Show off your KSP Blender Renders!

[esinohio]

The ground shakes as the mighty Saturbo V lifts our intrepid trio upward into history.

Find this awesome craft file designed by GusTurbo and forum thread here.

[Sma]

Nice! Though, shuttle era launch platform with Kerpollo era rocket....tsk tsk...lol j/k

Great work on the flames, something I'm going to have to work on soon. Though I'm going to be busy the next few days, moving into a house we just bought so I won't have time to work on anything unfortunately, but I'll be trying to model some of the buildings from around Kerbal KSC for my next scene. Was just playing around earlier trying to see how the brick texture would come out from around the tracking station, no results to show yet though. I might post some renders as I get certain things done though. That is of course assuming it doesn't drive me mad haha.

[esinohio]

A quick one I threw together to see how the desert camo procedural texture I found would work on one of Zekes big tanks. Aside from an odd scaling issue on the smaller panels I think it came out ok.

[Sma]

A quick one I threw together to see how the desert camo procedural texture I found would work on one of Zekes big tanks. Aside from an odd scaling issue on the smaller panels I think it came out ok.

http://i.imgur.com/f5tFeou.png

I like it. With the scaling thing, I wonder if that is a UV issue? I'm still pretty new to uv unwrapping, so I come across things like this sometimes, or like one tutorial said something about constraining the uv mesh to the image bounds, but when I did that I couldn't scale it in X and Y separately.

Also, I wonder if there is a way to do dynamic sand, so that say, if you wanted to take the time to animate something like that, or a rover running about it could leave behind tracks and/or kick up sand. I suppose it would be faster though with an animated normal map for the tire/track pattern and a particle/smoke emitter for the dust kicked up.

Wonder why we're the only ones rendering things, or at least the only ones posting them here lately lol

[esinohio]

I like it. With the scaling thing, I wonder if that is a UV issue? I'm still pretty new to uv unwrapping, so I come across things like this sometimes, or like one tutorial said something about constraining the uv mesh to the image bounds, but when I did that I couldn't scale it in X and Y separately.

Also, I wonder if there is a way to do dynamic sand, so that say, if you wanted to take the time to animate something like that, or a rover running about it could leave behind tracks and/or kick up sand. I suppose it would be faster though with an animated normal map for the tire/track pattern and a particle/smoke emitter for the dust kicked up.

Wonder why we're the only ones rendering things, or at least the only ones posting them here lately lol

That particular texture is like a diffuse or glossy texture, no UV mapping required. Its completely generated via procedure. So I'm guessing I'll have to make single user copies of that texture for the smaller plates. Then dive into the code a bit to see if I can adjust its scaling. Fun fun! lol

Doing the tire tracks is a bit tedious but I'm learning. Making a displacement map to show ruts in the ground is easy enough to do but I've had some issues getting the ruts to display the tire tracks properly. So the idea is to use the displacement map to change the ground mesh with ruts from the tracks. Then where you have ruts appearing apply a texture that further displaces the area thus giving the appearance of textured tracks. I know it involves using a mask similar to the one you make for the displacement. Just need to break down and figure it out in cycles.

Using dynamic painting would be another way of doing this that might work. Certainly would make more sense for an animation. I might look into this method to see if I can get it to work. Getting the tracks to show should be easy using dynamic paint but I'm wondering how you would get the displacement to go along with it? Wouldn't the tracks just appear as flat textures on the sand? Even with a normal map applied it will look wonky without a displacement to go with it.

As for others not rendering I'm not sure. Starwhip stopping just stinks I loved his shot setups and backgrounds. They looked more like art designed for big posters.

Oh well, to YouTube with me for more tutorials!!!!

[Starwhip]

I'll be back to rendering eventually. I like your style, too. I've never been that involved in cycles, which obviously you are.

[esinohio]

After some tinkering around I think I managed to make some passable tracks in sand.

Of course the colors are a bit askew there but that is easily fixed. Just wondering if those look like passable, if somewhat deep, tracks in sand. Hoping to cobble together some interesting surface rover scenes but without any tracks its just not working.

[Sma]

After some tinkering around I think I managed to make some passable tracks in sand.

http://i.imgur.com/qaS4gGm.png

Of course the colors are a bit askew there but that is easily fixed. Just wondering if those look like passable, if somewhat deep, tracks in sand. Hoping to cobble together some interesting surface rover scenes but without any tracks its just not working.

Hmmm, not bad, but yeh, a bit deep. SOmething is off though and I can't quite put a finger on it. Though maybe with stronger shadows and objects in the scene, and of course the camera angle and maybe it could work. Likely better than i could do in the same amount of time lol.

Just curious as to what you used to do the deformation? Not exactly related to this but wonder if a wacom would help with texture/vertex painting. I have one that was given to me but never really got around to using it. Of course it takes some getting use to, drawing in one place and having the changes happen in a different place.

