Blender 2.82 Features Showcase
Category: Blender
Open multiple instances of Blender on Mac OS
Blender is a fantastic open-source 3D animation software, it knows to make people say “wait Blender can do that too!”.
Continue reading “Open multiple instances of Blender on Mac OS”Compile Blender 2.8 on Linux
Blender 2.8 is currently in beta stage shipping with many new features like Eevee real-time render engine, refreshed interface and here is how to source compile it on any Linux based operating system.
Continue reading “Compile Blender 2.8 on Linux”Blender 2.8 will ship with monochromatic icons
Blender 2.8 is being shipped with vectorized monochromatic icons, which means it won’t pixelated in the zoomed view, it is a benefit for high-resolution displays.
You can get your copy of Blender 2.8 for [here](https://builder.blender.org/download/). It is currently in Alpha 2 stage and not recommended to be used in production environment, use it in development and testing environment.
Group mesh in Blender
Keeping things organized is key when it comes to working on a large project.
I was working with another Animation package on a big project that had many assets. All the assets where created according to the physical scale and built. The project had many scenes, I started organizing it by naming mesh and grouping them for easier selection and to have a better workflow.
As I kept working on the project, I started to think, how would I approach this in Blender.
Turns out it is easier than I thought it would be.
To group mesh, you need to select the object,
Then go into Object > Group> Create New Group
This will group the mesh, It will be named “Group”. The selection around the mesh should have turned green.
The Outliner does not show the group, by default it is set to show “All Scene”.
Switching to “Groups” using the drop down.
Now when you can select the group in the Outliner, and it will select all the mesh that are inside the group.
Thank you,
If you have any questions leave a comment below
Quick Smoke Simulation (Blender)
Preview render in Blender
I use Blender almost every day, as a 3D artist, from concept art, storyboarding to final 3D renders.
It was a tool when I started learning Animation, now it is a part of my life.
Renders can take a lot of time, depends on poly count, lighting, and textures. A good example will be a city scene and a camera is zooming in, this is very basic, but the scene contains large building which translates to dense geometry and lighting such a scene takes multiple points and area lights.
Textures are not heavy unless their 2K or above.
All this data takes a lot of time to process and sometimes, all we need is a preview to know, how well things are animated.
You could get a preview render in just a few steps. There are also various types of preview render, a good example is a
Playblast.
To render a Playblast, you can follow this article.
Playblasts are to view animation, but for stills and image sequence, we need to tweak some render setup settings.
In the Sampling section, we have Sampling Presets, which contains “final” and “preview”.
By selecting the preview, we are choosing, six samples in the viewport render and 12 while doing the offline render.
The default settings provided by Blender is good for most scenes. You could change these settings to further adjust the render setup to your requirements.
If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below.
Raspberry Pi 2 Blender Render Benchmark
Software: Blender 2.77
Model: BMW 27 Mike Pan
Renderer: Cycles
Hardware: Raspberry Pi 2
Time taken for render (tool: time).
real 101m33.880s
user 392m57.300s
sys 0m51.670s
Blender on Raspberry Pi
In a hot weather with multiple laptops running in the same room, the last thing I wanted to do was render, which I did and instantly the cooling fans turned on, result, the room turned uncomfortably warm.
Ten minutes later, I gave up on the render process as I did not want to sit in this oven and decided to fire up my Raspberry Pi 2, and checked to see if a build of Blender is available in the repository, turns out there is a built not the latest built but has everything I need for the render.
I highly recommend doing this on a Raspberry Pi 2 or higher, as it has sufficient amount of RAM for decent render and CPU that can handle BVH(Bounding Volume Hierarchy) duplication without any issues.
Announcement: I will be publishing the result of the benchmark once they have been completed, you can subscribe via email to get notified or leave a comment.
Installing it is like another application.
Arch Linux
sudo pacman -S blender
Raspbian
sudo apt-get install blender
The good thing about Blender is it has CLI support, which lets you render without firing up the GUI.
blender -b file.blend -o /render/frame_##### -F PNG -f -2
Let’s break down the flags used above.
-b (render in background without GUI)
file.blend (location of the blend file to be rendered)
-o (Location to where the render will be saved)
-F (Override the image format specified in the blend-file and save to an PNG image.)
-f (Frame)
To learn more about the command line you can visit the official documentation.
You could also [do preview renders](https://darryldias.me/12/preview-render-in-blender/), that are quicker than offline render.
Filmic Blender on Mac
Filmic Blender is an OpenColorIO configuration based on ACES (Academy Color Encoding System
) color space which is currently the industry standard and great known for photorealistic render, I recently discovered that sRGB EOTF was never designed for rendering and CG.
Like always CGCookie has the great explanation on this subject, here is a video they published on YouTube, embedded below.
Now that we know what Filmic Blender is and what are the advantages of ACES. Its time to install it in Blender and use it for all of our renders from now.
Installing
Downloading it from GitHub
Unzip the archive that we just download.
Its time to get into the filesystem of Blender app located in the Application folder and do the required changes to install Filmic.
Renaming the “colormanagement” folder to “colormanagement_old” just to have a safe back up and now move the “filmic blender” folder and name it to “colormanagement”. This way the changes are applied on the next start.
You can find the settings to use “Filmic Blender” Scene tab in color management.
You can find Blender related content here, Constructive feedback related to content is always appreciated, feel free to leave a comment below.
The gifs used in the post are optimized for web, due to which the quality of render may from the actual product.