Endless time sink projects!

It has been a difficult but exhilarating semester.

We made a makerspace! Here it is all packed up because we needed to move it to another location last week.

Thinking about the makerspace ate up all my waking hours since it opened. After a few months I started to feel unsettled by how little other identity I had left. Makerspace director is an all-encompassing role in two senses--having to do nearly everything related to it, having everything you do be related to it. You only ever get to make one thing, the makerspace.

But at the end of the semester I have found a little time to think and regroup. I need to make things in addition to making the makerspace. I'm not one to do anything casually enough to call it a hobby. So... I've started up the Blender Graphic Novel project again.

Because it seemed like complete and utter folly to reopen that project (another infinite time sink), first I tried lots of things, like watching movies and going out to eat with friends. But nothing else seemed to plug the hole.

Comic from Dresden Codak

So, just like with the makerspace project, I try the impossible thing anyway, then it doesn't always go well, then in private I cry and get angry, and then I use that anger to rhetorically dare myself to give up, which I will never do, so I swear stubbornly to try again, and the cycle repeats. And sometimes on a night like tonight I even make some promising incremental progress.

Incremental progress. Just testing out a few concepts

What I've learned in re-opening the project for the first time since 2016:

I'm still relying heavily on Blendswap for assets, but it feels like that website/community has lost some momentum. The environment above is from https://www.blendswap.com/blend/10299
Most of the assets I had found in the past still seem to be there so that's good, but the search function is pretty bad and all my Likes/Collections from before are now all empty.

In 2018 Manuel Bastioni decided to try raising funds for the MBLab project, but after about three days he gave up and shut the whole project down. It seems he expected a large audience to materialize (with not much thought given to advertising) and that most of them would immediately donate. The project is now on Github https://github.com/animate1978/MB-Lab

Marvelous Designer is up to version 9 from version 6, and it seems the same. I'm a little frustrated with it but at the same time it is the only tool that does what I need, and it gets good results (but slowly due to clunky workflow).

The sewing pattern community is still disappointing. Everybody seems only interested in making a few bucks here and there for the patterns in their collection. Very few community seems really attuned to concepts like public domain, digitally archiving historical patterns, getting into the nitty gritty of patent, trademark, copyright law, first sale doctrine, and understanding how it does and doesn't potentially affect sewing patterns and fashion. I wanted to try paying for ready-made Marvelous Designer garment assets but found very few for sale.

Blender Internal is gone in Blender 2.8 and I'm using Eevee instead. Freestyle still works, and is still pretty slow. Eevee is much faster than Cycles and I really don't need raytracing for the style I'm going for. I can use viewport rendering which helps workflow, so long as I keep the number of vertices sane.

Big directions to explore next:
- Hair...still difficult. Need to practice a bit.
- How to effectively storyboard so I don't waste time on scenes and assets I don't need, and so that the pages and chapters are cohesive (visually, and from a storytelling perspective)

https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/eccj2/how_to_draw_an_owl/

Blender Graphic Novel Work Diary #1

I've been working on my Blender Graphic Novel for a while now. Blender is an open source 3d creation suite. The graphic novel has no title yet, but the story has been fleshed out in full (50 or so scenes). The graphic novel will very much resemble a hand-drawn one, but all the visuals are computer generated. Other than Blender, I use Marvelous Designer to make the outfits, and the GIMP to lay out the final panels. Most models come from http://www.blendswap.com/ and full attribution documents will be appended to every chapter release. All humanoids are built with Manuel Bastioni Lab in Blender.

Here are some images and notes from my 'work diary.' Layout mess courtesy Blogger's terrible photo layout tools.

Viewport render of a hairstyle for a minor character

Test of ink shader

Backlight keyboard image concept

Police uniform in Marvelous Designer

Major character clothing and hair test

Prison uniform in Marvelous Designer

Struggles with the hair system for a minor character

Testing Marvelous Designer by making a dress

Outfit pose test

Braid and wig test

Color and style test

Character pose in the viewport

Borrowed Hair

After spending a lot of time on hair experiments, I finally broke down and just grabbed the Mass Effect meshes. I couldn't find anything better for polygonal hair to get started with. I figure I can use these as 'base' models and edit and elaborate on them.

I also heard that the newest versions of Makehuman are supposed to have some new hair models but I can't find them...I got the latest nightly build and it only included the same old, same old... 