[esinohio]

For the deformation I just made a quick and dirty mask using texture painting onto a blank image. Makes a nice black and white image that serves as the displacement map and the texture mask. Any white area will be displaced falling off to no displacement on the black.

What I'm missing now, and what I think your seeing or not seeing in the image above, is actual displacement within the tracks themselves. That simple addition would add the depth to match the normal map on the track texture and add all the proper shadowing. That is going to involve deforming the mesh only in the masked area. Not really sure how to pull that off. Feels like I'm so close!!!

*edit .. Vertex groups... the answer is vertex groups. It was your dynamic paint reference above that jogged it. The dynamic paint adds vertices into and out of the groups dynamically. Since I'm doing a static picture I just need to add the displaced area into its own vertex group. Then add the second displacement to it. I think that is it!

Edited March 20, 2015 by esinohio

[Sma]

For the deformation I just made a quick and dirty mask using texture painting onto a blank image. Makes a nice black and white image that serves as the displacement map and the texture mask. Any white area will be displaced falling off to no displacement on the black.

What I'm missing now, and what I think your seeing or not seeing in the image above, is actual displacement within the tracks themselves. That simple addition would add the depth to match the normal map on the track texture and add all the proper shadowing. That is going to involve deforming the mesh only in the masked area. Not really sure how to pull that off. Feels like I'm so close!!!

*edit .. Vertex groups... the answer is vertex groups. It was your dynamic paint reference above that jogged it. The dynamic paint adds vertices into and out of the groups dynamically. Since I'm doing a static picture I just need to add the displaced area into its own vertex group. Then add the second displacement to it. I think that is it!

Woo glad I could help lol. I was thinking maybe something about a mix node, and use the tread pattern (or a normal map version of the tread pattern) and plug it into a factor slot on something, but maybe that wouldn't work as well. Whatever it was that Andrew Price did in the grass tutorial to have the dirt path through the grass.

[esinohio]

Woo glad I could help lol. I was thinking maybe something about a mix node, and use the tread pattern (or a normal map version of the tread pattern) and plug it into a factor slot on something, but maybe that wouldn't work as well. Whatever it was that Andrew Price did in the grass tutorial to have the dirt path through the grass.

Wooo hooo!!!! It worked!!! Weight painted the vertices in the tracks into their own group. That solved everything!! Now I just need to track down or make a decent tracked vehicle texture and I'll be able to do decent surface shots. Thanks again for that memory jog Sma!!!

[Sma]

Wooo hooo!!!! It worked!!! Weight painted the vertices in the tracks into their own group. That solved everything!! Now I just need to track down or make a decent tracked vehicle texture and I'll be able to do decent surface shots. Thanks again for that memory jog Sma!!!

No Problem! I was thinking MAYBE you could some how use the actual texture from the wheel parts, or in the case of tank treads, use their texture and maybe some gimp/photoshop magic.

[Rareden]

Oh! Oh! Me first!

My computer slaved for eight hours over this image. 3000 x 4000 pixels and 3000 samples per pixel.

I have no idea what it'll look like in this post.

Here's the actual link: http://i.imgur.com/AYi2emW.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/AYi2emW.jpg

8hours? how, whats your pc specs

[Starwhip]

8hours? how, whats your pc specs

As in, how did you render it so fast, or how did it take so long?

Anyways, it's an HP Pavillion laptop. Specs:

PROCESSOR: Intel Core i7-4510U CPU @ 2.00GHz 2.60GHz (Not sure what the second number means...)

GRAPHICS: Intel HD Graphics 4400

RAM: 6074 MB (6.074 GB)

I also do some "Post-Processing" in GIMP.

The original image looked like this:

Maybe that'll explain it.

[Rareden]

As in, how did you render it so fast, or how did it take so long?

Anyways, it's an HP Pavillion laptop. Specs:

PROCESSOR: Intel Core i7-4510U CPU @ 2.00GHz 2.60GHz (Not sure what the second number means...)

GRAPHICS: Intel HD Graphics 4400

RAM: 6074 MB (6.074 GB)

I also do some "Post-Processing" in GIMP.

The original image looked like this:

http://i.imgur.com/VOx5awo.jpg

Maybe that'll explain it.

how long, and yea now i see why it did, but i dont know how efficient cycles is which could have had something to do with it.

Edited March 21, 2015 by Rareden

[Sma]

how long, and yea now i see why it did, but i dont know how efficient cycles is which could have had something to do with it.

It all depends on how manly light bounces you have set, and the number of samples you do. The default blender cycles is usually pretty low, even in some of the "stock" presets. Sometimes you can get away with 200, but I'll do 500 or higher usually.

[Newt]

How many samples you need depends what you are doing, that is, how complex of a scene you are doing, as well as what shaders you are using. I have often gotten by (on simple, single object planet renders with no atmosphere), with just 36-72 samples.

Some materials take rather a lot to process. If you do subsurface-scattering (which no one here has shown use of as far as I know), it takes rather a lot longer, than simply diffuse and/or glossy shaders, even for the same object.

Edited March 22, 2015 by Newt
integrated information better.

