OpenSurfaces

The folks at Cornell university have created a sort of platform for studying materials and textures, keeping it completely open for public contribution. It’s a big database of photos, but where contributors have isolated each material and inputted the various material properties as close as possible.

It looks a little too basic to be useful for any serious hyper-real material studies, but it’s a decent starting point for basic material properties such as diffuse and glossy intensities, roughness and colour.

OpenSurfaces
(Database download link is at the bottom, though the papers are the top are quite interesting)

Commonly Ignored Feature #7: Multiple Snapping Targets

It’s not an ignored feature, because it has to be the most well-hidden feature I’ve ever found. Seriously, whoever coded the snapping system must have completely forgotten to document this.

Yesterday afternoon in one of blender’s IRC channels hjaarnio mentioned this feature. It seemed that no one else knew of it’s existence – it wasn’t in the wiki and I couldn’t find any mention of it anywhere. This one is truly the Schrodinger’s cat of blender.

2013-08-10_21-09-55

While in snapping mode, when you have your mouse over a point to snap to, hit ‘A’ to mark that point. Then mark any other points you like and the selection will snap to the average of the marked points. It you want to give a certain point more weighting in that averaged location, just mark it more than once (as you can see in the end of that gif I mark the top right point a few times)

I’ve since updated the snapping page on the wiki.

This makes me think – what other strange and useful quirks lie out there beyond our exploration? What features have been painstakingly coded, only to have been forgotten forever? Probably quite a bit.

Gooseberry!

goose

I woke up late today, being Saturday, and lay in bed for about an hour aimlessly surfing the internet… when suddenly I see this on Google+ from Todd McIntosh.

I was out of bed before you could even say “Building BVH”!

This was shown at Siggraph apparently, but this is the first news I’ve heard since it was initially announced two years ago. I never doubted that Project Gooseberry would happen, but I never thought it would happen so soon. It’s kinda scary. Ever since receiving the nicest rejection letter I’ve ever had from Ton after applying for a position on the Tears of Steel team, it’s been my goal to learn as much as I can about shading and rendering so that one day I might work on one of the open movie projects.

I can only hope that I get to work on Gooseberry. And work my ass off of course.

Commonly Ignored Feature #6: Dirty Vertex Colours

Modeled by 1DInc

Modeled by 1DInc

It’s a sort of quick, and fake ambient occlusion that you bake into the vertex colours of a mesh. It’s a little different from AO as it also gives some highlights on sharp edges.

2013-08-06_19-06-552013-08-06_19-07-04

Simply pop into vertex paint mode by hitting ‘V’ and run Dirty Vertex Colors from the Paint menu:

2013-08-06_19-11-16There’s a couple options you can play with in the toolbar (or by hitting F6) though the Highlight and Dirt Angle options don’t seem to be particularly intuitive.

To use these colours in Cycles, just add an Attribute node with the name of the vertex colour layer (“Col” by default).

2013-08-06_19-16-24

If that material is used by other objects, don’t forget to add Dirty Vertex Colors to those ones too, or just make a plain white colour layer, otherwise it’ll just be black.

 

PS: The image at the top takes roughly 2 hours per frame… I’ve been rendering it on and off for months now

 

Don’t Ask

Don't Ask

A little weekend doodle. I decided to take a break from work on Sunday, a day off. It felt good for once, and I figured I could finish my current freelance job before the deadline without working at all on Sunday.

Monday morning at 11 AM, the electricity goes out.
It only came on late today and now I’m in a mad panic to get this job done in time o/

Commit 58930: OSL performance increase

Just from the mailing list, OSL texture performance has been improved be 10-25%

Hi fellow cyclists,

I did a little experiment to try and improve the performance of cycles/OSL in scenes that use image textures. I tested the Barcelona scene from ba.org and tried a bit of an ugly hack to cache the OIIO perthread info.

I only have an ancient macbook pro here with me on holiday and would need to investigate further but initial results are a ~ 15% improvement on overall render time on this scene.

I expect the improvement to be bigger for machines with more cores but I cannot test that from here.

I attached the patch

-Martijn Berger

It may only have such a big performance for OSX, though probably at least a little for Windows and Linux