I played around with some rudimentary UV unwrapping as well, adding a single eyebrow to the render below. I need to get my Wacom tablet out and start painting again.

For the hair mesh above and meshes in this style, there are a few ways I might use them:

• Blocky style, as above
• Carefully wrapped textures with transparent edges, for a wispy look emulating particles
• Actual particle hair along the mesh lines, possibly with Hairnet
• As a starting point for sculpting different hair

I'm almost ready to start making a bigger project instead of just endless test renders. I've been introduced to modeling, sculpting, physics simulations, particle systems, UV unwrapping, materials, rigging, shapekeys, keyframing, and more. I've figured out a good resources for inanimate objects, for heads, for bodies, for hair, and for clothes. I can endlessly raise my standards, OR I can get Project 0 in gear and actually start telling a story.

General frustration

Hair is still proving difficult...playing around with different things but I haven't figured out what kind of hair creation pipeline is going to work best for me yet.

I'm glad sewing weights finally got added to Blender trunk, but of course getting the cloth collision simulation just right is still tricky.

Freestyle still feels a little under-developed for my tastes. It works great for boundaries between objects and stuff, but the crease-based outlining (checking to see if the crease is sharper than some user specified angle) doesn't work so well for organic objects like human faces.

I spent some time thinking about what kind of thing would work well. Say you shoot a ray out from the camera and it intersects with two outer faces of the mesh (you could just deal with faces with normals pointing outwards, to ignore the inside faces of walled meshes), then measure the distance between those two intersection points. If the distance is great enough (compare to user specified value) then that would indicate that the region of mesh in front is sufficiently 'in front' to need to be somehow outlined compared to the region in back...but I haven't thought through that any further, so I'm not sure how you'd figure out where those lines belong exactly. Maybe I can hack something together using Z distance data to camera and the node editor, not sure exactly.

Anyway, to recap, what I'm looking for now:

• Find a reasonable way to make hair that looks good and doesn't take forever
• Better understanding of how to choose good physics simulation parameters in general, for cloth, hair, etc.
• More NPR line drawing styles...

Just for fun, I played around with this face mesh I've been using, and Freestyle. The use of a high crease detect angle for Freestyle (170-175) gives a nice sketchy effect. I'd like it more if it wasn't the only effect I can get for faces. If I turn down the crease angle I'm left with just the eyes and the central line of the mouth, basically.

Shapekeys are still proving to be quite easy; the above took 5 minutes for each (half-shut eyes, slightly parted smile). These results are helping me keep my sanity while I try to get the rest working.

Edge split modifier on the Freestyle generating mesh can help get a bit:

Particle Hair Physics Progress

Alright, some progress on the frustrating particle hair physics.

I checked out this model which uses particle hair which is attached to an invisible scalp. I eventually figured out the invisibility bit (object tab, "Wire" and "Transparency") which was more convenient than my previous method (moving the mesh that created the force field to another render layer). The scalp is copied off the original head then slightly scaled up.

Having the scalp a bit larger than the actual head helps fix the issue of hair getting stuck on/inside the mesh due to it starting out too close to it.

A quick test to prove the physics is working:

Next steps for hair:

• Give the character a haircut, also using different particle system groups for different areas of the hair on the scalp
• Figure out a way to keep the top of the scalp from looking so bald (see the first image; that seems to happen a lot)
• Get rid of hair that is still clipping the head, perhaps by adjusting force field settings
• Play with settings to get different looks (something a bit messier and a little less 'every hair in place')

Hair Physics and Face Remesh

I'm trying to do hair with particle physics. However, issues include:

• By default the hair falls through the scalp. The workaround I used is to create a duplicate mesh to emit the hair, then take the original head mesh and make it have a force field. But children hairs still collide and also I haven't figure out how to make the duplicate scalp invisible. (Edit: it seems that this is something being worked on now, but that the force field will have to do in the meantime).
• Exploring parameters, computationally intensive task is created, Blender is not responsive...force quit and try again.
• Getting a very bad case of the hiccups. Not a Blender issue but it compounded on my frustration. The hiccups were strong enough that they made me mis-click repeatedly.
• I happened to play around with Freestyle and this woodpecker blend and discovered that I can make a nice outline around particle systems. See the tufted areas on the bird body below. I'm having some trouble replicating that with hair so I need to figure out what makes it tick.

