Volumetrics are coming!

Brecht has begun adding all the Volumetrics work that all our great devs, Storm, Thomas, Stuart, Lukas and Brecht have been working on!

It’ll be a just little while before we have support for smoke simulation data, for now it’s just some basic absorption and soon some scattering and emission.

Commit from Brecht:
https://developer.blender.org/rBe369a5c48529864118d49222dde3d530d58ebeae

Cycles Volume Render: support for rendering of homogeneous volume with absorption.

This is the simplest possible volume rendering case, constant density inside
the volume and no scattering or emission. My plan is to tweak, verify and commit
more volume rendering effects one by one, doing it all at once makes it
difficult to verify correctness and track down bugs.

Documentation is here:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Cycles/Materials/Volume

Currently this hooks into path tracing in 3 ways, which should get us pretty
far until we add more advanced light sampling. These 3 hooks are repeated in
the path tracing, branched path tracing and transparent shadow code:

  • Determine active volume shader at start of the path
  • Change active volume shader on transmission through a surface
  • Light attenuation over line segments between camera, surfaces and background

Soon!

Download: 10mm SMG

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I’m not a huge Fallout fan, but I do really like the style of the games. Here’s a recreation of the 10mm SMG from Fallout 3. I was going to use it for another project, but life got in the way and it never happened.

It’s been sitting on my hard drive for a few months now, and I don’t think there’s much point in keeping it all to my self, so go ahead and download it :) Licensed CC-BY-SA

Download Blend File

Blendswap Mirror

Download Textures

Some of the textures used are licensed differently from the blend file and hence have to be downloaded separately. (licenses included in the zip)

To reconnect the textures to the blend file, simply put all these images into a folder called “textures” in the same folder as the blend file itself.

The structure should look something like this:
C:BlendsSMG10mm_smg.blend
C:BlendsSMGtexturesdirt.png

Enjoy :)

Color Ramp Improvements

color-ramp

Let’s be honest, these have been a long time coming – in fact the lack of some easy and precise controls for color ramps used to be one of  the things I hated the most, I use them quite a lot. In fact, it was even pretty high on my Todo list for Node Wrangler to add these features myself, though I couldn’t find a simple and usable way to do it.

But luckily, Krantz Geoffroy (kgeogeo) has come to the rescue, bringing a Position slider for precise control over the location of the active color stop. Other new additions include an input for the index of the active stop (in case you have trouble selecting the right one) and some welcome rearrangements of buttons (including the color ramps in BI textures and the rest of the UI)

I suppose the only thing left on my wishlist for Color Ramp features is some more interpolations, like squared and cubed  falloff, and the inverse of each.

Oh and in case you were wondering where I disappeared to for the last two weeks, I was on holiday in Scotland visiting (and meeting for the first time) my Blender Nerd partner Rex :) but more on that later.

Report Broken “Online Manual” Links

onlinemanual

In the right-click menu on (almost) any button is an “Online Manual” link. While useful, many of them don’t work – but that’s where you come in!

If you ever stumble upon any of these broken links, just let me know in this thread or in the comments below. It’ll show an error in the info bar similar to “No reference available ‘CyclesRenderSettings.seed’, Update info in ‘rna_wiki_reference.py’ or callback to bpy.utils.manual_map()”

In the next couple weeks I’ll be fixing as many as I can.

How to Create Your Own HDR Environment Images

Download Free HDRI - lapaDownload Free HDRI - lapa

Download Free HDRI (2048×1024 - 6.6 MB)
Licensed CC0

Want more free HDRIs? Check out my new dedicated website: HDRI Haven

I searched long and hard for a way to create these magical images that light your scenes for you, and I never once found any article or mention of the process in any of the Blender forums. Every time I saw a render using image based lighting (IBL), the artist had always found it on some website (and was usually accompanied by a complaint about how Blender doesn’t give you nice hard shadows).

I’m no expert in this matter, but due to the lack of information that can be found easily, I’d like to share the little that I do know with you.

So in this guide I’ll show you the basics, but it’s up to you and the rest of the community to find out by experience what is good or bad practice and when to ignore everything you’ve ever been taught.

Continue Reading…