Tag: Blender

3D stereoscopic test

Years ago I used Blender to make a stereographic test. It took forever to render a tiny, very low resolution test so I had to drop it at the time. (http://youtu.be/MWpsBb3enek if you want to see it.)
Now it is 2020 and I had some time last week. I couldn’t find the blend file from my original example, so I made a new example, again using Blender.  
Really should be viewed with VR goggles, and you’ll need to tell YouTube to use a higher resolution setting, but the compression wasn’t too kind. Even so, I’m encouraged to continue.

I’m still looking for a way to inject the needed metadata on Linux. I had to do this on a Windows machine because the injector is only for MacOS and Windows.
BTW, I had to render this twice because originally I rendered it side-by-side (SBS) but the YouTube Metadata Injector only accepts top-and-bottom (TAB).
Here’s the same frame in each format:
3D stereoscopic test frame, SBS
3D stereoscopic test frame, SBS.
3D stereoscopic test frame, TAB
3D stereoscopic test frame, TAB

Blendpeaks free add-on for Blender from Oormi Creations

Wow. Saw this today on BlenderNation:

http://www.blendernation.com/2020/05/24/blendpeaks-create-mountain-peaks-in-blender-free-add-on/

It creates a plane and a shader setup for material and displacement. 

I made a quick test using defaults, with a default Sky Texture and the default single scene lamp:


I like it. I like it a lot. In fact, I think I might be a bit in love.

Here’s the direct link:
http://github.com/oormicreations/Blendpeaks/releases

And while you’re at it, please do check out the Oormi Creations website:
http://oormi.in/index.htm

Blender Animation Nodes

There is so much great info on Blender Animation Nodes, but getting started with them can be a huge step. 

To get Animation Nodes:
Getting started guide:
I needed a tutorial to apply some theory, so I gave this one a try:
And here is my result:
I’m very pleased and I look forward to making some interesting things to put up on the planetarium dome. 

Fulldome Blender 2.8 Workshop GLPA 2019

The 2019 annual meeting of the Great Lakes Planetarium Association was held last week, hosted by the Ritter Planetarium of The University of Toledo.

It was special for me because my planetarium career started at Ritter Planetarium in February 1992. Honestly I had planned to stop conducting workshops for a few years so that I could concentrate on my GLPA executive community duties. But Alex Mak asked so of course I said yes.

The result is a very revised version *NEW!* for Blender 2.8:

https://github.com/waystar/2019-Blender-Workshop-Materials

  • Setting up render engine, camera and outputs for fulldome masters.
  • Setting up layers to separate objects for compositing to get glows or denoising only on some objects.
  • Compositing node setups examples.
  • Basics of materials, with shader node tree examples for incorporating alpha channels and animating fades between textures.
  • World environment settings and node trees for animation.
  • Examples of animating various objects and effects achieved through animating modifiers.

https://github.com/waystar/2019-Blender-Workshop-Materials

Click the “Clone or download” button to download the whole thing in a zip file.

Drop me a line if you find mistakes or OS-related differences. (I test on Linux and Windows.) Also, let me know if you find any of it particularly useful and I would LOVE to see what you make.

And of course, if you are having trouble with something in particular that you are trying to do, let me know. If I can’t help get it to work, I might be able to suggest alternate approaches to get the same effect.

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.