Released yesterday. Downloading the 64 bit version VERY slowly. I swear, I will learn to use this software some day.

A great place to start - something I should have done ages ago - is do the tutorials on BlenderCookie.com. Mind you, those tutorials weren't available for 2.34 (when I started using Blender) so my knowledge has been very limited until recently.

With BlenderCookie tutorials, you can get up to speed really really quickly. And before you can finish one, 5 more pop up! You'll find that it's almost impossible to do them all: they are proliferating so quickly.

Are they worth it? Judge for yourself:

...created in 2.64RC2 and rendered in Blender Internal (not even Cycles, which I'm such a huge fan of) from the Island tutorial by David Ward.

Nice image.  Just needs a volleyball floating in the water.

:biggrin:

thanks, Keppel... ...and someone sitting in a beach chair having something fermented watching the sunset?

Don't know why: my images tend to involve clouds... lots of them! makes them a bit moody tho - guess that's just me.

Have you seen the movie Castaway with Tom Hanks, whose only companion on a deserted island was a volleyball named Wilson?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0162222/

Actually, yes I have. Forgot about that film... and now understand the significance of the volleyball...

Damn I thought the volleyball was a disguise on a jap periscope ;-)

Nice image !! you use instancing or particles for trees? as for clouds, they all have a silver lining even if you cant see it

Keep pushing them pixels hun!! your bloody good at it

Thanks Hedd!

You are correct in thinking particles for the trees: billboards. And I wasn't happy with what CGTextures.com had to offer (the palms ended up having purple leaves!) so I went with Arbaro and created my own trees, which I rendered to .png and was able to use the same way.

Still getting a handle on how Arbaro works... I find the Linux approach (not version, because it's the same code) infinitely more stable. I can even do a weeping willow!

Very nice work. Thanks for the heads up on BlenderCookie. Have a bunch of certification related work this month. I'll give it a go. There's things I want that clearly aren't commerical, so I'll have to roll my own.

BlenderCookie and Blender Guru tutorials are the shiznit. LOL. BlenderNerds are pretty cool too. Great stuff. They actually got ME to understand Blender. Heh.

Laurie

Maybe I'm different.

I have been using Blender since 2.49 and I just got 2.64  - What I am not happy about is that there is still no manual or even near current wiki guide and the only things to give me an idea of how to use it are blendercookie vids and they are sketchy. The authors skate past everything that I want to know and go into detail I don't need.  Maybe they are good when you are a noob but for me they are not much help.

Specifically, I am trying to figure out how to rig things. - I did a bit in 2.4 but it is not the same now.

Good thing I have the patience to figure it out eventually myself.  If you know something about rigging in 2.6, please post me a link or something.

Yeah, I'm different alright.

May I suggest:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2857527&page=1#message_3996342

Thankyou RobynsVeil, will be checking them out !

You might also be interested in this, Prof:

http://www.cdschools.org/Page/455

You will want the 4th Edition, as it covers the main 2.5x stuff. Except, of course, Cycles, which is still very much in a state of flux, so what you read now might not necessarily apply a year from now.

:biggrin:

Or 2 months from now. Hahaha. ;)

Laurie

Thanks for the link RobynsVeil.

I prefer written guides myself - easier to find specific things and skip over the bits I already know. :)

Wonderful image Robyn!

I find that no effort invested in learning more about Blender is ever wasted. Every now and then I wonder if I am not spending too much time in Poser when I could be improving my Blender skills. Poser is almost a crutch now, and I wonder if it isn't holding me back.

There is just so much to explore, Nanette.

You actually have a purpose with Poser, where, in my case, I was just playing and eventually found myself hitting walls, sort-of. Actually, it boiled down to how Poser manages mesh, with that autosmooth thing it does, which for humanoids and their attire is a good thing, but anything non-organic like buildings or other man-made devices, not that good. Where I really became disenchanted was like corners of rough stone buildings. Displacement would mess with the mesh. But a razor-sharp edge or what's meant to be rough stone just looks horribly wrong.

But I do have such an incredibly long way to go with Blender. I can't see myself putting anything of value in a gallery rendered in Cycles... to much to get the noggin around. Oh well, not in a hurry...

:biggrin:

Yes, just playing is where it started...Now I have an almost-finished sculpted bird that I want to take into Poser. I modelled it with spread-out wings and now it needs to be rigged so that I can fold the wings and bend the neck...perhaps if I try the simple single-skin rigging in Poser it will work in Blender as well?

