TIP OF THE DAY I'm back just to share a very simple trick that I didn't know before: how and where to find the GIMP plugin for Normal Maps.This is a very useful plugin as it works like Nvidia plugin for Photoshop, but it runs on GIMP and therefore on Linux.
So: I first decided to download sources and compile it on my own... I've solved some dependencies but I was still stuck on a "Package gimp-2.0 was not found in the pkg-config search path. [...]". Too much time. I was needing it to work immediately.
Then I discovered the packages:
gimp-data-extras
gimp-plugin-registry
These packages come with lots of plugin, and what I need is under Filter -> Map -> NormalMap
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
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!
I had to solve a little problem: converting hex color value (like CSS/HTML color code #FFFFFF) to a blender friendly color code (a triplet of float numbers, range(0,1) like (1,1,1)) and back again.
Ok: this is not THE problem, and maybe lots of you will be laughting reading this, but this has been MY BIG problem for 30 minutes. And I've got to thank a lot Alvaro Moe from OpenTechSchool workshops (Berlin), a very skilled Python and Javascript developer who is spending his days at Campus Party Europe with me. So... let's go! 1 - From HTML color to CG color: Taking this light-blue color HTML hex code #1075f5 is built this way: # - the identifier 10 - the value for Red channel 75 - the value for Green channel f5 - the value for Blue channel Each couple can handle 0-255 value. As standard, if we have one number only we've to add '0' in front of it to keep six element rule. In this example we won't take care of alpha value because it's not handled by 'color picker' element but you can add it easely. First of all, let's convert a simple HEX couple (the first, RED channel) to a FLOAT number; Javascript gives us a nice instruction in order to do this:
2 - From CG color to HTML color: And now, let's invert the process! Our function will take as input an array on float numbers, ranged between 0 and 1, and will return a string. The Javascript function to translate a number to a string value is this:
Next step: checking if the value is less or more than 'F'. Why? Because we need to build a string.length = 6 plus the '#' character elsewhere we'll not perform a correct conversion.
if (r.length == 1) { r = '0' + r};
As last step, let's compose the final string:
hex = '#' + r + g + b;
We're ready to build our new function:
As I've written before, I'm not handling alpha channel because I don't need it but you can do that in few minutes if you want. Greetings from Berlin and Campus Party Europe! Pietro
Hello, here's my last release on Sketchfab: What's that? This is an original italian product, made in Sicily, and her name's MissGelo; this machine can help you in making a perfect sicilian granita. As I've made the animation when the product has been launched, I wanted to rebuild it for realtime visualization too. I think that 3d animation is a nice and powerful tool for presentation and advertise but I think also that a realtime experience could be a better way to explore and check a product before to buy it. You can look closer, change perspective and study color and shapes. I would like to publish a "making of" too, but unfortunately I cannot share these data because of contracts and industrial secret. So... I can just give you some more tips in order to have a nice result while using Sketchfab.
Lights For this scene, I had to illuminate a big box. And this is not only a simple box, but a metal box, that involves reflections; this is in my opinion a good example of a simple object hard to light correctly. I've started with the M.White light setup, because it is useful and simple, but:
I've doubled the fill lights, so they're four now
I've added two cold lights, one for the top and one for the bottom
there's no keylight but only the main specular
I've removed backlight and "white pusher"
It's important for this scene to have a more uniform lighting.
I've baked ambient occlusion and textures, even if AO now can't help too much because we haven't got some holes or complicated shapes: technically it's just a box with some buttons and textures. But anyway, some AO is better than nothing.
About auto-illuminant material
Yes, it's not only possible but it works very VERY perfectly. The exchange between Blender and Sketchfab is really transparent and extremely easy: what you see is what you get.
The emittin material you can see in my work is a simple Lambert shader with "Emit" parameter setted to 0.40. Nothing more.
I suggest you to focus a lot on specular's effects of each light, because is really what give you the difference between each scene and shader!
as I'm working on a new model for realt-time visualization I wish to explore normal and bump mapping. In particular, what I'd like to have is a quick reference table with those "magic values" that will work in almost every situations.
Of course, I don't believe in "magic values" to make your BEST rendering ever, but everyone knows that if you begin from a solid and quick start you can trigger and tune later your results to the top.
Now, the scene:
this is a very simple blender's scene, with six couples (half sphere + plane) showing the same shader per couple (total: 6 materials). Material's base is the same, what change are image source for test (normal map on the left, bump map on the right) and the value of "Normal" influence.
This is the raw render in Blender:
As you can see immediately, a normal map gives a better result and, most important, is almost the same as showed in Blender rendering; so you can get a perfect feedback of your work while making it.
