MiikaHweb Blog -> Blender

I have added even more features to my Blender SVN pages.

Commit messages now display the authors full name instead of cryptic username, revisions in commit messages are now shown as links and there is a "changed paths" list on each revision page. Additionally some Statistics pages now have new file related charts. E.g. developer pages show most edited files and number of added, deleted and modified files.

Commit Logs are also available as RSS feeds in case you want to follow Blender commits more closely. You can subscribe All Commits, Trunk Commits or commits from a specific branch from any branches' statistics page.

I have been updating some parts of MiikaHweb in the past few days.

First of all: after gathering dust for nearly five years, the Mobile section is finally up to date again.

Basically it's a listing of mobile apps I have found useful. New section features all popular mobile platforms: Android, iOS, Symbian and Windows Phone, although Android is the main platform as I'm using it myself.


I also did some small improvements on Blender SVN statistics pages. I suppose most useful tweak are new Blender Tracker links on Commit Log pages. Now you can view the related bug report/patch simply by clicking the hash number on commit message (if any).

This time I was experimenting with idea of Dynamic Paint being able to emit particles. Since this isn't possible with any official release of Blender I coded a basic system to try it out.

Here is the result. You see particles "painting" holes into the wall, and those painted holes creating more particles:


However this is just a highly experimental hack built on top of Blender's current particle system, so I'm not going to release the code.

But you can take this as a preview of what's coming whenever the new particle system becomes available. Then I'll start working on Dynamic Paint support right away. :)

A new MiikaHweb section "Blender SVN Statistics" is now online.

It shows real-time statistics about Blender development based on SVN commits. You can view charts based on releases, branches, developers or date.

Statistics section is still under development so some things are likely to change during upcoming days. Anyway, I hope some of you will find this useful or interesting. :)

Once again I was playing with Dynamic Paint eventually ending up with two new demo videos.

Dynamic Paint - Snow Test:

This was a simple experiment trying to make realistically gathering snow in Blender.

To do the effect I used an "incremental" displace surface with very low negative "displace factor" value. This made snow to slowly increase displace on areas where particles touched the mesh. Then I just added another white paint surface on top of it.

Snow surface is a bit too bumpy due to over amplified effect of individual snow flakes. (To not have to render 10 minutes of snowing. :)

I suppose another better approach would have been to actually use fluid particles of high viscosity. Though bake times would for sure have been longer than current 2 min for 1000 frames.


Dynamic Paint - Rain Ripples:

This time I was using Dynamic Paint waves to replicate rain ripples on a mirror calm water surface. I think it worked out quite nicely and it didn't really require any more work than slightly tweaking wave surface parameters. It's all texturing and bump maps so the water mesh is just a single quad.


To rant about something: particle system was really giving me a headache. Like usually, I had to use particle colliders of animated "permeability" to regulate the emission speed. Due to lack of reactor particles or texture/weight controlled emission it was impossible to create any kind of splash at points where rain drop hit the water. Not to mention two new bugs I encountered...

So I'm really looking forward to upcoming node based particles system by Lukas Tönne. :)

Posting some more awesome Dynamic Paint usages picked from YouTube/Vimeo. It's always interesting to see what people are creating with it. :)

Apatosaurus+DynamicPaint-Blender2.6 by blenderguy2008 (Footstep displace):


VisFX Blender Project 5: Water "Blending" by magiciandude (The pond water motion):


Burning paper in Blender by Linny:


Lets Paint!! by Michael Fox:

Yesterday I decided to try combine some of the upcoming Blender 2.61 features in a single scene.

After some experimenting it turned into a simple ship animation. You can check the result here:



I used ocean modifier to create the general sea motion and Dynamic Paint to generate the ship trail: A wave surface for the wake itself and a basic "Paint" surface as a foam mask.

Finally, the animation was rendered with the Cycles render engine over night. (Couldn't fit camera tracker into this test... :s)

The ship model was downloaded from Blend Swap. ("Tall Ship" by Natholas)

Now that the new Cycles render engine is finally merged into Blender trunk, I updated my build bot configuration to support CUDA. CUDA is a GPU computing architecture that is able to render tens of times faster than with CPU.

So if you have a modern nVidia graphics card, download the latest build from my Blender Builds -section and try it out.

One of the best ways to test Dynamic Paint stability and workflow is to actually use it to do all kind of test demos. Yesterday I was playing with idea of laser beam digging into ground, eventually it turned out to be cool enough to post online. :D



This scene combines all my favorite Blender tools: Dynamic Paint, smoke simulator and particles. I used a Dynamic Paint canvas with multiple surfaces to get results for displace, color trail and fading glow. Laser beam is simply a cylinder with volumetric high emission material.

Now it's possible to set Dynamic Paint brushes to "smudge" existing paint as they move. By functionality it's very similar to smudge/smear tools found in typical 2D image manipulation programs. This feature is part of my "velocity brush" experiments from last week.

Here is a video of basic smudge:


And now using a particle system as a brush:



Other velocity based new features include possibility to use brush speed to define it's influence and color, and to make canvas velocity or acceleration to affect "drip effect".

Though, I really can't think of any situation where velocity painting would be essential, but hopefully someone will find it useful! :)