I was going through the Blender 2.64 overview on Blendercookie yesterday, and now I am so discouraged because I didn't understand half of what he was talking about. I really need to get a grip on the compositor, Cycles, rigging and lighting. Sculpting and modelling are less of a mystery to me.

In Poser, I can fly solo and don't need to refer to manuals and tutorials all the time any more. But in Blender, I get stuck whenever I venture beyond modelling and sculpting, and I have to go and look things up. I want to be fluent in Blender. And every time it updates it gets bigger.

blender an posers rigging isnt really compatible, is the posertools to get stuff from poser into blender(not finished yet but usable) or you could try rigging in blender then going to poser with FBX dunno how good FBX is in 2012 its not so clever in P7 lol

Quote - Thanks for the link RobynsVeil.

I prefer written guides myself - easier to find specific things and skip over the bits I already know. :)

Unfortunately, that is getting too expensive these days. A complete Blender reference in book form would easily be in the $50-$100 range, likely closer to the upper end.  I prefer books myself. It's the way this aging brain was trained.

That guide from the school site could be printed, I suppose: no idea what Kinkos or the like would charge, mind you.

I'm pretty much the opposite: I prefer stuff I can read on my tablet to hard-copy books, only because when I'm at work, I can easily carry one tablet into the tea-room, whereas a stack of books... :blink:

I was going to get that now-a-bit-dated book on the Blender home site (their store) on Rendering and Lighting (think I got that backwards... LOL) for the MAIN reason that I do want to support this project, but after shipping and everything, it'll run me over $60 Ozzie. Where I can buy and download it from Packt for $23, and I haven't hurt any trees nor contributed to the Postal Service, either. Might do that and donate the difference to Blender Foundation, who need it more than the logging industry or the Postal Service, anyway.

:biggrin:

All I'm doing now in Compositing is from a tutorial: as you know, Nanette, Andrew had some really cool stuff on his Nature Academy course on that, and David Ward on BlenderCookie included some really neat tips for adding mist.

I've just taken a scene (freebie from BlendSwap) and sort-of redoing it, particularly the UVs. Blender really does have some awesome UVMapping capability! Nice thing about BlendSwap: those freebies are often just like starter-point thingies. Or educational. Or both. Think I've sort-of got a grip on how to do displacement in Blender, sort-of, which means: kind-of, but not really.

You do spend a lot of time reading and trying stuff. Which is the fun bit!! :biggrin:

I really think we need a Cycles node thread.

I've been playing with using a .png on a "billboard" (Blender supports alphas - how good is that!) and fiddled around a bit until I figured out what I was doing wrong. I mean, the sulotion isn't the very best ver for any and all solutions, but it seems to work reasonably well.

A bit of background: I tried making some trees in Arbaro. They wrork, but with a HUGE poly-cost, which makes Blender crawl. Since the reeds and stuff on this WIP remake of this scene by David Nyul are already using particle-driven 'tiles' which add a considerable load, I didn't want to push things with adding a high-poly mesh and materials. Already, I can't use the GPU for this in either 2.63a or 2.64: it simply fails. Fortunately, CPU rendering still works.

Anyway, here is the original out-of-box scene as downloaded:

You can see where the trees (jpgs) leave a bit of an outline. Now, a bit later:

The tree is from Arbaro, and is a .png displayed on a simple plane, not mesh. The shader for doing this is:

What isn't working as well is displacement. I followed suggestions on BA on this, with this 'shader'

...but as you can see on the planks of the dock (the bit facing the camera), it isn't working right.

Also, I do get filreflies on that first tile that renders.

Anyway... fun!

You know tho...I've seen nature scenes in Blender that make me go "Vue who?" ;). Some seriously awesome stuff. I like the above. They have an almost painterly feel to them :).

I use Arboro myself. It makes awesome trees if your rig can handle the massive poly count. Baum3D I probably use more often because, tho the trees don't look quite as nice, they have a much lower poly count. And it makes virturally fantastic dead trees which you can see in my gallery. Add a little ivy with the Ivy Generator and they look amazingly realistic.

I've just reminded myself that I need to try my Ivy Generator textures in Blender Cycles and see how good they look. They use displacement.

Laurie

LaurieA the ivy gen has been updated and cycles can use displacement now I believe

Oh I wish I had more time to play! Great work, Robyn! I am just getting more convinced that the "destination application" has to be Blender.

Thanks for all the information and encouragement. Interestingly I have 3 major hobbies. 3D "art" (I don't consider myself and artist, but that's what people call it.), model railroading, and naval wargaming. Oddly people in both the latter hobbies are starting to use 3D modeling programs and 3D printers to produce models. (Shapeways is apparently the current leader, but there others, and other systems that yield better results.) Odd how such dissimilar hobbies come together. There might actually be some money in the future for people who know 3D modeling. But I'm not in this for money. 

