Based on my last tutorial for 3dsMax, in this video we recreate the technique used to model an Interlocked Star Nest in Blender 2.77. The result is a twisted star ball sculpture which could be translated into an interesting design element, or exported as STL for 3d printing with SLA or SLS technology. I hope you enjoy this tutorial, and please don't forget to like or subscribe to my channel for more!

Thank you so much for sharing with the community!

Look forward to watching this one thanks for sharing

Thank you, Boni and Lobo.

@Lobo, let me know if you encounter any issues. After going through the tutorial several times, I encountered some minor inconsistencies with proportional editing when in perspective viewport screen space, and feel as though I should have presented it in orthographic views instead, to be more precise for everyone.

Oh, now this looks interesting. Thanks for creating the tutorial for Blender too.

Well done, John! Btw, don't worry about the proportional editing values here. It really doesn't matter how close or far away you are from the object in world space, because proportional editing works almost identical to soft selection, except there aren't color gradient cues to help you see the area of influence. In other words, a proportional size of 1.0 is still influencing the same distance from the selected polygons or vertices up close as it would far away, just like soft selection. It also makes no difference if you're in ortho or perspective views. It affects the mesh the same. Try it out for yourself and see. The info you gave in the video works just fine!

If I may suggest one thing though, it is that you should use the proportional editing "connected" option for some of the rotations! I noticed when I had the pentagons selected towards the last part of the tutorial, increasing the proportional size started to affect the outer parts of the mesh, and that's probably why you had to use the corrective smooth modifier. I used the connected option instead, and it came out nice and clean!

Hello John

First excellent tutorial I always do like when you do them for Blender and I encountered no issue following the tutorial from start to finish so mega I know you make most of these for 3D printing but I do like taking the models in to Bryce and using some pre-made set ups that I have for abstracts and rendering them out even thou get annoyed that no new updates have been made to Bryce to make it more 64 bit friendly so I can take advantage of all my memory and render at higher resolutions but none the less here is a start of something I rendered out using the model as center piece not totally happy yet with the colors might tweak it more

I can't even get my head around the render, let alone how to do it! Very impressive work!

Really liking that render Lobo. I started in 3D with Bryce about 14-15 years ago, and just started learning how to do abstracts with it last year, so I can really appreciate what you've done here. I, too, wish they hadn't abandoned Bryce. It so needs a 64-bit version.

Well I still give john all the credit many of his models and tutorials help make these wonderful designs in blender and then gives me the motivation to work into another application to do something unique with the models. I just added a new version of the image in my gallery with a bit more color and boost was not fully happy with the coloring so some post work in Photoshop it can be seen here https://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/?image_id=2713952 And again Johns tutorial is at the core of my creation and can not thank him enough for his contributions.

Lobo3433 posted at 2:41PM Wed, 26 October 2016 - #4287902

Hello John

First excellent tutorial I always do like when you do them for Blender and I encountered no issue following the tutorial from start to finish so mega I know you make most of these for 3D printing but I do like taking the models in to Bryce and using some pre-made set ups that I have for abstracts and rendering them out even thou get annoyed that no new updates have been made to Bryce to make it more 64 bit friendly so I can take advantage of all my memory and render at higher resolutions but none the less here is a start of something I rendered out using the model as center piece not totally happy yet with the colors might tweak it more

WHOA! Lobo3433, this is awesome! I'm a big fan of surreal effects in 3d. I know most of the time we call it abstract, and indeed this is abstract, but there is also a hint of realism going on here, with reflections and such, so I tend to consider it more like surrealism. Either way, it's VERRRY cool work! Did you duplicate the object and use deformers to get that environement effect going on?

WHOA! Lobo3433, this is awesome! I'm a big fan of surreal effects in 3d. I know most of the time we call it abstract, and indeed this is abstract, but there is also a hint of realism going on here, with reflections and such, so I tend to consider it more like surrealism. Either way, it's VERRRY cool work! Did you duplicate the object and use deformers to get that environement effect going on?

