Blender Guru

I entered just yesterday to Blender News[1] and was wondering why there aren't any new articles in 6 months. Even Blender Guru[2] seems to have stopped for almost a year. Does anyone have some insight on why these two stopped/slowed down? I remember these two were amazing sources of technical posts about Blender and I loved reading and learning about it there. [1] https://www.blender.org/category/news/ [2] https://www.blenderguru.com/

Here are a couple of great Blender resources. http://www.blenderguru.com https://cgcookie.com

It is hard to sit down and start, so I usually trick myself with: 'I will just draw one line today and the rest can follow tomorrow'. Once you get going is always more than one line (I'm an amateur Blender user, so 2 lines are already a polygon). This stuck with me (volume, not 'quality'); https://www.blenderguru.com/articles/7-habits-highly-effective-artists… p.s. And after N lines * N completed pictures you will automagically know what you want. In my case certain image will form (or an idea) - this could take days/weeks, this are usually small and stupid, but that doesn't prevent me from realization (or at least an attempt) - it's all just for /me.

> It's not a secret that Blender has a bad UI > But it's clearly lacking in the UI department. It's not a secret that a small, vocal minority of Blender users feel that way. IMHO most of them have never used industry standard tools that have way stranger interfaces eg. Zbrush that are much harder to master. > There's even a three-part article (2013) from Andrew Kramer of Blender Guru It was actually Andrew Price: https://www.blenderguru.com/articles/fixing-blender-part-1-why-its-bro… He later admitted at the 2013 Blender Conference there were a lot of problems with his proposal and that the way he had gone about it wasn't that great either: https://www.blenderguru.com/articles/improving-blenders-ui-the-2013-bl… Not completely unlike the grandparent poster, which is presumably why he got downvoted.

Thanks alot for your hard work. It's amazing how this project evolved. I'm really excited about micro-displacement which was added recently [1]. Before you had to subdivide/displace whole objects, which increased rendertime a lot or fall back to normal mapping which does not look as real. [1] https://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/introduction-microdisplacements/

https://www.blenderguru.com/podcasts/podcast-interview-with-ux-softwar… He followed up with a actual UX designer, who pretty much told him that his proposal was the wrong way to think about it (objectively, not subjectively). He admitted that his proposal at the blender conference was more of a discussion about the way of the future -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aIA2LaB2Iw After that, he stopped pushing so hard on the UI/UX problems of blender. I believe he is still part of the UI committee, but isnt pushing it as hard in his podcasts as he realises he doesn't have the answers.

I played around with Blender when I was in college back in 2012-2013. Cycles render was just introduced back then. Blender and it's community has come a long way since then in this short span of time. My starting point was http://www.blenderguru.com/ (for general tips and tricks), reading about ray tracing(for understanding why my renders were not up to the mark), anatomy of physical shapes(for sculpting) and watching a lot of behind the scene VFX breakdown videos(to understand their construction). Frankly, my humble computer back then was not capable of running 3DS Max or Maya. Apart from this, a lot of articles regarding photography helped. A keen attention to detail and huge amounts of patience is required(while watching your renders take hours if you have the wrong graphics card).

Check out blender. It's a fairly powerful, open source 3d modeling tool (also game engine, motion tracker, compositor, sculpter, and more). I used to use it quite a lot back in highschool. It also has a fairly high learning curve at first, but there's a huge community built around it[2]. Andrew price has some very high quality tutorials[3] 1. https://www.blender.org 2. http://blenderartists.org 3. https://blenderguru.com

Have you seen crazybump? There is a good tutorial on it at http://www.blenderguru.com/videos/the-secrets-of-realistic-texturing It is a program that takes a single image and generates diffuse/normal/occlusion/specular/displacement textures from it in such a way as can be easily used as a material in blender. As you can see from the video, it can work amazingly well given the limited amount of input information.