I just found the overview video on YouTube presented by Blender Cookie. From what I am seeing the new version is a vast improvement over 2.63a, which is my current version. To see the overview video follow this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsug7xDuFgY&feature=g-all-u

I don't want to get rid of 2.63a yet, as I have several modelling projects in progress using it. I do want to go ahead and download 2.64 though. I also plan to grab the release notes for reference purposes.

All I can say at this time is AWESOME!

Agent 0013.

Have you tried modelling each plank individually? In the first image it looks like you are using a different surfacing for the dock. I'm just wondering if the same model is used in the second image?

Same surface, slightly different UVmap. How cool is this! :biggrin:

If I am reading the release notes right, it looks like Blender could be working toward becoming a stand alone application that can do everything needed to model, surface, rig, and animate without having to use other software for certain tasks. Of course for the UV Mapping it may be necessary to import custom image maps, but soon you may not need software such as Photoshop or Gimp to create your image maps. If this is the direction Blender is headed and it works out well, we may have in Blender the most complete 3D art application in existence!

The fact that this software is "Open Source" allows the development and improvement to be done by people all over the world. It's like having a collective mind in which the skills of every member can be brought to bear for the purpose of producing the best product possible. It shows how advances can be made that would not be possible for a product that is the brainchild of a select few. Who can find fault with that? 

I think you've summed it up very well, Agent... it is definitely the potential of Blender (direction it is going/open-to-developers structure) that makes it such a compelling program. That's the one thing I found so powerful about Poser was its extensibility through Python. And Blender is even more so.

Had a play with Sapling yet? Sheesh, I can't stop!!! :biggrin:

I'm unfamiliar with Sapling. Perhaps you could enlighten me? Is it something new that can be found in Blender 2.64?

add ~ curve ~ tree

all parameters are in bottom of left tool bar

Need to enable it first - don't think it's enabled in the user preferences by default. Well, mine wasn't, anyway...

Menu -> User Preferences...
Addons tab
Add Curve

@ **heddheld & **RobynsVeil Thanks for the information. Still don't have 2.64 yet. I plan to download it today. I'm not planning to get rid of 2.63 yet; rather I'll move it to one of my external hard drives. Then I can install 2.64 and start exploring the new stuff.

A quick question: Does anyone know where I can find tutorials in document format for the new stuff in 2.64?

Quote - A quick question: Does anyone know where I can find tutorials in document format for the new stuff in 2.64?

Just a heads-up - we're on to 2.64a now - there's been some significant bug fixes.

Documentation. That IS the challenge. The approach I've taken is to go with what has been published in that new Blender basics book first (for the core stuff about 2.5x - which includes 2.6x), then start to haunt BlenderArtists.org and watch pertinent tutorials on BlenderCookie. I soundly dislike video tutorials as a rule because:

-- the information flits past so quickly, you can't look at it, contemplate it, assimilate it
-- some of the people making videos are just incredibly difficult to listen to, for a variety of reasons
-- videos are hard to bookmark
-- some videographers don't tell you what they did, they show you steps minus keystrokes
-- for some, a gig download video on dialup is not even feasable (especially for just a few gems of info)

So, I completely agree with the DOCUMENT format notion of tutorials: I learn best that way myself. Saying that, there are some gugus (like David Ward and Jonathan Williamson) who use tools available in Blender that actually displays keystrokes on the screen in rolling-movie-credit style in a central yet unused section of the screen, which has actually served to show me a few things about Blender I didn't know before. And something things are just more efficiently demonstrated in video than document (picture tells a thousand words).

However, these are the better instrtuctors... and even they succumb to the "wait, no, that's... no, that's not right, actually, oh yeah, I remember now, it's..." - edit those videos, guys!!! Gotta remember, since it is in video format, one inevitably has to stumble past that fluff/brain-frump/cute-opinion section to get to the meat, unlike with a pdf where you can go straight to what you're after, and those little glitches get old real quick.

