It’s a rainy saturday morning so I made this and decorated a cake I made yesterday.
Things to do:
But, it’s a start.
Cutting down speed paints to being properly speedy seems to be the way to go – used as they should be, not finished works but concept generation and quick ideation.
The 3D model version took about as long as it would have to flesh out the paintings to a respectable level (with my current skills).
Every villain’s lair needs to have an unassuming topside front to conceal the sprawling underground complexes. Mine, of course, happens to be the innocent Snapstag Cider Flyers Brewery, complete with plywood cows that would pop up and play a pre-recorded “Mooo!” any time an investigator ventured too close.
Some things that I’ve been playing around with. May or may not ever finish them, but the ideas are there and people keep telling me to share the intermediate things.
I feel like the loft is off to a good start, but that back wall needs some love. Not sure yet. The external scene is, well, I’m terrible at them. I mean, that’s the point of practice, but still. I started a speed paint of almost that exact idea but realized half way through that doing the shading for each of those chimney stones is an ugly process.
The MK2 Stealth Chairs are the design we were originally going to make after we did the cardboard versions, but we got distracted and it never fully materialized. Someday, perhaps.
Funnily enough, not counting the render times themselves, making these takes about the same amount of time as my “speed” painting does. I’m both a pretty fast modeler and a pretty slow drawer, it seems. It is getting faster though. I was painting this morning and went to take a break only to realize it wasn’t as late as I thought it should have been. So that’s good. Improvement!
It’s been a while since I’ve posted my own work. Too long.
So, as we know Blender has had an ocean simulator for a little while now and I just got around to playing with it. I don’t really have much use for making oceans, but if I ever write a script for a Perfect Storm sequel, I’m totally set. Mostly, though, my version would just be like swimming pools and things becoming unrealistically angry and tidal wave over the sides onto those people who insist on sitting beside the pool but get all whiny when water touches them. You know the type. Like sunbathers, but sitting on lounge chairs beside indoor pools. Fluorescent tan.
Anyway, I’ve put the atrocious .blend file up for download but seriously, nothing’s even named or the renders made efficient or anything. You’ll have to throw in your own HDRi map for the world node texture there because for legal reasons I can’t redistribute the one I’m using. There’s no water textures or anything, it’s all procedurally generated (both by the ocean sim and by the proc. noise material).
To download, right click and “save as…”
I couldn’t decide which style I liked better, so here’s both. I hope you don’t mind. Definitely click for full; 560px thumbnails don’t do justice.
Ah, but yes. It’s March 14th once again. 03/14: Pi Day. A holiday just as arbitrary as any other except you still have to go to work. In consolation, though, you should probably eat a pie. Pie is delicious! Also: wallpapers from your favorite design blog are always a plus, even if you only get to use them for one day.
Enjoy,
I like making toast because for those two or so minutes you’re allowed to just stand there and think about things. Much like showering, it’s these pockets of vacant staring that lead to some of the best ideas. A more mediocre idea occurred: my toaster is rubbish.
It’s been dutifully making my toast for a year and a half now and while it hasn’t failed or jammed or lit anything on fire, the design itself really isn’t much to write home about. It’s a Betty Crocker but I couldn’t find any further information on it. Measuring roughly: 17cm x 23cm x 20cm makes for a pretty hefty countertop footprint and looking at the mechanism I haven’t a clue why the bulbous plastic shell needs to be so obese. I can only assume the original design reason was so it doesn’t get too warm, but if they had done a bit of problem solving that shouldn’t have been a problem.
There’s three buttons and a knob and then the big toaster-down lever part on the corner. The buttons read “Bagel” “Defrost” and “Reheat” – none of which I’ve ever used. I’d be curious to see statistics as to who does. Frankly, I can’t even see what they would effect. Bagel might only use one side of the heating? Defrost / Reheat might go at lower power for longer? I’m not sure. Again; never used them. Why would I be reheating my toast, anyway?
My design removes them altogether. It’s sort of egocentric, I realize, to assume that everyone uses the same functions I do but if I’m redesigning it for myself, I’m allowed to satisfy my only customer the best way possible. Likewise the heat knob is gone. Since we’ve already got this handy linear lever we might as well integrate them: it moves the toast action still, but it’s height will vary the toasting power. There’d be internal ticks to denote power level intervals. Alternatively, and I’m assuming this only works for people who either live alone or with other people who like their toast the same brownness, put the knob somewhere like the back or the bottom and let them set it and forget it. I spent the first week figuring out the optimum toasting number and it’s been left there ever since. Unless you’ve got like, a picky family or something, you really don’t need to have it on the front to be constantly adjusted. Again. Maybe it’s just me,
So that eliminates almost everything. We’re left with one sliding knob. Neat.
