viewing-the-world

Personal knowledge base about blender and the 3D world.

Studying the 3D creation suite Blender is teaching me a lot not only about generating digital content, but also about physics, vision and photography.

This repository is used to keep track of the learnings.

Status: just getting started.

Where to learn

I somehow got started using youtube videos, even though I usually prefer other medium to follow lessons. It's actually going very well.

Andrew Price - aka Blender Guru - is just amazing. He shares his experience openly, has a broad visual arts culture, provides very relevant and precise information, and the flow of his youtube videos is perfect. Strongly recommended.

Find him on youtube and on his website.

Blender fundamentals might also be a good source of information.

Photorealism, explained.

Modelling

Good topology - Keeping quads: this video guide.

Procedural modelling addon: Sverchok.

Materials

Todo: check this GPL-licensed PBR materials set addon.

For photorealistic reflections, setup angular roughness (aka fresnel glossiness) usign layer weight facing node and RGB curves, as shown in this video - controversial, c.f. comments.

Read:

• The PBR Guide by Allegorithmic
• Physically-Based Shading at Disney - aka Principled BSDF paper
• Understanding metalness - feat metal color and IOR values

Texturing

C.f. texturing.md.

Liquids

C.f. liquids.md.

Procedural shading

Tip to obtain a smooth fall-off: use a substract math node, then multiply. As explained here.

Animating

To rig an object, parent it to an armature, and define suitable vertex groups.

Lighting

The smaller the light, the sharper shadows will be.

Useful setup for indoor / artificial light settings: Three point lighting setup. Source: Blender 2.8: Getting started with EEVEE: Lights, Shadows, Shading, Reflections, Skies and HDRIs

HDRI generation.

Composition

3 stages:

• Focal element
  • Saturation
  • Contrast
  • Camera Focus
  • Motion
  • Faces or figures
  • Influencers
    • Guiding lines
    • Framing
    • Geometry
• Structure
  • Rule of thirds
  • Golden ratio
  • Pyramid
  • Symmetry
  • Full frame
• Balance Visual weight management, using size, high contrast, saturation, faces, figures.

Animation

Cuts and transitions 101

Post-processing

To have a glow effect in cycles, add in a glare node in the compositing (source), then play with the options. Fog glow is probably a better start than the default streaks mode.

Useful resources:

• Render Passes in Blender 2.8 - what are they and why even use them?
• Composite CGI Element Behind Real Glass - Blender VFX Tutorial
• Shadow catcher

Rendering

Denoising

Steps to activate the AI denoiser:

1. In 'View layer properties' panel, activate Passes > Data > Denoising data.
2. Perform one render.
3. In the compositing tab, activate Use nodes.
4. Add a Denoise node, plug in Noisy Image, Denoising Normal adn Denoising Albedo from the Render layer node, connect Image output to the Composite node.

Voilà!

Evee

Cycles

Blender usage

Camera

To see where the camera focuses (depth of field), activate limits option in Camera's Viewport Display settings.

Managing files

Shortcuts

Interface customization