Today is a Red Letter Day

"Hey, about that cat.". Shorty after Freeman's insertion into a decimated Europe, a trial of a new teleporter was in testing for safer way for refuges to flee the alien overlords, the Combine. With the high Sci-Fi design to the crude construction make the teleport from Half-Life 2 memorable. With lot's of small details in the design and plenty of wire and cables made modeling time consuming as well as rewarding. No textures were used unless they were procedural.

The mesh was made by combining two checkered textures that when rotated make strips. These strips made a grid which was used to control the alpha of the material, creating a mesh or chain look.

The brick wall was made using a brick with an array modifier, with two array's to create an offset. The main brick has a global displacement map to give a random geometry. The problem being that it array's the same brick over and over. They means that the array needs to be applied, and the object split by part. This resulted in 1,800 bricks, each with random geometry and texture color. The random color being made using the object info node and a color ramp.

Scare Floor F Monsters Incorporated

For this week's Monday/Wednesday challenge I went for a iconic room in a older animated movie.

All materials in this scene, except for three are fully solid. The three are, the blue metal walls, the hallway, and the screen.

With light portal's not working as intended, I needed a improvised solution. This was turning off the camera ray visibility. What is does it it makes it so that light ray's bouncing into the camera sensor do not render, but any light rays that bounce off of the object still interact with the scene. This allows for the the interior to be completely closed off will only allow light in or out where designed, like the windows. This also prevents the green and red accent from interacting with the inside of the scene.

Tension Sculpture

I don't know about everyone else, but I swear everywhere I look on the internet there is a tension sculpture somewhere. So I wanted to simulate a tension sculpture. Let's just say it was a pain to figure out.

To get this visual to work I had to make some assumptions.

1. The top center string will never move
2. The top back strings will always be in sync with the bottom center string because they are attached via a solid object.

This is was formed the bases for the design. No other parts are simulated because parenting does not play nice with rigid bodies. Objects will cling to them, but not restrict they're movement. Imagine that top piece falling off and rolling way, but the cloth just stretches.

The way I got around this was I parented a empty to the bottom 3 vertices on the center string, so the empty(Empty_Bottom) follows the bottom of the string. Then parented the curve model(Circle) to the empty so it follows the empty's motion. Because it's a solid object, the distance and location is directly related. The top of thee back strings empties(Empty_Top.001 + Empty_Top.001) are children of Empty Bottom. Then the bottom of the cloth for the back strings gets pinned to the base and the setup is done. I then added in a noisy wind force and turbulence to show that it is not a static object. and that it is stimulated.

I then added in some lights and some materials to make everything look nice.

Person Fire Simulation

I wanted to mess around with more fire and smoke simulations so I did a quick bake and render in Cycles. I downloaded a animation from Mixamo and created a fire/smoke simulation.

Remix Culture

A common thing in digital art and media is purposing asset to make new art. I wanted to exercise this mussel again. I want to make further additions to did(Make it more about medical professionals) which I have been working with a little bit but have been having a hard time sculpting around it.

I got the Atlas model from MyMiniFactory.com. They have an amazing selection of scanned art pieces under their "Scan The World" section. These files are meant to be 3D printed, but because 3D files are universal I was able to make a few changes to it.

The arms where just slapped on because the topology of a 3D scan is very... Messy

The lighting that I used was a HDRI from HDRI Haven, and is one of the best HDRI's. It's called Shanghai Bund.

I grabbed a random "Organic" texture from google and used it for my color, roughness, and bump control.

I grabbed a marble material, added some bump for the darker spots and made it a little more universally glossy.

I used the AO pass to darken some of the bright highlights because they were a little over powering and caused some discoloration.

I spent some time this weekend working attempting to replicate the Monster Cat audio visualizer. I found out a few thing about it through my research.

1. The Monster Cat visualizer is not 0-20000hz, it's around 50-10000/12500hz.
2. MP3 compression is insane and is shown well in the visualizer as everything blends together.
3. Moving particles is a pain with a generated F-Curve
4. It is a Logarithmic display, not linear.

I tried about 3 different addons/scripts to generate a visualizer as well as trying to make one by hand. Spoiler, Don't make it by hand it takes a really long time. The 2 scripts I used were from 2.5 and 2.6, so they were only compatible in version 2.79. The addon I found was either made or promoted by Ducky3D which works with 2.82. I found that they all work roughly the same but some offer better options than others like frequency range and so on.

Getting the particles to move with the bass is a pain. I can't get the strength high enough to where they move more, without completely destroying the particle physics. I tried using drivers to sale it up but all it does it move it along the y axis and not scale on the y axis.

Return to 3D Mandelbrot

So I found a new piece of software called FIJI.app. This program is used in research to construct 3D Models. One of the things it can do it take a black and white image sequence and make a voxel-based mesh out of that image sequence. It's like taking a MRI scan of the 3D object.

To get the 3D Mandelbrot's I used a piece of software called "Mandelbulb 3D" It works well and allows for a bunch of different Mandelbrot calculations. It can also export 3D obj's, if I export each layer as a image I get a higher resolution and it takes less time and is less prone to crashing.

