DasFrodo

Indie License. I know it's not going to happen, but that's literally the only thing I want.

Yeah, I understand that. Still, not supporting the ONE version that will be probably the most used (especially in production) until the next LTS comes out is kind of dumb. As @Cairyn said, if I was thinking about buying Renderman that would be a big big no no.

I bet they just haven't gotten around to it yet. Makes no sense at all to support the version right before the LTS version.

Thank you for posting this Dave. I Jumped in and bought the course for the reduced price as well. I am done with Chapter 1-3 at this point and I've started Chapter 4. Up until this point everything has been explained very well and in necessary detail. I've started a text file with shortcuts as well because the existing cheat sheets for Blender seem to be mostly trash.

Nice! I know exactly which HDRI you used there 😄

Sounds like you quite literally immersed yourself in Houdini. Interesting!

I can somewhat relate to that. Over the years I've noticed that just watching a tutorial does absolutely nothing for me. I HAVE to do it myself, and if I stumble along the way that's even better, because then I have to find a solution myself and learn something in the process. This is also the reason why I can't do long video tutorials; my mind just wanders and the second I see something cool I just want to do it myself. I've always been a "learning by doing" kind of guy which unfortunately for some things (including 3D) is the slowest and hardest way to learn something. I'm also prone to getting used to workflows in the "wrong" kind of way, meaning not using best practices.

Lol if that wasn't the case I would have given up on Houdini pretty fast. I've looked at older scenes so much when I did some kind of setup and recreated it in another because I couldn't 100% remember how I did it.

Yeah, unfortunately the Blender community is (in some ways) pretty elitist. They often remind me of the stereotypical Linux user, lol. Telling you how great Linux is and basically calling you dumb for still using Windows because Linux is just sooo much better and free and yaddayadda. Good on you mate lol, but I don't feel like spending weeks learning an operating system that should just run my programs.

Good stuff! I can see your progress with every rendering 😉 The aberration, don't forget the aberration!

I disagree. A UI and UX can be judged after a couple of hours already. At least to a certain extent. After a couple of hours I can already tell if an interface is unintuitive as hell or not, if it's ugly or beautiful and if parts of it make sense or don't. I can use zBrush for 10 hours and still tell the UI is an absolute dumpsterfire. People that have used the software for thousands of hours are often blind to problems with the UI, myself included. "It's not that bad" or "If you learn it you'll be okay with it" is stuff I've often heard about Blender or zBrush. Problem is "it's not that bad" is "it's horrible"s little brother.

This is looking better and better 👌

Yeah, that is something that always frustrated me with Blender. You spend tons of time finding out which hotkey does the exact thing you need because there is no visual representation of that hotkey in any menu. You either know it's there or you're screwed. That there are millions of different releases and thus millions of different tutorials on different versions that potentially teach you something that is long, long gone or easier to do doesn't help at all. It's just a frustrating experience overall compared to more "traditional" softwares where you have access to EVERYTHING via the menus.

Very talented people due to the increadibly positive atmosphere that Blender and its community oozes. Everything is open source so outside people can help squash bugs and issues. Probably a ton of bug reports from outside unlike many other softwares where it's sometimes even hard to find where to report a bug. etc.

Looks like you're working with transparencies. Have you enabled "Evaluate Transparancy" in the AO settings?

Welcome! Enjoy your stay 😃

Well again, as I already posted: if there is none you will have to make it yourself. It's really not that complicated as a material, especially the main "blinky spots" part. You will need a Normalmap (which you can create with Substance Designer very easily). That needs to be VERY reflective, but with sharp angles in the normals so you get this very intense flickering. Probably white metal material with a very, very high IOR. Everything else is just playing around with colors and lighting.

Just playing around a little... it's not perfect but whatever, don't feel like rerendering this at all 😛 Hint: It loops! Mindfuckery_FINAL.mp4

Because some people, like Jed can actually like use math for this. I can't believe it either. I've been trying to avoid math as much as I can my entire life 🥴

You can use the mograph cloner to spawn spheres inside the volume of the object and them use field forces with some random field to move them around like in a tubulence. Or with more control. You can do a lot with field forces.

Another one! Trying out the Quixel Scans and some more lighting stuff...

Hm fair enough. Although I did write it's not "traditional raytracing", not that there is no rays involved. You can control the "noise" up to a certain point with a final gather value for both the GI and the Reflections; for the shadows there is no such setting. Maybe it's just not exposed in the interface yet. I can imagine this being the case. Anyways, I did some more testing yesterday and I just imported my Space Marine model with one material and some lighting. I still think it looks remarkably close to a real pathtracer. Really, really hyped what people come up with in the next months with this new technology.

I think you have a fundamental misconception on how this works; this is not traditional raytracing. As far I can tell at this point it's doing its lighting calculations in a different form of geometry, called Signed Distance Field. Each mesh is represented in the rendering engine as a Signed Distance Field, GI and other calculations are made on this, and this is then applied to the classec rasterized geometry. Kind of like a hybrid, just like realtime raytracing works for now. Some parts are rasterized, some parts are raytraced. There is nothing like the classic noise you know from engines like Octane since there is no "samples per pixel" or anything like this. It's all an approximation with all the limitations that come with all approximations. In Lumen there is nothing like "amount of bounces" or anything since it works completely different. What you rather get (especially with very clean surfaces and small light sources) is the classic "light blotches" you get from Irradiance Cache in C4D. Just look at the video I posted above with the many small glowing spheres and you'll see what I mean. If you want to know more about this I recommend you look into the documentation (there is already a lot to read there) or just download it and try for yourself. If you can work with C4D and Blender you will have no issues doing basic stuff in Unreal Engine.

Hell, even C4D and every other DCC converts to triangles. You just don't get to see it as user.

Well there's still a lot of stuff you simply can't do with realtime engines. Transparencies or translucent materials is one of these things. Subsurface Scattering is still "eh". All the GI and stuff that I showed up there are just approximations. If you made that scene with the small glowing spheres in Octane or Redshift or something similiar you would get "perfect" lighting and shadows. In Unreal it's a blotchy mess. Even with all the modern techniques realtime is still a lot more finicky than just simply chucking a shitty model in a DCC app. You get issues way more quickly. You are not as flexible. Etc. If you haven't, just go ahead and try porting one of your projects. UE supports alembic. Depending on what you were doing in that scene you're going to run into limitations very quickly. It's really cool tech and it has its place but it's simply not a replacement for classic render engines. It's just another tool.