Actually, at the moment, I'm sort-of there with you, Agent. I need to get clear in my mind again how to instance a low poly leaf onto a 'sapling' tree using particles. The core information to doing this was provided by Marcos_Ita over at BlenderArtists.org:

Weight paint is kinda crazy onto trees, that's why i looked for another way. Nothing new or revolutionary though:

• Set up your tree as you like with Sapling, with visible leaves and hexagonal form
• Select leaves, edit mode-->edge select-->select all(A)--->press x and click dissolve. Now we have all the leaves hexagonal and ngons.
• Open UV editor, while leaves are selected--> press "u" in 3d window--> reset. Now all the leaves are on top of each other in UV editor and are aligned perfectly.
• In UV editor, keeping edit mode and UV editor in sync enabled, select with border select the bottom vert of the hexagon (he kind-of forgot to say you have to go back to vertex mode, but I figured it out eventually - I guess that's implied - he also forgot to mention that in the UV editor you sort-of have to click the "Keep UV And Edit Mode Mesh Selection In Sync" button in order for this to work). Now you (have) selected automatically all the verts which are lying on the branches.
• In 3d window invert the selection to delete the other verts.

Now we got a certain number of verts lying nicely on the branches and you can use them with a particle system.
My settings were: Hair - advanced - numbers equal to the number of verts (doing so i have an instance per each vertex)
Play with random rotation and scale in particles options.
Done. Is it clear? It's quite fast. Keep in mind of course, your custom leaf mesh must have its origin in the right place, otherwise your leaves will "grow" badly.

But there is more to it - now, it's about getting the tools in particles section to all play together to get those leaves all looking right.

But, it involves getting pretty comfortable distributing an instance of a simple mesh object (a leaf) onto a tree. Not there yet, but getting there.

Another thing to consider... whilst it's not really as structured as a step-by-step tutorial (linear) there is a lot to learn from the BlendSwap .blends you can download for free.

...

Overall, it's a bit higgledy-piggledy (which doesn't suit some folks) but you will find the info if you dig a bit.

:blink:

@ RobynsVeil: Thank you for the information. I would like to get to the point at which I can model trees, scrubs, and other plantlife; however, at this point my skill level is nowhere near that yet. Even so, the information you have provided here looks quite simple to follow; and as I am one that believes you have to get your hands muddy to learn how to make mudpies, I will certainly give it a go. Of course I will more than likely be asking questions concerning the process as I learn when there is a point at which I get stuck. I just hope I can word my questions so that they can be understood.

Stay awesome!

Agent 0013.

When Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall, all the King's horses and All the King's men were thinking of just one thing: A BIG OMELET!

@ Agent, is no need to install blender!! D/l the zip(not the exe) it will run from anywhere and you can have as many copies as you like (never tried to run 2 copies at the same time but never felt the need to try lol), The sapling worked in 2.6 but I might have added it then myself but think it was included in .62 onward but as RV said it prob needs enabling, think I dive into the preffs change them all to what I want then forget I done it lol, ps did you get the DS thing sorted?? not seen you since lol. The BIGGEST changes I have "noticed" (either annoyed or delighted) are the bmesh and dynotop, not sure bmesh is any use to me been so long avoiding ngons I find it hard to make one an when I do blender crashes lol, dynatop is okish but not as good as scuptris! since I'm NOT a good scuptor not a lot of use to me, also has probs opening older files and is slower on my comp!! so unless there is something in there you really want stick to the version you have an keep learning

@RV how about a link to vid hun ? pretty please ;-)  cant understand why your "remaking" all the leaves like that, for a BG tree I find use the square leaf and just load a .png file(or tga) and it works fine, did try a more "high" poly one used sapling for trunk an branches converted to mesh ~ weight painted ~ added particles(used billboard) was hoping whatever made billboard work would carry into poser (it didnt boohoo)

Actually, I'm not aware there is a video for that particular thing, Hedd. Those instructions I copied verbatim from bA.org (with a few caveats) - this is all a bit of a new concept. What is cool about this is that you could potentially save the tree still in development form - before converting curve to mesh - and do a variety of leaf distributions, ones that could end up being different leaf colours or or even fruit! - which you really would have less control over using a group to distribute over a single particle zone.

Just a thought.

I did find a video on You Tube (back about 2 months) ago dealing with using the verts to create dynamic chainmail. Basically the guy created a small metal ring, and then somehow converted all the verts of the chainmail model into copies of the ring. (Not sure but perhaps this is where the ngon is used?) He then resized all of the rings enmass until they looked like they were all interlocked. His version of the process included animation with real world physics. Like hedd, I don't have very much computing power, so I will not be trying it for fear of a crash. 

As for running Blender from anywhere, I remember an earlier posting in another Blender thread that pointed that out. I like having my latest version installed for quick access, but I'll run the earlier version from the extracted zip file on my external. My only reason for doing this is because I have a few unfinished .blend files that I am working on in 2.63. When they are completed, (they are just modeling jobs), I'll export them in.obj format for use in my other applications. After that I'll probably delete the earlier version and use the new version for model creation and the other great features that are now available.

