Subway Station - new render

Here's the latest render of my subway station. It's getting really close to completion now. Some of the textures need a bit of tweaking, and I'll add a bit of post-processing work in the end. I hit the Escape key by accident, which stopped the render. I wish Cycles would have a Pause/Resume button, so you could stop a render, work on a different scene, and come back to resume the rendering process. One can wish...

Creating a 3D Illustration for a Book Cover in Blender

Elizabeth Castro just published a new book about EPUB production, with the title From InDesign CS 5.5 to EPUB and Kindle. She asked me to create an illustration for the cover. This is just one more book in a series of miniguides about the same topic, so I decided to continue with the same general theme as I used in the first cover illustration I created for this series. I wanted to maintain the diagonal element on the front cover, and leave the back cover relatively empty. Also, I wanted to keep some sort of horizontal divider. Other than that, I knew I had to use some image that made some reference to the word point, since these minguides are all expansions of the original Straight to the Point book. That's where the dart idea came in. This is the final render.

Final render, at a smaller resolution. In order to choose a render resolution,
I multiplied the size of the cover, plus bleed, by 300 (as in 300 dpi) and that
gave me the final size, approximately 3500 x 2700 pixels.
The white line (not in the actual final image) separates the front cover from
the back cover.

This is the final cover design (not done by me).

All the models in the image were created in Blender from reference images of darts and dartboards. The final render was done in Cycles, the new render engine recently incorporated into Blender. What's great about Cycles is that it allows for real-time render previews, which takes away a lot of the guessing related to lighting. Another great thing is that it's a physically correct renderer, which means that you can achieve realistic-looking results with less fidgeting than with Blender's original render engine (Blender Internal). Also, it does depth of field beautifully, and although it is physically-correct, it still lets you cheat your way out of any problem. Unfortunately, at the time I'm writing this, it still does not support compositing, otherwise I would have added some motion blur. Actually, I could have added it in Photoshop, but we decided against it because we wanted something simpler—it's a book cover, not a video game!

Here is a clay render of the models' wires.

Many of the original materials are relatively complex, and involve mixing two or more layers (‘nodes’ in Cycles parlance) to achieve a certain effect. What's neat is that you can save node groups to be reused later on, even across files, which is a real time saver. I am attaching a screenshot of the node setup for the red plastic with black lettering on the dart fletching. Roughly, the red plastic finish is achieved by combining a Glossy and a Matte material, but the mix is controlled by a Fresnel node, which determines the intensity of an effect depending on the view angle of the camera. The lettering texture defines what is red plastic and what is black—just like an alpha channel in Photoshop.

Cycles Nodes Microtutorial

Recently, I opened an older Blender file I had used to do some test renders in Cycles, and I noticed that some of the materials were broken. At first I thought that the new Cycles had changed so much that the older setup was no longer compatible. Then, I realized that the reason for the broken nodes was that I had not connected some of the node inputs into outputs of the same color. Cycles was fine, after all, and all that was needed was that I connect same color with same color. So this is the tutorial.
Very basic: for Cycles nodes (and for any node, in general) connect same color to same color. That's it.

There are a few colors, and this is what they mean:
Yellow: an RGB value.
Grey: a Greyscale value.
Green: a Shader (which is the same to say as Cycles material)
Blue: a Vector. A vector is a hard concept to explain. It has to do with the projection mode of the material on the model polygons, and the scaling and manipulation of the texture in its own local space. In essence, a vector is a way to describe a dimension. In Cycles, it is mainly, but not only, used to define the texture space (generated vs. UV).

I just Control-A added some nodes, doesn't much matter which. Notice that they all have different colors for the input

and output. It is essential to notice those colors, and connect things in the right order.

I connect the nodes. The final material is a Mix Shader with a B&W displacement from mixing a texture plus a color. The texture will be used in a Generated vector way, and scaled 5 times up (which make sit 5 times smaller—really). The Diffuse and Glossy shaders used in the Mix Shader don't specify a Vector, which in Cycles is UV by default.

So, to sum it up, connect same colors with same colors!

PS: here are two screenshots of a scenario where the material gets broken. Before and after. All I did was connect same color to same color. I think it worked.

Disconnected

Connected by following the rule

Subway Scene 7 - in Cycles

I decided to try and finish Subway Scene. I still don't know exactly what it'll turn into, but I decided to begin texturing it. I also did a few noisy renders with Cycles, just to test things out. More to come.

Notice the amount of noise. 400 samples wasn't enough to begin getting rid of it.

Never Say Final - Coke and Cookies

On my last post, I used a forbidden word in production circles: final. Over the years, I've learned to avoid using it. It's meaningless. Nothing is final—except death, that is. I used it again, and again it exacted its revenge on me. It was supposed to be the final render—really-really final, or double-final, or final-final, or final-2. I've used them all over the years :)

After I had posted that render, the next morning I woke up and I noticed an incredible spike on this blog visitors' count. On a good day, I get somewhere between 50 and 150 visitors. At 8AM yesterday it was at 400 already. I checked the source of the traffic, and I discovered it was coming from BlenderNation, a Blender News web site. Apparently, this BlenderNation admin, Bart, liked my Coke and Cookies render, and put it up on their site. On top of that, blender.org, who usually mirror BlenderNation's news and posts, linked to that post as well. This incredible, two-pronged combination did the trick, I ended the day hitting the 2500 mark. I'm not complaining, I love the attention, and I like talking to people about Blender and Cycles and anything else 3D. Everything 3D.

Another interesting thing about what happened with my being featured in another site is that, all of a sudden, my artwork had become. It got away from me, and it started having an independent life all of its own. It got out into the world, and that was that. It's a funny feeling, but also a good feeling, and a wake-up call concerning the obsessive pursue of perfection. You want your work to be perfect, but in order to achieve it, you keep tweaking and futzing and fidgeting with things, but it does not necessarily get any better. It's just that you get all caught up in the creative process. Or maybe you're just an addict :) Sometimes it is better to leave the freshness of the first impulse as is and not worry about the imperfections. Some examples related to this idea come to mind: the Aeneid is not a finished poem, someone refused to burn it as Virgil demanded on his deathbed. One more: Paul Valéry's Le cimitière marin was published before he could 'finish it.' His over-eager publisher friend took it away from him and decided it was good enough. The hutzpah!

Anyway, for all these reasons, I wanna send a big thanks to BlenderNation, blender.org, and all the visitors to my blog. THANKS!

Oh, and here is the really-final render! I could not resist changing a few things around ;) If you liked the former version better, you know where to go :) Just click on final.

Also, I've decided to release the coke model as open-source file. It seems like there are many others trying to create soda bottles, so perhaps it can be helpful. Send me an email and I'll send you the file, minus the textures.

Render at about 3000 samples, with some
post-processing work done in Photoshop.

Coke and Cookies - Final Render

Here's the final render of my Coke and Cookies scene. I'm going to leave it like it is now. I added some water on the table and a washcloth. Cycles finally decided to stop crashing, and I was able to do a proper render this time. Three hours for 1500 samples. I sharpened it a bit in Photoshop—I don't quite like Blender's Sharpen filter.

Background image used under Creative Commons license
from http://www.smartibl.com/sibl/archive.html

PS: I woke up this morning, and I noticed an unusually high level of traffic on my blog. Then, I slowly realized that both Blender Nation and blender.org are mentioning my work on their sites today! Thank you guys! It doesn't happen every day... LOL

Coke and Cookies - 2

Here is an update of the Coke and Cookies scene I've been working on. I think it's pretty much done now. Creating all the materials and setting up the scene has given me a greater understanding of how Cycles works. There's nothing like getting your hands dirty to learn something new!

Coke and Cookies Scene in Cycles

Here are a coupe of renders of a scene I'm working on in Cycles. I call it Coke and Cookies. I think the reflective materials are the reason why I'm getting so many fireflies. Fireflies are those super shiny spots on the image that seem like they don't belong in there. Anyway, it's a work in progress, we'll see where it leads...

Dartboard Scene Part 3

Here is an update to the Dartboard Scene I've been working on. It's supposed to be the whole front and back cover for an upcoming book about epub. The image I show here is not a real Cycles render, but rather, three renders, composited in Photoshop. I don't think that Cycles can do motion (or vector) blur yet, so I added that in Photoshop—with the Motion Blur filter applied several times, offset and masked with a layer mask. Here is the result.

This is the (almost) final version, minus the copyright.

Reusing Cycles Materials the Smart Way

Lately I've been working with Cycles quite a bit. I'm creating a new illustration for a book cover, and I decided I would do the render in Cycles. Tweaking the lights and the materials in Cycles is really fun, because you can see the results in pretty much real time, which takes away much of the guesswork associated with materials and final appearance.

One of the objects I'm modeling is supposed to be made of red plastic. Cycles comes with a quick and dirty, default “shiny plastic” shader—it's called Glossy. However, I feel that the Glossy material does not yield a very convincing plastic. I decided to try something niftier. I'm talking about a Mix Shader. A Mix Shader is a material that is the result of mixing the properties of two other materials.

In a Mix shader. you can specify which areas receive material A, and which areas receive material B through a grayscale image input, which you can customize on the Fac input in the material panel. Among other fun facts, Fac can be controlled by what's called a Fresnel. In 3D applications, fresnel defines the transparent versus reflective mix in a material. You notice the effect when looking at a small body of water from a shallow angle and the water becomes reflective instead of transparent. In Cycles, using the Fresnel to control the mix of two materials, where one of them is shiny, can produce, in my opinion, a very convincing plastic material.

The interesting bit of this is that you can create a material, itself a Mix Shader material, and plug it into slot A or B of another Mix Shader material. To do this, you need to go to the Node editor, group the nodes that make up that material, and group them. Cycles will save that group as another material option in the pull down menu that show up when creating new materials. Basically, you can save very complex material setups and reuse them by just selecting them from a menu! Sweet stuff! Here is an overview of this workflow.

First, we create a red plastic material. This is the setup used for the Red Plastic material, shown here both in the Material panel and in the Node editor. Every option in the Material panel gets reflected in the Node editor.
Note: at this time, some nodes (or options) can only be accessed from the Node editor at the moment.

Next, we create a node group, which we'll use later as part of another Mix shader.

Very quick render showing the red plastic material so far.

The next step would be to create a new Mix Shader material.
Then, we'd choose the Red Plastic node group we just created on the shader slot A.

Here's the rest of the setup. We use a simple, plain white Diffuse
shader on slot B. For the control texture, I'm going to use a striped
texture. I'll choose Generated for the mapping of this texture, and we're done!

Final render, at 100 samples. Red plastic stripes with white diffuse material.

Hello Mac mini

As I think I promised, I am giving an update on the dead MacBook saga. A new Mac mini (2011 version) arrived yesterday via UPS. I loaded it with 8Gb of RAM, an i5 processor (I did not have the patience to wait two weeks for an i7,) and an AMD GPU with 1/4Gb dedicated memory. It's not the fastest computer on the face of the Earth, that's for sure, but it's perhaps ten times faster than the one I had before. So far, it has performed flawlessly, out-rendering any renders I had from before.

The only thing I'm a bit afraid of is to have Cycles run on it. My last computer died from a Cycles indigestion, and I've been wondering whether there's anything wrong in Cycles' memory management that pushes things to an unhealthy extreme. One thing I noticed is that GPU rendering does not work with the GPU in the Mac mini. Too bad :( Another thing I noticed is that Cycles gets the Mac mini cranking big time. Although normally it is a pretty silent machine, as soon as I get Cycles going, it begins to spin, get warm and sputter. I don't think I dare leave it all alone during a render! Anyway, I'm sure I'll get used to it.

One more thing I wanted to talk about is the migration process from a Time Machine backup into a newer Mac. In my experience, it worked OK. However, there's this very annoying thing that happened. Instead of porting my original user from my older Mac and making that the root admin user, with all the settings intact and whatnot, the Migration Wizard created an entirely new user, luckily an admin too, and plonked everything in there. Like in the old times, I've had to move everything over manually. I refuse to have two admin users in one computer that will be used by just one person! I spoke to Apple, and the guy basically said "Sorry, that's as good as it gets." Suddenly, it does not feel like the 21st century anymore.

Mac mini. Seriously?

I think that buying a Mac is hard. Especially when you don't wanna break the piggy bank by getting a full-fledged, loaded-up Mac Pro. Apple is still missing what I call a mid-range, power-user-wannabe Mac. This would be a decent-sized box with a little bit of room for expansion, and no monitor or keyboard included. I imagine it as something like two or three times the size of a Mac mini, and with just a few expansion slots. Nowadays, if you want to even dream that you might be able to expand your Mac, you either think really really big (Pro) or don't think at all (the rest of them all).

Given the configuration of the top line of the most recent Mac minis, I think they are not a bad deal. Perhaps they're even a great deal. I'm gonna try one and see. I have a feeling that I won't be disappointed. For one thing, it comes with a nice CPU (2.5 GHz dual-core Intel Core i5) and a dedicated GPU (AMD Radeon HD 6630M with 256MB of GDDR5 memory).

This guy at the Apple Store started eating my head (see if you can figure out what that means!) about dedicated vs. integrated GPUs. He then pointed out that Apple already has a mid-sized Mac with dedicated GPUs: the iMac. To me, it all sounds like a complicated marketing scam: an iMac looks to me just like another monitor in the house, and I've seen plenty of those at the dump lately. However it may be, two days ago I had no idea there was such a thing as a dedicated GPU, but now, here I am, blogging about it, pretending I'm an expert. To the point: a dedicated (or discrete) graphics card comes with its own memory, so it does not have to steal any RAM from the main memory.

Additionally, I like the idea of using a low-consumption machine, and the Mac mini seems to be precisely that. I hope that it won't get as hot as the last unfortunate render-engine fodder I was using before.

So what else is good about this Mac mini? Hmm... Oh yes, it'll be the second Mac I've ever bought. Actually, the first one, since my first one was a Power Computing machine. Remember those? Up until now I've survived on hand-me-downs. Here's a render to celebrate the occasion.

Goodbye MacBook

Today, while trying to render the final Dartboard scene using Blender's new render engine Cycles, my old computer died. Apparently, the logic board got too hot. I took it to the Apple store near me and they confirmed that the logic board was fried. I was lucky to have a recent backup, but even so, it's a bit of an annoyance. So, now I'm shopping for a new Mac. I've been really thinking that I'll get a Mac Mini. Why on earth did Apple call it Mac Mini? What a horrible name. Anything would have been better than Mac Mini—how about Mac Pancake? Anyway, I'll try to forget the male-challenging name and buy one. I can definitely not afford or justify a Mac Pro, which is what I really would like to have. On the other hand, I've been toying with the idea of building my own PC, but the idea of not using a Mac anymore is not a pleasant one. I'll keep everyone posted.

Dartboard Scene Part 2

Here is an update of the Dartboard Scene, this time rendered at full size (but not full resolution), and with Cycles. Cycles is the upcoming new render engine for Blender. It's a bit like Luxrender in that it is a physically-correct, unbiased render engine. Unbiased means that you can have the render go on for as long as you want. Although Cycles is still a bit of a work in progress, I think it's ready for production time, especially for still images.

Dartboard Scene Part I

Here is a render of a scene I'm working on in Blender. It's not complete yet, this is a preliminary render, done in Blender Internal. I'm not sure whether I'll do the final render with Cycles or with BI, but using some Freestyle module to stylize the look a bit. Realism is not my goal here. We'll see where it goes.

Review: Introduction to the Cycles Render Engine by Jonathan Williamson

I just finished watching the fantastic intro tutorial to the Cycles render engine, which is set to be part of Blender default package. Jonathan has a great style and very clear explanations. It really shows that he prepares ahead of time. His tutorials are straight to the point, with very little dawdling around.

Cycles promises to be an incredibly useful and fun addition to Blender's tools. At this point it does not have as many features as, say, Luxrender, but its potential is immense, especially considering the viewport render mode that could speed up setting up of scenes. It's not yet a finished product, either. some of te options have not been implemented yet. Having the capability of GPU rendering would be one of the reasons for me to upgrade as well. I keep salivating at some of tho killer GPUs I see around. Ah, one of these days... :)

You can watch Jonathan Williamson's tutorial on Cycles here.

Goban Scene—Final Render

Here is my final render on the Goban scene, created in Blender 2.57, rendered in Luxrender 0.8. The render time was some 30 hours, and reached 1300 samples per pixel. There are some areas where there is a bit of what's called fireflies—areas of overly light pixels that don't get resolved by the renderer. However, I think it's probably OK as it is right now.

Goban