feeblemind

Allan Brito, author of the famous weblog Blender 3D Architect and of the Blender 3D Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery book did it again: he recently published a new book at Packt Publishing.

His new book is titled Blender 3D 2.49 Incredible Machines. I should receive it soon, and I would be pleased to review it on this blog for your very pleasure. Before it happens, you can check the full table of content or the attached sample chapter, courtesy of the publisher.

Some progress has been made. I worked on the textures for the land, and played with Composite Nodes in order to soften the billboard issues of the clouds due to the Atmosphere not supporting faces other than Solid.

As you can see, I also played with particles in order to start to grow an ecosystem. For the moment, the trees are only "placeholders" quickly modeled, the only attention I paid is about the range of colors. I wanted to depict somehow true colors as seen in wildness.

I also simplified the water surface: it is now a single plane. Enough for the moment.

Not easy to see it, but the texture of the landscape uses he trick depicted in my short tutorial Texturing landscapes according to slopes.

Enough talks, here's the picture.

Texturing landscapes according to slopes is a challenge by itself if you are not aware of all the subtleties lying deeply within Blender. Of course, it might sound difficult even with the following guidelines ; if so, you might be interested in reading my tutorial about Using stencils with Blender.

Read "Texturing landscapes according to slopes"

Ok, I finally found out about the uggly billboards. In fact, Atmosphere option of the Sun lamp is not friend with ZTransp alpha mapped planes... I will fill a bug report as I guess it is one...

But as I don't want to wait for the bug to be corrected, I messed with Composite nodes to correct this. I set up three rendering layers:

• one with the clouds alone, Sky option deactivated
• one with the sky alone
• one with the landscape itself

Here's the nodes setup, based on the three previous rendering layers:

Added some clouds, using Alan's Cloud Generator.

While the Billboards are using ZTransp, we can see them in some places of the clouds. Any hint how to solve that?

Just a small WIP. Will see how it will evolve.

Read "Compiling Blender 2.50-svn on Kubuntu 9.04"

The information contained in the article Compiling Blender for Kubuntu 7.10 are still relevant, but recently Jesterking (Nathan Letwory) introduced scons-local of the latest version supported. The reason behind that is that a lot of people were complaining about the shift to SCons 1.0.0 as a new requirement, which proved to be a problem with some distributions, while a manual installation of the latest Scons looked difficult also for some people.

Read "Compiling Blender: important new upgrade!"

Helios enables the distributed rendering of 3D models building on open source technologies that are all 100% pure Java. The rendering engine is Sunflow with the distributed computations managed by the JGrid service-oriented Grid system that uses the Jini technology as its base. This is what is written on the homepage of the project. Puzzled? This simply means that using this piece of software, you will be able to enslave numerous computers from your own private network into an efficient Render Farm.

Read "Helios - Sunflow Distributed Rendering"