@fantasybooks - great question, I've wondered that for years and can't wait for someone who knows for sure to answer.

I always thought the difference was that 3D meant it was mostly created in a 3D rendering program (DAZ Studio, Poser, Blender, etc...) and 2D meant it was mostly done in either a traditional two-dimensional medium (paint, pen and ink, etc.) or a digital version of one of those (painted in Photoshop, Krita, etc.). That's just my personal interpretation though and if you look at past contests it mostly seems to be true, but sometimes there are obvious 3D renders in the 2D category, so that doesn't seem to be an absolute rule. I still use that as my own rule for entries though. I personally would not enter a render in the 2D contest unless I had pretty much completely painted over it.

I think it is a matter of "what medium was most of the work done in." Just my guess though since no real guidelines have ever been posted that I can find.

Can you post screenshot of an example? Or a link to a .Blend file where you have the issue so people can take a look and offer more specific advice? It's hard to imagine what it might be without seeing an example. All I can think of is maybe you have a Subdivision modifier on it in Blender which is not exporting, so when you import into Poser it is no longer rounding the mesh.

I'd be really surprised if Poser is adjusting the mesh in any way, although I haven't used it since Poser 4, so what do I know?

It never even occurred to me that you _could _vote for yourself! I've been missing an opportunity.

Thank you Denesia! Glad to hear I didn't break anything.

Their books are on sale on Amazon all the time too and often have an additional Prime discount - I got a bunch of them several months ago for around $15 each. Just be careful because there are several editions of some of them with slight changes in the name but almost no actual text changes - if the description sounds like it might be the same thing as another one, it probably is, but it won't straight up say that.

Also, most of the "cookbook" ones seem to be good resources if you are just looking for a solution for something, but they rarely explain they "why" - they are very much of the "click this,", "enter 5," "click this" school, so they are not good learning tools for the beginner in my experience.

I'm not sure what is in it exactly but this one https://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/liquid/50248 says it includes 50 different .OBJ water models - maybe one of them looks like drool?

Miss B posted at 7:17PM Wed, 05 October 2016 - #4285668

Hey Mark, I didn't know you used Blender. Fancy seeing you here.

Anyway, thanks for testing the .SVG, since I haven't used Illustrator in years, and I've only just recently downloaded Inkscape, I haven't tried exporting a UV map in .SVG format.

I think you're right Lobo. If enough people complain (or suggest) to the Blender developers that it should be changed, maybe it would get changed. I've never seen another piece of software that's compatible with more than one format, actually behave that way. They all change the extension according to the format you choose, and yes, it's annoying.

Hi Miss B! Yes - I started playing around with Blender near the beginning of this year and now flip back and forth between Blender and Carrara about 50/50.

No - it just appends the extension for .svg as well, it doesn't remove the .png. I just tried it now.

TheBryster posted at 7:01PM Sun, 25 September 2016 - #4284785

Sorry if I'm stating the obvious, but don't you need to unzip it first?

No, you shouldn't have to. Usually with Blender add-ons if you use the "install from file" option in the user preferences Blender will unzip everything and put it where it goes. I just tried it with the Mitsuba exporter though and it doesn't work,exactly as the OP reported. The instructions for the add-on say to install it manually so I guess the normal process doesn't work with this add-on.

Here's the relevant section of the instructions:

Unpack this file and move the resulting mitsuba folder into your Blender scripts/addons folder. After restarting Blender and enabling the plugin in the addons preferences, you should be able to select Mitsuba as the currently active renderer. In the main scene tab, you will need to set the path to the main renderer executable (mitsuba.exe on Windows, Mitsuba.app/Contents/MacOS/mitsuba on MacOS, /usr/bin/mitsuba on Linux).

This process does not seem to work either though (at least in Blender 2.77), so I have no idea how you get this add-on installed.

For the collisions part: Are you actually using particles for the simulation or are you using a fluid sim?

If you are using particles then you need to set the cup as a collision object.

If you are using a fluid physics then the cup needs to be set as an obstacle in the physics/fluid settings. Maybe this video can help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgwKPP2ZEjI. At about 10 minutes he starts working on the actual fluid sim (before that is just basic lighting setup) and at 17:00 is where he starts setting up the glass that the water will be going into.

For the color part: I don't know about coloring particles directly - I have just been using objects as the particle (like in my screenshot above where I used spheres) and every tutorial I have seen using colored particles has also used an object as the particle. Maybe you can color a particle directly without it needing to be an object in Blender Internal, but I am not sure.

I believe you need Digital Carver's "Ground Control" plugin to use DEM files. I looked into it a little bit a few months ago but I've never managed to even successfully download a DEM file (every site I found for them was either defunct, very confusingly setup or required a login) so I never bought the plugin and don't know how hard to use it is.

I am far from an expert on particles considering it is an area of Blender I've only just begun playing with in the last couple weeks but if you are just trying to keep particles from going through something, then under physics you can just set that object to be a collision object. Here's a screenshot where I have two planes in the scene, one is emitting particles (just using some basic UV spheres I have on another layer as the particles so that it is easier to see) and the other is set as a collision object. See how the particles are not passing through the bottom plane? Is that the effect you are going for?

Just to add to Keppel's answer above, my apologies if this is too basic and you knew this already but you need to be in the compositor - your screenshot shows a material node, not a compositing one,so the defocus node will not be available since it is a post-render effect. Click the icon that looks like two pictures where I drew an arrow below.

You can do it "in camera" as well by using the settings in the camera (see the box I drew on your screenshot below) by adjusting the f-stop there. This will add DOF blurring at render time (but will also slow your render down by a large amount and possibly add a lot of noise unless you let it go for a much higher number of samples).

jcarp posted at 5:22PM Thu, 08 September 2016 - #4281808

As for finding a comfortable position, if you have a small tablet, have you tried your lap?

Ha! I[m not sure if you were joking or not, but I tried it and that is actually a big improvement. :) Thanks for that!

As Antaran said, hair is not really the best way to create grass but you can grow hair directly on a terrain - just make sure you select "Geometry Based." Also keep in mind your scene size - in a Large scene 30cm high grass is going to impossible to see - you would need hundreds of millions of hairs to start to notice the effect. Note that the hair shader is hugely important to create a decent effect - you need variation in color and length, a tiny amount of frizz and wave, some clumping and a little bit of density variation (I didn't use that last one in this example). The hair scale is also important - for this example I used the Very Large thickness and in the shader I set the root to 100% and the tip to 40%.

Below is an example of hair-based grass on a Medium sized terrain. Note that I only added grass in the area right in front of the camera so that I only needed to use 25,000 hairs instead of whatever crazy amount I would need for the whole terrain. If I'd been doing this for a render I would have covered slightly more of the terrain and used a better shader on the more distant terrain so it looked more like the grass continued on. I would have spent more time of the hair shader too - I spent longer editing this post than I did setting up and rendering my example. :)