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I want to make a fade in/out effect in 2D animation and used to import images as planes, but tutorials about fade out effect are describing transition between two materials, and it looks like a whole new level in the Blender handling - can I make it in some fast simple way? (previously I've made separete movie clips and added fading between them in a dedicated movie editor).

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A castle for a King of clickbait titles :D

 

That's a 60-minute commentary over heavily cut and sped up footage. Decent work, although it won't make me change my mind over Blender (i.e. stay away from it).

 

I use Modo most of the time but I don't stay away from Blender, specially when it has good animation/md5 support for idtech 4 and it's free and powerful.

 

IMO the only reason to stay with 3DMax, even Modo, Maya, Lightwave, etc is like on your case and mine, we just don't want to start from scratch and learn a new tool, we got accustomed to them (Modo is changing so much that is almost a new tool tho) but anyone starting modeling now, in my humble opinion, is pretty much dumb going to any of the paid tools, i love Modo and i would be sad if it died one day (it was close) but i'm also a realist, when Blender does exactly the same thing for free and the interface is miles better than it was before and improving all the time, is becoming very hard to justify Modos price. Specially when you have low cash and want to create a film studio, with Blender you can have anyone use it and not pay a dime, with the others, depending on contracts you could end to have to pay a fee/licence for every artist using the tool at your company.

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Because of the workflow, naming conventions, and overall handling – everything is looks so different from standards set by the likes of 3ds Max. I can always switch to something like Maya and have fairly mild learning curve. With Blender it feels like learning 3d modelling from the beginning, which is something I don't have time for. And that's probably why Blender didn't become industry standard anywhere. It's a great tool on its own, but I wouldn't want to switch to it, if I can use Max or Maya.

 

You know what? I totally understand, and comprehend that, and feel the same about it. In the end though, one tool is free, the other costs a couple of hundreds every year for the sub. And, that's basically the difference for me, and probably a lot of other hobbyists.

 

Not that i ever made much in Blender, except for taking a look. :D Surely reflects my experience though, that the free, and often open source tools just don't give you the same user experience. Well, how would they? The one is made with usability in mind, and delivered to a professional audience, which pays a lot of money for the software, and has the pressure of competing on a market where users simply won't accept bad user experience, instabilities, and bugs, because they also make a living working with the software, and the other is made by people who may even work part time at it, or a very small team, which might get enough money from fundings to develop the software on a regular base. I mean, seriously, who expects it to be on the same level? Can't be, won't be. Fair enough, though. I think Blender is a nice piece of software for free.

Edited by chakkman
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I want to make a fade in/out effect in 2D animation and used to import images as planes, but tutorials about fade out effect are describing transition between two materials, and it looks like a whole new level in the Blender handling - can I make it in some fast simple way? (previously I've made separete movie clips and added fading between them in a dedicated movie editor).

 

Not sure I completely understand what you want here. You are talking about the Sequencer, right? You can easily animate visibility (of a clip) using keyframes, and there are transition effects available (between clips). If you wanna apply a gradual transition/fading accross several "clips" (I assume your animation is comprised of a number of separate images), then you got me. But a possible solution would be to first render the two portions of the animation you want to transition, import them back (replacing the needed image frames) and then use the transition effect on them.

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@HMart and Chakkman – I still think Blender is a great tool, especially since it's free, and when you're a hobbyist or if you're just starting out. But, unless, like you said, someone is starting a company from ground up, it's not the best choice, if you ever going to go professional. No film or game studios, even indies, use Blender. Mostly because all the workflows and pipelines and plugins or external tools, and all the file handling relies on standards set by companies like Autodesk. Film studios use mostly Maya, Mari for some stuff, sometimes also Houdini. All indie game studios I know use Maya or Maya LT, since it's much cheaper.

 

If you're not working as part of a pipeline, and you don't hand over your work to someone else down the line, or you're just starting an independent company and you plan to make all your workflows from the ground up, then sure, Blender is a great idea.

Edited by Judith
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Right, so Eevee is pretty radical, but one thing it cannot do is clip the specular effect. Let's say there are two objects, one in front of the other, and then a light behind the first one. Although the first object will block shadows from casting onto the second object, the specular effect passes right through. Needless to say, this looks bad.