Thank you maxxxmodelz

I got Bryce back when it was still Bryce 5 to learn how to make terrains and have yet to render one single terrain I would be willing to show off lol. But I have kept it updated and found several decent tutorial resources on Deviant Art the one that this is based on is Bryce Kaleidoscope Tutorial by timemit so using his set up and changing the center piece and doing some mods on the materials with in Bryce to give me different effects is how I achieve the look and then post work in Photoshop. My disappointment with Bryce does not take full advantage of 64 bit processor nor memory this render took 12 minutes but if I tried at any resolution over 1280 x 720 with in Bryce it would either lock up or crash and Bryce is been the only software I have been able to achieve these sort of effects. I need to try and find something that can give me similar results. let you in on a secret thou when I make these renders I think of a hippie uncle I had who well often took certain mental drug induced trips lol and would describe images like this heck he even painted his ceiling in some retro funky psychedelic look for his tripping space.

I've been using Bryce since version 4, long before DAZ got it's hands on it, and the only forum I still visit regularly at DAZ is the Bryce Discussion forum. It's amazing how much I've learned from David Brinnen and Horo, who have some of the greatest Bryce products I've ever seen in their stores there.

It's David's showing off his abstracts that got me started trying them.

I took a look at that Bryce tutorial, and it seems that we can reproduce that effect in just about any 3d app that supports rotational arrays, like Blender! I don't see what would prevent us from doing that same thing here in Blender with a few Array modifiers. Has anyone ever tried it yet? Bryce uses a very old fashioned raytrace engine, so rendering can be done with Blender Internal, and Cycles wouldn't even be needed for that style of render.

I don't know if Lux has seen that image yet, but if he's reading this, take a look at that deviant art link Lobo posted of the Bryce tutorial. There doesn't seem to be anything there we couldn't reproduce in Blender, or is there?

Sorry I'm late in writing this but thank you so much for creating this and for sharing it with us!

Thanks for the tutorial link Lobo, I'll have to check that out.

I did check old uploads to my site, and I did my first Bryce abstract in 2012, and all the others in 2013, so NOT last year. ~ROFL~

maxxxmodelz posted at 9:07AM Fri, 28 October 2016 - #4288035

I took a look at that Bryce tutorial, and it seems that we can reproduce that effect in just about any 3d app that supports rotational arrays, like Blender! I don't see what would prevent us from doing that same thing here in Blender with a few Array modifiers. Has anyone ever tried it yet? Bryce uses a very old fashioned raytrace engine, so rendering can be done with Blender Internal, and Cycles wouldn't even be needed for that style of render.

I don't know if Lux has seen that image yet, but if he's reading this, take a look at that deviant art link Lobo posted of the Bryce tutorial. There doesn't seem to be anything there we couldn't reproduce in Blender, or is there?

Sardi Pax has a very interesting tutorial about how to make a true animated Kaleidoscope using Blender physics simulation to mimic the real world effect. Have a look at that here: https://youtu.be/Qm24ep6-i4Y

The Bryce tutorial that Lobo used to create his wonderful image is using an optical trick with reflections and camera perspective, which can be easily reproduced in Blender as well, especially with Cycles. Using Rendered View, Cycles will allow you to see the results directly in the viewport before final rendering. As a very quick and primitive test, I simply added a large cylinder to the default cube scene in Blender, rotated it 90 degrees, and changed the material to a mirror glossy finish. Then I changed the default cube in the scene to red (just so we can see the results), positioned my camera to view directly down the center of the cylinder, and played with perspective a little. Then I switched to rendered view, and here's the result...

Disregard the poor quality of the screencap, but you can clearly see the single red cube in the center is mirrored around the sides of the cylinder. The cylinder only has one loop of very long polygons. Moving the camera or the cube even slightly produces different effects. So the technique will work in just about any raytrace engine.

Very cool render by the way, Lobo.

Thank you John.