Because of the way FIJI.APP renders the 3D model from the image it leaves inside hollow. Which can also give some interesting results.

Because of the Voxel nature of the render it creates a step in model, which can't really be smoothed out because of how dense the model is.

Things I'm gonna mess around with will be using the Mandelbrot layers as a mask in compositing and adjusting the smooth shading options to make the stepped feel of the model ago away. Though it might cause some weird lighting.

For another class we needed to make an art piece about our current climate emergency. What I wanted to do for mine was a short video that posed a hypothetical situation which would put our campus at risk those these issues. That being rising sea levels.

Here are a few frames from the animation

FLIP Fluids

When looking at some demo shots for FLIP I wanted to make something that mirror what was shown, but make it my own. My inspiration comes from this video below.

To get something very similar I would need a much higher resolution bake, and a large area. The final settings I used were not ideal, but I couldn't see what needed to be done till around a hour into the bake, and I didn't want to start over.

FLIP also saves the Cache in a way that if Blender Crashed it can recover the data providing the .blend file was saved before the bake started.

EEVEE vs Cycles, I attempted to render this in EEVEE first for the ability to have a faster render time. Something I found out is that EEVEE was having a hard time working with the cached data and initializing the data to render. Because of the long initialization times it actually was causing each frame to render slower than it would in Cycles on average (EEVEE: 5.45m vs. Cycles: 2.87m).

The reason I think this is happening is there was not enough memory for EEVEE to correctly execute the render because it needed to keep the whole animated mesh cached, as well as render the image. Because EEVEE works off the CPU I think it was having memory allocation issues. This was confirmed by my RAM being maxed at 16GB with no backgrounds tasks like Chrome open.

Due to this I needed to switch to Cycles. Cycles allows for GPU compute which means the memory that gets used for the render computations is stored on VRAM and not system memory. This fixed my issue. Though with the traditionally long render times and needing to get other items done, I needed to switch to my desktop.

FLIP Fluids

I did an ocean simulation. I tried this before but I wasn't seeing any of the foam/white caps so I left it. Turn out they only show up during the render. Baked a simulation, took a total of 2.3 GB of storage and 22 minutes to bake. That does not include the rendering process which took another 20 minutes in Eevee (Cycles(64 samples + denoise) ~ 1:45m per frame on GTX 1080 Max-Q 1.7Ghz @ 250 frames. ~ 7.29 hours, 4:17 per frame on i7-8750H 3.8Ghz @ 250 frames ~17.84 hours )

This lead me to start creating the image on the right. I thought a good place for a spiral staircase would be a library/study area. So I made a quick room design, made book shelves, and added some lights. Though it still felt empty.

I added a few more details to try to round it out a bit more (I didn't get to making books). The final render is located below.

To get this image on the left I would need to render out my object and create a mask for it. I rendered my rings as a white emission texture, with no background, alpha only. This created my mask I will use for masking in post process. Note that it's a slight grey because the color management was set to "Filmic" which is good for high-quality renders, but when color matters it messes it up.

I was then able to render out the full image with background and all.

Then with compositing using the mask I was able to generate the final image on the left by cutting out the parts of the render that are not the ring objects. I could have rendered it without the background but it would remove the light, and cause it to render pure black. Thus why it needs to be done in post process.

In hindsight I think using the Glass BDSF caused it to feel very blurry in comparison to the original. This was also render in Cycles. This can also because I'm attempting to make a physically accurate version of a rastered, stylized image from the Max-FX engine.

This experimentation came from hoping to save time on a model. My modeling experience is not in character modeling, and I would like to improve that this semester. My current attempt can be seen here. I've enjoyed working on hands in the past, and I feel like these are turning out alright. The hardest part is staying in quads and not falling into quads and tri's.

Overall in my Blender modeling experience this is the 8th time I have attempted to make characters. It'll be a process and I think I will follow along with a tutorial because at the end of the day I'd rather make a chair or something.

1. What is your name/major? My Name is Robert and I'm a digital fabrication and design major(DFD).
2. What do you consider ‘fun’ work? I enjoy working with my co-workers and getting to manage a team of three.
3. What do you consider ‘fun’ play? In my spare time I enjoy 3D modeling, Rendering, 3D printing. My other hobbies include Sim Racing, playing video games like Civilization and Half-Life. And binge watching any TV show that is not the Office.
4. If you were to start to make ‘something’ from scratch how would you do ‘it’ and what would it be? I enjoy modeling and rendering singles rooms in Blender/Cycles, I would like to scale that up to an entire building. I don't think I have a computer(yet) that would be able to handle that workload. But I'm close ;)
5. What is making you happy this week? At work we got a new bin for cardboard for the new recycling policy on campus. Which means we don't need to take our cardboard down two sets of stairs to recycle it. That's because the new bin is on wheels and we can keep it in our office.
6. What are your expectations of yourself in this course? I would like to continue to expand my knowledge of the software that is being used. I haven't worked with 3D in VR much and I wonder how that workflow will translate to Blender. Tri's vs Quad's.