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The one is made with usability in mind, and delivered to a professional audience, which pays a lot of money for the software, and has the pressure of competing on a market where users simply won't accept bad user experience, instabilities, and bugs, because they also make a living working with the software, and the other is made by people who may even work part time at it, or a very small team, which might get enough money from fundings to develop the software on a regular base. I mean, seriously, who expects it to be on the same level? Can't be, won't be. Fair enough, though. I think Blender is a nice piece of software for free.

This is true. Although I would say free tools are also made with usability in mind, as many or some of the people who develop it are also actively using it. I always thought the most influential difference to the efficacy of the tools might be in that the one that costs money is made by people working full time on it, from the planning department to the development departments, so the level of commitment is much higher. Although I would agree that the fact that their livinghood depends on excelling on the results makes it also majorly influential.

 

I would say that free apps are also naturally competitive, though. They may be free and the developers may not be getting anything from it, but the success and continuity of the tool hinges on it being capable of competing with the paid ones. And there's also a whole bunch of people making money around it who depend on it, and its in their best interest that the tool is and remains a competent one.

 

However, I think in the case of Blender, there's the perhaps detrimental factor that it tries to be good at everything, and I think we all know how that usually goes... jack of all trades master of none. I would say it's actually surprisingly good for a jack of all trades. Well, I'm only mostly experienced in modeling, not really in animating or any of the rest. I delved into camera tracking at some point (and loved the whole thing!) and Blender seemed pretty competent at it.

 

My biggest peeve is really the UI... Especially the Tool Shelf (T) and the Properties panel (N). I'm also not too fond of context sensitive UIs, tbh.

 

Blender 2.8 is getting my mouth watering a bit though.

Edited by Skaruts

My FMs: By The Cookbook

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  • 3 weeks later...

Right, so Eevee is pretty radical, but one thing it cannot do is clip the specular effect. Let's say there are two objects, one in front of the other, and then a light behind the first one. Although the first object will block shadows from casting onto the second object, the specular effect passes right through. Needless to say, this looks bad.

Can you show an example of what you mean?

It's only a model...

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Can you show an example of what you mean?

I was actually wrong about this. It does clip the specularity. But there is an issue where lights clip through geometry, and that must have been what I saw. The easiest way to see this is to create a simple cube with a hole in the side (for a window). Now add a sun to the scene and aim it through the window. You will notice that the light is bleeding in through the corners of the wall.

 

Might be able to stop it by tweaking the bias settings of the sun, but I've been unable to eliminate it completely.

Edited by kano
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  • 4 weeks later...

yay, unlimited nested objects - DR could do with something like that.

 

Seems like there's a lot of improvements for scene and movie rendering, but only a few interface changes for modelling for games.

I like the full-on dark mode. DR could do with something like that. It can be painful to use sometimes, from a dimly lit cave.

Edited by teh_saccade
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-------

Edited by Anderson

"I really perceive that vanity about which most men merely prate — the vanity of the human or temporal life. I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary — and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain — that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future — that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves — nor are we with our posterity. I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass."...

- 2 July 1844 letter to James Russell Lowell from Edgar Allan Poe.

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I too am frustrated by the crusade to fix stuff that wasn't broken. I mean, sure, the UI pre-2.5 was a nightmare as a newcomer, but after that it was good and easy to pick up. With 2.8 they changed all kinds of basic shortcuts like fly mode. At least there is an option to use an old interface.

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I've been out of the loop for several Blender versions, but I really like the fact that you can now bake normal maps entirely within Blender itself, without having to worry about cumbersome external tools like Doom 3's "renderbump" command. You can use this either to bake a high-poly mesh into a low-poly UV map, or create a normal map for a flat tileable texture.

 

 

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  • 2 months later...

I've been using Blender 2.80 for a while now. One of the good features is the ability to edit multiple objects at the same time. It's often useful to have vertices from different objects lined up, and it's especially useful when doing UV mapping with a single material for all objects because overlaps can be avoided.

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