My major disappointment with Bryce and this render I was limited by my render size to 1280 x 720 for some very odd reason when I tried for a large image size Bryce either froze up or crashed and this is what I noticed I know Bryce is not a 64 bit app but last night doing some renders and I use to Render to disk all the time in my old system and never came across this issue before where the CPU heated up to temps above 80 degrees when I redid the render and used normal rendering mode at a lower resolution than what I was wanting then CPU temps were around high 60's found this to be very odd. I tested my system with renders from Blender and Poser and even Daz Studio rendering out large files and nothing like this happened but both Poser & Daz Studio both are 64 bit. If I can do the same thing in Blender it would be really a boon in the right direction since I do not see Bryce being developed any further than it is currently is.

Windows 10 Pro 64-bit

CPU Intel Core i7 6700K @ 4.00GHz

RAM 64.0GB Dual-Channel @ 1066MHz

Motherboard Gigabyte Technology Co. Ltd. Z170X-Gaming 7

Graphics 6144MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti (Gigabyte)

Lobo3433 posted at 10:36AM Mon, 31 October 2016 - #4288138

Thank you John.

My major disappointment with Bryce and this render I was limited by my render size to 1280 x 720 for some very odd reason when I tried for a large image size Bryce either froze up or crashed and this is what I noticed I know Bryce is not a 64 bit app but last night doing some renders and I use to Render to disk all the time in my old system and never came across this issue before where the CPU heated up to temps above 80 degrees when I redid the render and used normal rendering mode at a lower resolution than what I was wanting then CPU temps were around high 60's found this to be very odd. I tested my system with renders from Blender and Poser and even Daz Studio rendering out large files and nothing like this happened but both Poser & Daz Studio both are 64 bit. If I can do the same thing in Blender it would be really a boon in the right direction since I do not see Bryce being developed any further than it is currently is.

Windows 10 Pro 64-bit

CPU Intel Core i7 6700K @ 4.00GHz

RAM 64.0GB Dual-Channel @ 1066MHz

Motherboard Gigabyte Technology Co. Ltd. Z170X-Gaming 7

Graphics 6144MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti (Gigabyte)

The fact it hasn't been ported to a 64 bit platform will no doubt have a negative impact on performance in a significant way, considering today's advances in hardware and software rendering. I would say with confidence whatever workflow you have in Bryce can be reproduced in other 3d packages like Blender, and you would probably experience a boost in performance as well.

I had bought up the issue with in the Bryce forum https://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/?thread_id=2907328 and there was one option that another member mentioned that made a bit of a difference but not a substantial enough to address my concern I just felt that the spike in Temp during a final render of my scene which took about 10 minutes was accceptable and if it would have been harmful to the CPU luckily when I built this new system I went with a high water cooling set up but I do agree need to learn how to achieve the same or similar rendered style with in Blender where it can take full advantage of my hardware

Thanks, Luxxeon!

Awesome thread guys! So I made the model from Luxxeon tutorial, then tried doing what that Bryce tutorial was doing in Blender. Didn't come out as good as Lobo's render, but it's a start. I think my problem is lack of knowledge on how to use the array modifier properly. But it's a cool effect I thought. I'm using the Cycels renderer here, and took a snapshot of the viewport like Luxxeon did above.

Still a long way to go, but I'll play around with array more.

Sorry for the late reply, David. That looks very interesting, I like how you've intertwined the object in a cluster. Cool effect so far.

LuxXeon posted at 9:48PM Wed, 16 November 2016 - #4290072

Sorry for the late reply, David. That looks very interesting, I like how you've intertwined the object in a cluster. Cool effect so far.

Hey thanks, lux! I've been playing around some more with it, but haven't really figured out how Lobo gets that kind of color flow in his models from Bryce. I'm not too keen on the materials in Cycles yet either. One step at a time I guess. If I come up with something cool, I'll post it here. This is one of your best tutorials yet, I really love the look of this object by itself. Wish I was creatinve enough to think of a good use for it in a real scene, like how Lobo created that abstract with it.