#blender nodes

[lynnbecksart]

Haven't slept but uhhhhh figured out how Blender's "Light Path" node works. Which turns out to be basically the opposite of how I thought it worked. Anyway here's a thing I made using it, specifically making an object's reflection in a mirror texture a different colour than the object itself.

Nodes below.

[djskiskyskoski]

Figured out how to make rocks.

I found tutorials about creating rock patterns, but these were mostly for deforming a surface and not making piles of rocks. What I was able to abuse is that voronoi fields already look a lot like rocks and hold a lot of interesting shapes. All I did was take a voronoi diagram distance to edge, set some distance from the edge to be the surface of the rock, and then do a lot of smoothing. Once all the rocks are created, I began to start deleting rocks based on their position output from the voronoi diagram.

Have fun parsing this code. The 2 things I can say is that the 2 vornoi functions have to be the same and detail MUST be 0 (I spent a day debugging that when I had detail set to 0.08). More delete geometries can be added to cull more rocks and make whatever patterns in the rocks are required. This will probably slow down creation time (it takes like 45 seconds to populate the rocks currently) but it seems to be mostly on startup and render times weren't too bad for me. Be careful about blender crashing because it verymuch is on the cusp and does not like what we are doing. 1 million triangles for 800 rocks (double that for whatever got culled) is not something that a computer likes to to).

[bubblebaath]

this is the node setup ive been using for the past few posts if you wanna use it yourself!

some notes:

the lens distortion thing adds randomized noise if you tick the jitter checkbox

if the picture looks too red try changing the gain on colour correction to blueish

the dispersion on the lens distortion thing might be too high if theres something important near the edge of the picture (it blurs the edges)

[lynnbecksart]

Just in case I somehow make it big, and/or someone who believes this sees this post, I think I need to say that

Blender Nodes aren't AI. They're procesural generation, which is different for various reasons I don't onow enough about computers to comprehend, but mostly because a Blender Node uses noise and stuff that are, like, free to use and in some cases might have been around for longer than humanity in some cases I'm guessing? I'm not a scientist. And it uses them as maths-y inputs into other ones to make cool patterns and stuff. Meanwhile generative AI is just shitty predictive text and/or a thing that hallucinates an image from a mish-mash of stolen art. If I make a skin texture with Blender Nodes it will look coherent and also. Like human skin kinda, complete with normal mapping if I feel up to it. Meanwhile if I asked an AI to, it probably wouldn't do either. Ok end of post byeeeeeee please feel free to add onto this and also debunk the thing I said about algorithmically-generated noise being older than humanity because it's probably not true but it feels true.

[djskiskyskoski]

AWP | Charcoal

Recolor of my 'hardwood' design with a few tweeks to make it look a bit more like charcoal. This was mostly done to test out roughness and ambient occlusion maps in cs2 and see what can be done with them.

Standard normal mapping was done on this as well. Nothing special with it except for the fact that I have to boost the strength of it before baking and using in cs2.

I like the roughness map because it lets certain parts shine. For this skin I have the darker parts running through the skin shiny, it gives certain parts of the skin something more to do and makes it look better in direct light.

I still have no idea what ambient occlusion maps do. I would assume its a way to darken parts of the skin in light, but I didn't see much of a different. So either it's not fully implemented yet or I'm doing something wrong (we all know the answer).

Also... the nodes.

Go ahead and try and decipher this, not like I can parse anything from it.

[djskiskyskoski]

Shoutout to bluey.

I wanted to recreate a scene that my friends have meme'd to all hell. After enough time I got the math done and the animation complete.

I think I finally solved stars from this. There's probably a little more I could to force better twinkling.

The moon was a lot of pain specifically because wikipedia had errors in the function I wanted to use. After a lot of headbanging I fixed the error and got what I wanted.

the balcony/foreground stuff was all modeled, but in a really bad way. I just wanted some flat colors so I took some planes and gave them colors. Really not that difficult.

I'm really happy about that shooting star but man did it cause problems. I was doing stuff in post and the buffers were acting up. In the end I needed to minimize what I was sending and do more in the shaders. That ended up taking like 2 hours last night.

The shooting star is a bezier curve with a shader over it. It's really the only new part of blender that I needed to learn since I had no idea how to shader curves before this. Everything else was a refinement of workflow that I hope to remember for next time.

Once again, take the blue pill. It's a good show and some of the best writing of parents I've seen.

[bubblebaath]

heres the nodes used on the last post if u wanna copy them!

[djskiskyskoski]

Lines

ty to Amy May Ellis for inspiration.

This was originally meant to be built to learn how to model catenaries and utility wires. It was a little tricky to model but got done with some tricks. That was over a month ago and this slowly changed in scope.

The catenaries were modeled from this stack exchange (I used A as an input to solve for length instead of providing the length). This works for anything in 2 dimensions and moving it into 3 involved a rotation into a plane and inverting the rotation after the math was done. In the end this really wasn't even needed because all of the catenaries are along one direction and probably wasnt needed.

Try and parse this if you think you can.

I tried doing a bunch of other junk. the utility pole can a bunch of work to try and mimic knots in the wood. the clouds got redone (again). there's some quick trees i tried to add. The birds I just stole and stretched around to try and make it look correct.

So happy im done with this. it took way too long.