Tuesday, October 10, 2023

blender rendering notes

I tried out some rendering of scenes using the Cycles Panorama camera 180 degree Fisheye Equidistant option. A large number of links to howtos for accomplishing specific tasks in blender - link dump below.

1. Render optimizations - 4K render of one frame takes 6:45 - nearly 7 minutes a frame is not enough - need to check out GPU rendering. GPU needs min compute capability 3 Nvidia or AMD GPU -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1io1yPj0Sk0.
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/cycles/gpu_rendering.html
For reference, the old Macbook Pro with 4 GB RAM and i7 processor has a compute capability of 1.2 -
From System Info
NVIDIA Corporation GT216M [GeForce GT 330M]
GeForce GT 330M compute capability is 1.2
But for tests, can do with some optimizations - render time tweaks -
5 Tips for FASTER Renders in Blender Cycles - YouTube
Noise threshold of 0.5 and enabling noise threshold reduced render times nearly 50%.

2. Animate rocket launch tutorials -
Involved version - https://youtu.be/NFtXTruJ-_c
Simpler version - Rocket Launch Smoke Simulation in Blender 3.0 [Easy!] - YouTube - this is the one I tried out, removing the grass in the foreground and adding water instead.
 
4. Blenderkit - For current versions of blender, need to install blenderkit addon from blenderkit.com
BIG CHANGE! You won't find BlenderKit in Blender 3.0 by default anymore || Blender Tutorial - YouTube

5. The reason the smoke was not working for my rocket was the Bake settings, and the paths to the bake were also set wrongly.  Need to set the paths correctly, Free all, then bake all.
In Physics tab, which is the one which is below the particles tab, with a sphere in orbit around another sphere, 
choosing SmokeDomain object,
under Cache,
changed the directory of the cache to within the project directory,
"Free all"
Then 
"Bake all" - this took approx 3 sec per frame in the beginning, becoming 10 sec per frame near the end.
 
and if only Sky is needed, Nishita sky seems to be a good option - 
 
7. Make all paths relative - so that the project directory can be copied and used on another machine - 
https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/230328/how-to-package-all-assets-image-textures-mainly-into-a-folder-not-into-blend
File --> External Data --> Make all Paths relative
 
8. Importing a model - like FBX - with textures -
Imported 3D model missing textures - Simple Fix - YouTube - which says just re-apply the textures - Material properties --> Surface --> Emission --> Color--> Image Texture --> open file.
Blender 2.8 - OBJ materials are not imported properly - [ SOLVED ] - YouTube - this one renames the mtl file, if that was the issue.
How to PROPERLY Import Models With Textures in Blender - YouTube - this also uses Node Wrangler, which has a detailed tutorial below - 
What I needed was Node Wrangler:
How to use node wrangler for setting texture roughness, colour etc in one step.
 
9. Moving all keyframes to make a 150 frame video 1500 frames instead -  with the current version of blender's smoke simulator, just doing the time remapping as 10 to 100
https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/3242/can-i-increase-the-frame-rate-of-an-animation-while-keeping-it-the-same-length
http://www.ffnn.nl/pages/articles/media/blender-tips-and-tricks.php
- is not sufficient. The smoke gets updated only once in 10 frames if the time remapping is 10 to 100. Trying 100 to 1000 - the maximum value for the latter value is 999 - so 100 to 999, but the resulting animation still has the smoke particle system jumping from one state to the next every 9-10 frames. So the only way is to add more frames to the project, and drag the keyframes further along the timeline. A separate post about it coming up.





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