didn’t allow for specifying input filenames from the command line.
Sooooo… I set up the script in Linux to copy the 6 cube sides to a scratch folder and rename them to the filename in the PTO file. Then it blends the 6 images into a fulldome master file and moves onto the next frame number in the sequence. 
My script needs cleaned up a bit and it isn’t pretty to look at. But it works and I can set it going and walk away from it while it does all the work. 

Now I need to test it with a variety of scene types to see how the seams turn out. Even if I can’t use this for all cases, it will still work for enough situations to have made this worth my while.

I’ll keep updating on this, and will share the scripts and make a tutorial or how-to if there is enough interest.

Using GIMP to slice images

A very cool effect in our digital planetarium is to take slices of an image and use them to seemingly build or break apart the image.

In our Digistar system, I create an empty object to be the parent of all of the needed image planes and position the image planes accordingly.

By keeping the image slices organized in folders, the separate image planes can be assigned slidesets to advance or reverse through a set of images.

To make the image slices, I use GIMP.

 

There are lots of ways to place guides for cutting. I’m accustomed to a script that lets me put the guide positions in by percentage. I don’t speak German, but the script maker does. 

I check the boxes to indicate that I’m setting the guides by percentage, then I enter percentages and select horizontal or vertical.

My guides are in place.

Select Filters > Web > Slice

Because the slice tool is meant for web work, an html file is created. I just delete that later.

And then I have a folder full of sliced image pieces!