> Blender is a nice project Sorry, but Blender is an amazing project. Its single-handedly the best graphics software the FOSS community has produced by a long shot, and can compete with the likes of 3DS Max and Maya which are owned by the 3D powerhouse monopoly Autodesk. For me, its up there with the likes of linux and maybe libreoffice in terms of quality alternatives for otherwise software monopolies. Anyway, I've used Blender quite a bit for games and animation and it never ceases to impress. So their devs deserve a huge applause IMO. Also, for those of you who think I'm exaggerating about Blender's quality just check out these links: 1. http://www.blenderguru.com/articles/24-photorealistic-blender-renders/ 2. http://archive.blender.org/features-gallery/gallery/index.html 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=R6MlUcmOul… 4. http://archive.blender.org/features-gallery/blender-open-projects/inde…

Back in 2011 if you googled "blender is ", you get these autocompleted options: blender is slow blender is too hard blender is hard to use I know this because I was so frustrated as a newcomer and took a screenshot that I still have today. Now if you google "blender is " today, you get these: blender is hard blender is damaged blender is confusing blender is free blender is slow In 2013 Andrew Price led an effort to work with the Blender community to point out why so many people have difficulty with Blender's UI. Check out the video & transcript here: http://www.blenderguru.com/articles/fixing-blender-part-1-why-its-brok… Despite being a thoughtful and very patient man who made a great case, Andrew was met with a lot of pushback from the community that already thought Blender's UI was easy and usable. Unfortunately in the years since not a whole lot has changed (some improvements like tabs, context menus, and not assuming users have a numpad and 3 button mouse). Blender tries to be everything to everyone - a game engine, a sculpting modeler, a mechanical CAD modeler, a video editor, and a dozen other things. What you actually get is a mess wrapped in a UI that is alien to everyone except for the initiated. There's a reason why Autodesk and others have so many individual products catered to industries and use cases - it's because there's simplicity in specialization.

I used to use this site: http://www.blenderguru.com/

Blender Guru (Andrew Price) has a newsletter I enjoy for all things Blender https://www.blenderguru.com/newsletter Dave Verwer has IOS dev Weekly that always has something interesting https://iosdevweekly.com Edit: and Animation Obsessive for a bit of weekly animation history https://animationobsessive.substack.com

I think it's called Filmic Color Management because of this: "... imitate an effect that's unique to film: as exposure increases, colors will become more and more desaturated." https://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/secret-ingredient-photorealism Whereas in many HDR algorithms, there is no such thing going on.

I don't know why they chose that scene, these ones show the difference much more: https://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/secret-ingredient-photorealism

Also this: https://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/blender-beginner-tutorial-series

Blender is GUI to render engine. And there are multiple rendering engines[1]. Including Mitsuba[2] physically based renderer with GPU support [1] https://www.blenderguru.com/articles/render-engine-comparison-cycles-v… [2] http://www.mitsuba-renderer.org/

What you say may be true, but there's a difference between 16-bit photorealism and the photorealism possible today, and the difference is that it's possible to find rendered images that are hard to distinguish from real life today. In the 16-bit era? Not so much. To give some examples, take a look at these images created in Blender: http://www.blenderguru.com/articles/24-photorealistic-blender-renders/

Cycles uses GPU and CPU both for rendering.src http://www.blenderguru.com/4-easy-ways-to-speed-up-cycles/

http://www.blenderguru.com/blender-2-5-cheat-sheet/ a better one came out today

The article makes the point that it became inefficient to use displacement maps due to their size ballooning beyond '36 times' what they would normally use. So this means that the ground displacement map was just not detailed enough and pushing it to higher resolutions didn't scale. Instead they used Houdini to generate sand grains, I presume Houdini used some sort of displacement map per grain? The final result is a mesh nevertheless. They also mention that, "this result was driven by a combination of culling techniques including camera frustum, facing angles and distance, creating a variance of dense to coarse patches of sand for optimum efficiency." So while they had grains each of ~5000 polygons available to them and positions that they could occupy, they cut down on that polygon count using a combination of techniques (many common in games too) to make it all work. So the polygons of any grains outside the camera frustum were ignored. The faces of the grains point away from, I presume, any light source and therefor not contributing to the path tracer were ignored and also some soft of LOD to reduce polygon count as distance. As an amateur blender user I'm reminded of microdisplacement as a way for us mere mortals to achieve something in this space: https://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/introduction-microdisplacements