Thanks friends for all the advice. I'll look in on my YouTube channel and see if I can find that url and post it here for the above mentioned video. Perhaps it will help somebody. As for me, the modeling project is well above my skill level for now, and I will probably need to have a lot more processing power.

Stay awesome!

Agent 0013.

Humpty Dumpty was an egghead! If he had any common sense, he would never have gotten up on that wall!

Quote - have done the chainmail dress where you add rings with a particle system to a dynamic dress, looks good unless you try a close up ;-)

 

Nice job! I like the gold material you used. What figure did you use for the image? Judging from the purple bikini underneath, I'd say it is Victoria 3. Am I right?

be either 3 or 4 ;-) lol. this might interest you just a list of whats working etc  http://www.blenderguru.com/is-it-in-blender-yet/

Quote - be either 3 or 4 ;-) lol. this might interest you just a list of whats working etc  http://www.blenderguru.com/is-it-in-blender-yet/Thanks for the link my friend. I'll give it a look see.

I checked in at Blender Guru and found that most of the info is stuff I already found. There were some things I did not know yet, but nothing that I did not expect. I did see that there are some things that are not in Blender yet which are scheduled for a later build. There are several new features planned for Cycles which will be appearing in 2.65 to 2.67.

It is good to know about Blender Guru, as the schedule can help when deciding when to upgrade to a new build. 

Thanks Hedd.

hehe..that DOES look good ;)

Laurie

hey RV (took me ages to find this thread lol, I really need a memory) think I seen the thing you was on about vis sapling, but I cant get access to the particle system if I add leaves in sapling (help lol) "my" way of weight painting works ok but is tedious(little bit of ocd helps) but has the advantage of letting you decide where fruit dead leaves etc go (got to admit here I can crash blender 10+ times per day) rofl. Have you tried using the skin modifier to make a tree?? is good for trunk ~ major branches would get a touch tedious after that but then u can drop to particles or dupliverts?

And what we really really need is leaves, lots an lots of leaves, most 3d trees I look at are 1 tex on 10,000 leaves(even with random scales) a real tree with "only" 10,000 leaves would have 10,000 textures, yeah I know we couldn't have that many textures but particles lets you add groups so a group of ten (?) would give good random patterns add that to randm scale an the tree wil look more real!!

so I am "collecting" leaves, scanning (huge- aiming for 4096 min @300dpi ) be fun if you do same wiv yer upside down leaves, gumtrees dont grow round here lol, we could do swopsies ;-)

Great - we need good textures for leaves - good ON ya, Hedd!

The technique that was shown me actually used one vertex of each leaf mesh item as created by the Leaves component of 'Sapling'. You actually let that do the distributing for you, then save only the one vertex closest to the branch to "grow" your new leaves from. Haven't gotten back to it, but since Leaves is created separately to the 'Sapling' curve, I'm guessing that you could make several groups of leaves (each with a slightly different colouring scheme, for more realism) and even a fruit distribution.

The key to having only one vertex remaining (to grow the new leaf from) is in that UV-map selection process:

• Select leaves: edit mode; [CTRL] [TAB] --> Edge
• Select All [A]
• Press [X] and select dissolve. Now we have all the leaves hexagonal and ngons.
• Bring up a UV-Map editor window while leaves are selected. Be sure to have the Keep UV and Edit Mode mesh selection in synch button (bottom of the UV window) active/depressed... this is crucial in order to be able to select the vertex closest to the branch in the 3D view editing window. In this way you'll be able to make that selection in the UV-map window.
• Press [U] for Unwrap in the 3D View window
• Select reset from the UV-Map dropdown menu. You will see all the leaves are on top of each other in UV-Map window and are aligned perfectly.
• In the UV-Map window - still in edit mode and with UV-Map/3D View editor in sync enabled - go back to vertex mode [CTRL] [TAB] --> Vertex
• Border select [B] the bottom vert of the hexagon

Now you (have) selected automatically all the verts which are lying on the branches.

• In the 3D View window invert the selection [CTRL] [I]
• [X] --> Vertices to delete the vertices not touching the branch.

In the Object Data editing area, create a new group under vertex groups - call it vLeaves01, for example - then click Assign. This will be one group you can access in the Particles area.

I'm actually going to have a go to see if making multiple groups can be done this way... back in a bit!

And I'll try to get some hi-res images of gumtree leaves for you - have a decent camera, so they should turn out okay...

Okay, so no... at this point, I've got one group of leaves I can make, then the whole sapling thing vanishes when I go into edit mode.

This will take a bit of thought.