I’ve also rearranged the bread. Instead of having two x two grills (two toast with two cradles) I’ve made the cradles wider to accommodate two slices side by side. Having no science to back this up on I’m not sure how heating is affected this way (especially when having only one slice in) but it makes the form factor much thinner and longer, which means it can sit up against the wall better and allow more space on the counter for, say, breadboards and butter and things. For my cramped kitchen this would provide much needed space and allow the appliance to be pushed back out of the way better when not in use.
Aesthetically minimal, of course. Matte black and brushed grey for me, but it would work well with anything, really. We could go the Kitchenaid route and offer more colours than the paint store swatch board but as I’ve mentioned before, visually loud things demand attention and do you really want the attention in the room to be your toaster? Exactly. Matte black it is.
And that’s pretty much it. A basic, easy, intuitive toaster redesign that saves space and makes you a cooler person, just by owning it.
He’s animatable but I’m still hammering out a style.
I really like the bright, happy vintage 60′s-80′s Bond villain style:
And the Team Fortress style plays off of it nicely, often using it exactly in interior environments, but takes a bit heavier approach to things overall. I’m not sure what I want!
The idea as it stands, though, is to make a silent film with direct ties to a good song (that I have yet to decide on) where the stereotypical good guys are blowing up our protagonist villain’s bases and he’s sad. So, shots of things blowing up, the map’s little lights turning to red as bases are lost. His head in his hands, shaking as he ejects in his secret escape pods from places as they’re being destroyed. Maybe some bank papers exclaiming his debt, and subsequent depression. I just want to feel bad for this guy, with the government agents running amok blowing up his visions of empire, crushing his dreams with the rubble.
Further workings on the Vaudevillain… franchise? Possibly an short story animation in the style of Gravity Bone which I recently played through again. Still brilliant.
Covering both internal (node based) and the new Cycles version built into the camera settings.
On the left we have the node and on the right the Cycles camera panel. I’ll come back to that after some photographer’s physics:
Inside a camera lens is a diaphragm made up of an iris, which is a number of blades that can open and close to varying degrees allowing various amounts of light into the film / sensor. Fortunately in the digital world we don’t have to deal with things like exposure and shutter speed, so we can focus on making the aperture hole whatever we want purely with intention for depth of field (DoF).
As the aperture hole gets bigger, the F/stop number gets smaller, and DoF becomes more pronounced (bokeh gets bigger):
Confusingly, there are two numbers that both photographers and Blender programmers use. One refers to the F/stop of the aperture and one to the size of the hole it makes. They’re referring to the same measurement in reality, but for some reason the standard isn’t really upheld to use one or the other. F/stop (denoted f2, f4 etc.) is for all intents and practical purposes arbitrary (they were set holes for the old old film cameras – each hole (each Fstop) is exactly twice the amount of blur as the last). All you really need to know is that typical camera lenses are between f1.4 and f22 but most commonly around f5-f10 when taking into account the film’s exposure and whatnot. Conveniently, the Blender node simply uses this directly. Plug in some value around 5 and you’ll get a decent result.
But. You’ll notice this F-value gets smaller as the hole gets bigger. A pain. Cycles interface uses this number directly. The bigger the number, the bigger the hole, the bigger the bokeh. It makes sense and I applaud them for taking the straightforward approach for strictly digital users, but a lot of us are photographers and more comfortable with the old notation. Personal preference, I guess. Anyway, values between 0.1 and 1.0 seem to work well, based on focal point (more on that later).
There is a conversion ratio, apparently, but I tried it in a few experiment renders and it didn’t seem to be very accurate for me, so I’m not sure I’ll both posting it. Mostly, do it by test and eventually, feel.
I’ve been lurking various forums and subreddits and there have been a few comments on bokeh, what it is and how to get it. The node system sort of did it, but unreliably, and the Cycles system does do it much better. You can download my test .blend HERE to play along. It’s just an array of cubes and a few other cubes that have an emission material.
