In the right-click menu on (almost) any button is an “Online Manual” link. While useful, many of them don’t work – but that’s where you come in!
If you ever stumble upon any of these broken links, just let me know in this thread or in the comments below. It’ll show an error in the info bar similar to “No reference available ‘CyclesRenderSettings.seed’, Update info in ‘rna_wiki_reference.py’ or callback to bpy.utils.manual_map()”
In the next couple weeks I’ll be fixing as many as I can.
Want more free HDRIs? Check out my new dedicated website: HDRI Haven
I searched long and hard for a way to create these magical images that light your scenes for you, and I never once found any article or mention of the process in any of the Blender forums. Every time I saw a render using image based lighting (IBL), the artist had always found it on some website (and was usually accompanied by a complaint about how Blender doesn’t give you nice hard shadows).
I’m no expert in this matter, but due to the lack of information that can be found easily, I’d like to share the little that I do know with you.
So in this guide I’ll show you the basics, but it’s up to you and the rest of the community to find out by experience what is good or bad practice and when to ignore everything you’ve ever been taught.
Before this really does turn into a coder blog, here’s an update to my portfolio. It includes some new stuff I haven’t really shown online before.
In fact I bought a domain and wrote some really crappy html :)
I was wondering today about how feasible something like this is: A system that allows you to download and install an addon with the click of a button, as well as tell you if an update is available to something you already have installed and update that with one click as well.
It would theoretically use the SVN/Git collection of trunk and contrib* addons and periodically check if an update to those already in Blender is available. Additionally, it would fetch an external database of Addons that are not a part of trunk or contrib and show an entry for each of these just like any other addon, only instead of an ‘Enable’ check-box, you’d have a ‘Download and Install’ button.
This would fetch the addon from the server, downloading it to a temporary place, and install it for you. Simple yeah?
That much is easy, in fact it’s literally 3 lines of code. The problem with this idea is maintainability and flexibility. The whole point of it is to show a repository of addons from external sources, since trunk addons are already there and updated every release, and contrib ones come with most graphicall and build bot builds – however we still have to somehow control what addons are in this repository, allowing anyone and everyone to add to it would be messy and a serious security risk (imagine you enable a cool looking addon that promises a one-click character rig, only to find its a piece of malware with a keylogger).
Someone has to maintain this repository personally, which leaves the question of how best to do this with minimal regular effort? You could update it only once a week perhaps, but you still need a way to automatically go through the database of scripts and find out which has a newer version available. This means that for each addon you’ll need some custom method of checking for new versions, some developers will update the same file on a server, while others might increment a number and leave the old file in place (auto_tile_size_release_03.py for example)
(mockup)
I’m not the first to have this idea. Campbell wrote a primitive one a while ago, and Gaia Clary apparently as well. They encountered the same problems. The script itself is trivial, the maintainability is not.
I don’t often like to publicize these mad ideas of mine, they don’t normally lead to much, but this time I’d like to ask if you have any suggestions for me – how can I do this simply and only have maybe 20 minutes work per week on maintaining a database of addons? Should I store the addons on my own server, or rely on the original source? Perhaps only include those in the external column of the wiki page? What about asking developers to contribute to this repository and update it each time they release a new version? If so, how best would we combat low quality addons and potential security issues?
The UI mockup at the top of this post is a quick one – I’d still need to handle categories and such, and I might as well edit the existing UI instead of creating my own.
* The Trunk set of addons are those included in Blender by default, stuff like importers and the very useful ones such as Looptools and Node Efficiency Tools. The Contrib set is a collection of addons not included in the official release of Blender, but still officially approved by Blender devs and can be trusted that they’re pretty darn good.
For several months (more than a year even?) I’ve been trying on and off to find a way to create HDR panoramas. 360 degree equirectangular panoramic high dynamic range image, to use for lighting.
And recently I’ve finally had success o/
Might be because I’ve got a decent DSLR camera now, or simply that I understand the process a bit better. Either way, expect a whole bunch of these in the future, and some how-to’s (because “tutorial” is too mainstream) on how to make your own on a budget (or no budget at all).
For now, here’s my first successful one:
(preview)
Test render using only the HDR for lighting
Yes this is my lounge… and yes that is a cat.
One thing this tought me is to pay more attention to white balance. I figured I could just fix that in post, but it’s not as simple as that when theres about 120 images to edit and retain their raw color depth and exif data. The image is a bit more blue than it should be, but lesson learnt!
From the commit logs:
(r61178 – Lukas Toenne)
Removed the automatic “link swapping” feature from the node link operator: When a link was being dragged to an already connected input, the existing links were shifted to the next free socket.This was originally intended as a way to speed up workflow for math and mix nodes, but more often than not it just gets in the way. Most binary (or n-ary) functions are not even commutative, i.e. changing the order of sockets does not usually produce the correct result.
Also this includes the more common case where one actually wants to replace a socket, which then requires a second click to remove the shifted connection.
All in all this is not a helpful feature.
I think we can all agree this is a change for the better :)
Sure there are some times where it’s useful, but it’s mostly just annoying. If you really miss it, fear not, in the next release of Node Wrangler there’ll be a feature for all you lazy bastards.