[Rareden]

How many samples you need depends what you are doing, that is, how complex of a scene you are doing, as well as what shaders you are using. I have often gotten by (on simple, single object planet renders with no atmosphere), with just 36-72 samples.

Some materials take rather a lot to process. If you do subsurface-scattering (which no one here has shown use of as far as I know), it takes rather a lot longer, than simply diffuse and/or glossy shaders, even for the same object.

still surprised it takes so long for 500 samples, majority of shots i do for nass have 1500-2000 or more and they usually take 2-4mins a frame depending on scene complexity, is cycles CPU based?

Edited March 23, 2015 by Rareden

[Newt]

Cycles is CPU driven by default. Alas, at the moment, only Nvidia cards are supported from what I can tell. You can change the setting to use it in User Preferences/System. The menu is in the lower left.

If you are doing animations, you should also be able to speed things along by caching the BVH setup (in the right hand render menu under performance). By changing the tile size, you should also be able to improve performance. For the latter there is a tool that should automatically do this: 'Auto Render Tile Size'. You can enable it in User Preferences/addons, but I am not sure of how much of an improvement it gives quite.

As for overall efficiency of the engine, it seems to be improving, although still somewhat slow in many ways, although I am unaware of good, current benchmarks to compare with other software. There are many little tricks you can do to make it faster by tweaking settings but usually those come at the cost of realism.

What exactly is it that you are trying to render? Or are you just experimenting?

[Rareden]

Cycles is CPU driven by default

What exactly is it that you are trying to render? Or are you just experimenting?

I dont use blender or cycles, i was just wondering why it took so long for a reasonably simple scene to render

[esinohio]

I dont use blender or cycles, i was just wondering why it took so long for a reasonably simple scene to render

Cycles render engine configuration is almost an art unto itself. The major problem is the shear number of settings that need to be tweaked in order to get it working efficiently. Add to that those settings seem to be almost haphazardly littered about though your various settings dialog boxes. Now that you've found those settings your usually in for some Google legwork for each individual setting because they are usually very poorly titled and the tooltips are usually horrible as well. Worse is that after doing said Google legwork you'll find a good deal of conjecture seems to swirl around properly setting this all up. I guess arcane would be a good way to describe getting it setup. Blender definitely lacks the polish that your used to in 3DSMax, Maya, etc.

But after you get things all tweaked for GPU rendering the render times fall dramatically. Throw in a newer model NVIDIA card with a high number of CUDA cores and your in business. Renders that could take hours are down to minutes. Its that dramatic. Unless of course you have the audacity of wanting to render fire with your GPU..... grumble grumble grumble. Still currently no fire is able to be rendered on the GPU in Blender. Soon

[briansun1]

As in, how did you render it so fast, or how did it take so long?

Anyways, it's an HP Pavillion laptop. Specs:

PROCESSOR: Intel Core i7-4510U CPU @ 2.00GHz 2.60GHz (Not sure what the second number means...)

GRAPHICS: Intel HD Graphics 4400

RAM: 6074 MB (6.074 GB)

I also do some "Post-Processing" in GIMP.

The original image looked like this:

http://i.imgur.com/VOx5awo.jpg

Maybe that'll explain it.

The second is the boosted speed.

[Starwhip]

I'll just shove this here.

Esinohio, can't wait to see what you can come up with.

[Sma]

Unless of course you have the audacity of wanting to render fire with your GPU..... grumble grumble grumble. Still currently no fire is able to be rendered on the GPU in Blender. Soon

I wonder...if you could some how setup the fire to render separately without the rest of the scene, render that on cpu, then render the scene without the fire but using gpu, then composite the two together. dunno if that is possible, or if it would help at all, but might be worth a shot.

Also, in my case I have an APU instead of a cpu (4 core cpu, 8 core gpu) unfortunately it's not nvidia. I wonder though if I could still use the apu video, and get an nvidia card so I could do gpu rendering on it, with out actually hooking it to a monitor. Other wise I guess I could run one monitor from the card, and one from the apu....or get more monitors lol

[esinohio]

I wonder...if you could some how setup the fire to render separately without the rest of the scene, render that on cpu, then render the scene without the fire but using gpu, then composite the two together. dunno if that is possible, or if it would help at all, but might be worth a shot.

Also, in my case I have an APU instead of a cpu (4 core cpu, 8 core gpu) unfortunately it's not nvidia. I wonder though if I could still use the apu video, and get an nvidia card so I could do gpu rendering on it, with out actually hooking it to a monitor. Other wise I guess I could run one monitor from the card, and one from the apu....or get more monitors lol

Moving the fire off into its own scene that is separate but linked is what you would need to do to efficiently render the fire currently. I think the problem then is getting the fire simulator to properly interact with a linked object in another scene. Not really played with using different scenes yet so I can't say for sure if or how that would work.

Just adding an NVIDIA card to your system will work fine. Set it in your preferences and your off. Your power supply might have a word or two about that addition