150 samples :: 23.79 s :: Cycles: 0 | 0 | 0 (appearing in order of interface: size, blades, rotation)
300 samples :: 48.04 s :: Cycles: 0.1 | 0 | 0
You’ll notice the more blur the more samples you’ll need to keep it smooth. Mine aren’t quite done yet (still a bit grainy) but I’m still in the low range of samples (150-500)
Bokeh is the word they use to describe the shape of the out of focus parts. Because of the lens focus and physics of optics and so on it takes the shape of the diaphragm the light is focused through. So, if the lens has a lot of blades in the iris it’ll be more circular (common) and sometimes the aperture only has 5 or six blades, creating penta and hexagon bokeh respectively. You will see in movies triangle and diamond bokeh for stylistic effects and if you put a cutout in front of the lens you can make it whatever shape you want. Typically, circles are the smoothest and hexagons are used for science fiction movies. Subtle differences, but those angles can really change the feel of a scene.
500 samples :: 1.21.23 :: Cycles: 0.3 | 0 | 0
500 samples :: 1.21.60 :: Cycles: 0.3 | 6 | 0
The difference between 0 (circle) and 6 (hexagon) bokeh. Notice the best looking bokeh comes from the smaller cubes in the back (to the left) – the large ones just blow it all out.
Both the node and Cycles has this easily built in, simple select the number of sides you want from 0 (perfect circle) to octagon. After that, polygons tend to look like circles anyway, so there isn’t any need to go higher. Or, in Cycles, simple type in a number for # of blades. (0, 3-9). Both have an angle / rotation as well. This is the rotation (in degrees) that that polygon gets rotated. Say if you’re using a pentagon and you wanted the point up or down, you could angle it as you’d like. If you’re trying to simulate a specific lens just find a source image and look at how it’s diaphragm is rotated to rotate your bokeh accordingly. Note this does not effect the size at all.
500 samples :: 1.21.24 :: Cycles: 0.3 | 6 | 30
So we can rotate the hexagon bokeh 30 degrees to make the flat edge down. 360 / 6 / 2 = 30
1000 samples :: 2.51.62 :: Cycles: 0.6 | 6 | 30
1000 samples :: 2.51.29 :: Cycles: 0.6 | 9 | 0
Taking it to the extreme: 0.6 creates a lot of blur and needs a lot more samples. Almost 3 minutes vs. 23 seconds for the 0 DoF control render.
Since bokeh is the effect of light’s focus on the film / sensor, the amount of light defines a lot about the resulting effect. Light sources are often the cause of the prevalent bokeh in the background of scenes – makes sense, they’re putting out light. Specular reflections on geometry can also make bokeh, but the effect will typically be diminished because the material is absorbing some of the energy in the bounce. Likewise, glossy materials are better than matte materials for this; rarely will you get any real effect from a matte material since it absorbs and scatters most of the light.
The size of the bokeh, as mentioned briefly above, is directly linked to the aperture size – the amount of DoF blur. If you aren’t getting the desired effect it’s because either there isn’t enough light power to create it or that the ‘lens’ is too in focus, meaning there isn’t enough blur to get anything good. Typically, it’ll be the former. This is where the node DoF struggles, the threshold for creating bokeh seems a little off and it takes a really intense light value in the scene to get results. It’s a tradeoff, though, because you can easily make things too blurred and start moving into tiltshift area.
Now, there is another reason the camera might be too in focus and it has to do with the focus distance. The closer the focus is to the camera, the more DoF blur you’ll get, even at the same aperture size. If the focus is extremely far away, you’ll have to compensate with an irrationally large iris to maintain the same amount of blurring effect.
It seems, in my informal tests so far, that the node based one is much faster but Cycles is much more accurate, especially when reflections are concerned (node isn’t smart enough – will reflect perfect focus instead of realistic reflected bokeh). The more blur you have, the more samples you’ll need to make it smooth. There seems to be a curve to this, where minor blur increases = major extra samples. Just keep it in mind. You can use nodes compositing on top of a Cycles render, so it isn’t limited just to internal.
Let’s review:
-F/stop between ~2-10 (2 being lots, 10 being less)
-Cycles size between ~0.2-1.0 (0.2 being less, 1.0 being lots)
-Shape defines the appearance of the bokeh
-Rotation rotates that shape
-Distance to camera and lighting power do effect bokeh intensity / size
-Nodes are faster, Cycles and more accurate
Credits to everyone who’s image I googled; all link through.
You can download my demo scene HERE to play with.
Playing more with the new Cycles Render.
Fun fact, this is the first time the Stealth Chair has been used in anything other than it’s original conception. The painting on the back wall was previous featured here.