Cycles – FOSSdome

Cosmic Shaders from Darkfall

I saw this on my YouTube subscriptions feed last week. Very cool stuff. There is a good blog post on using the add-on as well: https://darkfallblender.blogspot.com/2021/03/blender-add-on-shader-library-version.html

Downloaded the python script from the Pastebin link provided in the blog post. Then installed the add-on through Blender Preferences.

The Shader Library is accessed through the 3D View. If you don’t see the tabs on the right, hover over the 3D View and hit the “N” key on the keyboard.

There are several shader types and options to choose from.

The add-on creates the node tree for the shader. This is a great way to quickly see what node trees can do without creating them from scratch.

I added some compositing to get a nice glow in Cycles.

Have to separate out the Environment (background as set up in “World” panel) and blur foreground alpha separately from the image to get that nice glow.

I always look for a Cycles way to make things glowy since I ultimately use fisheye for use in the dome. Eevee is super fast and that bloom is wonderful, but it’s a no-go when rendering straight to fisheye.

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: