Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Environment maps on Sketchfab!

Here we are!
Sorry but I've been really busy and I'm gonna be even more :)

So... because of the few time which I've got I'll pulish three works together!




ONE

The first is a simple geometry with a totally reflecting material applyied. 



The cubemap
In order to get the final result I've used the same cubemap on sketchfab to texture a big cube in my Blender scene. If you need them, you can find them on Humus for free.
For this purpose I've setted up eight different materials but you could also use the same and play with UV's placement.
Anyway, the cube's material is an emitter (emission=1.0).

The light
Another remarkable details: I had to place a point light in the center of the scene because elsewhere the inner reflection were totally black. Try it on your own.

The UVs
Of course, I've unwrapped one sphere and one cylinder at the early beginning. That's necessary if you want save time after, because if you want to bake textures you NEED to unwrap.
Nie vergisst!

The baking
I've baked textures as usual and created the new material (one for this scene); this is a very simple lambert shader with no specularity and only the baked texture applyied.

A blender viewport snapshot:




The SSAO

Oh my God, what's that!? Yeah, now we can use SSAO (like Ambient Occlusion) without bake it. Nice, but what about the values?
As I've digged quite a lot with those values I wish to publish my personal setup:










TWO

The second one is an old model (do you remember about my Christmas 2011 postcard?) with matte materials, no raytracing; this is meant to play with lights only.



The cubemap
No cubemap here! Only some lights around to fake image's lights.

The light
Not so complicated setup, but... there are no rules for this. You have to follow your own feeling about lights and image. For this scene I've used 7 lights (2 spots, 5 points) but you can do what you want and do it better.

The UVs
Only needed for wood texture. No complicate unwraps.

The baking
No baking... :)

A blender viewport snapshot:



The SSAO
The setup for this scene:








THREE

Oh... something new? Ok, this is the same as the first except for texture's resolution (bigger) and for blurry metal applyed to the external structure.




A technical note: in the third scene I've used two textures 4096x4096 each. So... don't worry about texture's management, because Sketchfab is really powerful.

Ciao!
Pietro

Sunday, September 2, 2012

File sync with Ubuntu 12.xx

Hi there,
yesterday I had a little problem: compare two directories in order to update each other, getting back two perfect copies. Easy.
I was used to compare directories with Sync'n'Go with Windows, but... now I'm working with Ubuntu! So, do you know a good utility to get the same result?

After a little google surf, I found Meld Diff in the official Ubuntu 12.01 repository. It has a very minimal interface, but it doesn't work on my pc: infact while it can compare two (or more) directories but the button "Copy right" (or left) doesn't do anything.

So I've googled a little more, and I've found FreeFileSync and it's working very well. I'm planning to use it for backup purposes as soon as I'll come back to my office in Milan.
You can download the executables, the sources, or simply add the repository to yours and install it through apt-get:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:freefilesync/ffs

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install freefilesync


Now you can find it in you dashhome, typing "FreeFileSync" and of course, you can also pin it into you launchbar!