94310f0f9d
Completely remove the other image gallery themes. I now have: image galleries, with lightboxes, and captions, with links in them (and to Hugo pages), with full images lazy-loaded, with all thumbnails auto-generated, and the ability to do this on both individual images *and* with globbing, from page resources, from this page or any specified one. See cavelab_notes.txt. It also has the ability to use Exif data of the photo - if I preprocess it into a JSON file. Known issues: - The theme header/footer are now being overridden. I am working to fix this first. - I am missing some kind of fonts/images needed for the lightbox to show up properly.
104 lines
5.7 KiB
Markdown
104 lines
5.7 KiB
Markdown
---
|
|
title: Blender from a recovering POV-Ray user
|
|
date: "2011-02-07"
|
|
author: Chris Hodapp
|
|
tags:
|
|
- CG
|
|
- blender
|
|
---
|
|
|
|
This is about the tenth time I've tried to learn
|
|
[Blender](http://www.blender.org/). Judging by the notes I've
|
|
accumulated so far, I've been at it this time for about a month and a
|
|
half. From what I remember, what spurred me to try this time was
|
|
either known-Blender-guru Craig from [Hive13](http://www.hive13.org/)
|
|
mentioning
|
|
[Voodoo Camera Tracker](http://www.digilab.uni-hannover.de/docs/manual.html)
|
|
(which can output to a Blender-readable format), or my search for
|
|
something that would make it easier to do the 2D visualizations and
|
|
algorithmic art I always end up doing (and I heard Blender had some
|
|
crazy node-based texturing system...
|
|
|
|
Having a goal for what I want to render has been working out much
|
|
better than just trying to learn the program and hope the inspiration
|
|
falls into place (like it would appear all of my previous attempts
|
|
involved). This really has nothing to do with Blender specifically,
|
|
but really anything that is suitably complex and powerful. I have just
|
|
had this dumb tendency in the past few years to try to learn all of
|
|
the little details of a system without first having a motivation to
|
|
use them, despite this being completely at odds with nearly all things
|
|
I consider myself to have learned well. I'm seeing pretty clearly how
|
|
that approach is rather backwards, for me at least.
|
|
|
|
I took a lot of notes early on where I tried to map out a lot of its
|
|
features at a very high level, but most of this simply didn't matter -
|
|
what mattered mostly fell into place when I actually tried to make
|
|
something in Blender. However, knowing some of the fundamental
|
|
limitations and capabilities did help.
|
|
|
|
The interface is quirky for sure, but I am finding it to be pretty
|
|
intuitive after some practice. Most of my issues came from the big UI
|
|
overhaul after 2.4, as I'm currently using 2.55/2.56 but many of the
|
|
tutorials refer to the old version, and even official documentation
|
|
for 2.5 is sometimes nonexistent - but can I really complain? They
|
|
pretty clearly note that it is still in beta.
|
|
|
|
However, I'm starting to make sense of it. Visions and concepts that I
|
|
previously felt I had no idea how to even approach in Blender suddenly
|
|
are starting to feel easy or at least straightforward (what I'm
|
|
talking about more specifically here is how many things became trivial
|
|
once I knew my way around Bezier splines). This is good, because I've
|
|
got pages and pages of ideas waiting to be made. Some look like
|
|
they'll be more suited to [Processing](http://processing.org/) (like
|
|
the 2nd image down below) or
|
|
[OpenFrameworks](http://www.openframeworks.cc/) or one of the
|
|
too-many-completely-different-versions of Acidity I wrote.
|
|
|
|
<!-- TODO: Originals (get alt-text in?)
|
|
[{width=100%}](../images/hive13-bezier03.png)
|
|
|
|
[{width=100%}](../images/20110118-sketch_mj2011016e.jpg)
|
|
-->
|
|
|
|
{{< figure resources="hive13-bezier03.png" title="Hive13 bezier splines" caption="What I learned Bezier splines on, and didn't learn enough about texturing.">}}
|
|
|
|
{{< figure resources="20110118-sketch_mj2011016e.jpg" title="Processing sketch" caption="This was made directly from some equations. I don't know how I'd do this in Blender.">}}
|
|
|
|
[POV-Ray](http://www.povray.org) was the last program that I
|
|
3D-rendered extensively in (this was mostly 2004-2005, as my
|
|
much-neglected [DeviantArt](http://mershell.deviantart.com/) shows,
|
|
and it probably stress-tested the Athlon64 in the first new machine I
|
|
built more than any other program did). It's quite different from
|
|
Blender in most ways possible. POV-Ray makes it easy to do clean,
|
|
elegant, mathematical things, many of which would be either impossible
|
|
or extremely ugly in Blender. It's a raytracer; it deals with neat,
|
|
clean analytic surfaces, and tons of other things come for free (speed
|
|
is not one of them). However, I never really found a modeler for
|
|
POV-Ray that could integrate well with the full spectrum of features
|
|
the language offered, and a lot of things just felt really
|
|
kludgey. Seeing almost no progress made to the program, and being too
|
|
lazy to look into [MegaPOV](http://megapov.inetart.net/), I decided to
|
|
give up on it at some point. My attempts to learn something that
|
|
implemented RenderMan resulted mostly in me seeing how ingeniously
|
|
optimized and streamlined RenderMan is and not actually making
|
|
anything in it.
|
|
|
|
Blender feels really "impure" in comparison. It deals with ugly things
|
|
like triangle meshes and scanline rendering... ugly things that make
|
|
it vastly more efficient to accomplish many tasks. I'm quickly finding
|
|
better replacements for a lot of the techniques I relied on with
|
|
POV-Ray. For instance, for many repetitive or recursive structures, I
|
|
would rely on some simple looping or recursion in POV-Ray (as its
|
|
scene language was Turing-complete); this worked fairly well, but it
|
|
also meant that no modeler I tried would be able to grok the scene. In
|
|
Blender, I discovered the Array modifier; while it's much simpler, it
|
|
is still very powerful. On top of this, I have the interactivity of
|
|
the modeler still present. I've built some things interactively with
|
|
all the precision that I would have had in POV-Ray, but I built them
|
|
in probably 1/10 the time. That's the case for the two
|
|
work-in-progress Blender images here:
|
|
|
|
{{< figure resources="20110131-mj20110114b.jpg" title="20110131-mj20110114b" caption="This needs a name and a better background">}}
|
|
|
|
{{< figure resources="20110205-mj20110202-starburst2.jpg" title="20110205-mj20110202-starburst2" caption="This needs a name and a better background.">}}
|