Also, I attempted many automated methods of retopologizing models to go from tris to quads and nothing worked perfectly. The "tris to quads" tool did an alright job. I highlighted some of the leftover triangles for emphasis. There are quite a few.

Remesh failed. I played around with the options but nothing usable came out.

Other settings for remesh. Could be used as a creepy type effect. Shrinkwrap did a similarly bad job.

Learning to use shapekeys

Following the tutorial "Creating an Advanced Face Rig - Part One" I learned how to use shapekeys and played around with this model by Norby again.

It's a start anyway. Smiles are easier than frowns. Eyelids are tricky. Brows are easy.

If you are following the video, there's a tricky bit (reflected in the comments) where he forgets to mention the use of "New Shape Key from Mix." He implies that pressing the "+" key in the Shape Keys menu will create a new Shake Key from whatever mix of shapekeys is set. Actually, you have to use a special button in the drop down menu to do that, as such:

Study in (Mass Effect) Faces

I'm back to Blendering, though I managed to forget how the GUI works almost completely in the time I've been away...

So getting back to where I left off: through resources like Blendswap, I'm basically set for all still-life, but I still need characters. I decided to start by exploring some ways to make unique character faces (they should be distinguished from one another by facial structure, not just hair/eye color/accessories/scars). For this study, I designed these in the Mass Effect 3 face editor, then ripped with umodel, headmorphs exported with a save editor, and imported to blender with the script found on this page.

The sketchy lines are Freestyle Geometry editors, set to Bezier, with a high error (200s or so). The material is more or less the same one I used on the sci-fi female head I did a while back.

I'm hoping to be able to edit and retopologize them (they are low-poly and all triangles, having come from a game), rig them, and pair them with a body.

Here's another thing I threw together, to celebrate when I was able to get the models successfully imported into Blender:

Building A Custom Blender Build (and failing)

I decided to compile my own build of Blender on Windows. The main reason is that the sewing addon I want is a patch, not a script, so I have to apply to to the Blender source code and then compile. I'm typically a Unix user (and most often I'm specifically a Darwin user), so when it comes to using the Windows command prompt, or knowing where certain important system files are, or anything a power user might need, I get a bit lost.

I have not yet produced a successful build. To illustrate a point about how difficult these things usually end up being, here are some of the issues I've run into so far:

• I had no previous setup for Windows so I had to choose what tools to install, namely: a git or svn client, a compiler, a build system
• I installed mingw64 in a directory with spaces in the pathname which is a no-no
• I needed to add some directories to my Windows PATH variable
• I retrieved precompiled libs for Windows but put them in the wrong place initially
• I was not sure what command to actually use to install using the cmake-generated Makefile (mingw32-make, which confused me because I'm installing 64-bit blender with mingw64)
• The compiler failed because of libmv, so I just decided to disable that in the build, as I don't need that feature in Blender
• The process failed due to complaints about the openimageio library...and I had no clue how to proceed, so I decide to switch to using SCons instead of CMake, since somebody mentioned that the daily Blender builds are done with SCons and minGW
• SCons installer can't find Python in the registry...I find out I need 32-bit Python, and I installed 64-bit Python
• SCons errors out early, and I learn I need to set a flag BF_TOOLSET=mingw, which I just pass in the command line because SCons doesn't see my user-config.py file for some reason...
• After a long time, build errors out. More online searches suggest the problem may be due to the fact that I am using gcc 4.8 and I need to get 4.6 instead...
• Now the build fails compiling files to do with Cycles when using SCons...
• Now the build fails at the linking stage when compiling with CMake-gui...

The bullet points seem to fly by quickly...but keep in mind that each, on average, required significant time in google searches, trial and error, and CPU time to actually diagnose and get past.

The good news is of course the availability of builds on graphicall.org and of course you can always go to http://www.blender.org/download/. Still, I'm hoping I can get this figured out someday soon.

Exploring Materials in Blender

Up to now I was ignoring most of the options I had in the Diffuse settings section of the Materials settings panel (for Blender Internal). There are other ways to get the right 'lighting feel' for objects, including using the Node Editor, using light sources themselves, and using other aspects of the Materials panel, but I feel that this is a powerful one.

Here are two blends using just good old Suzanne. The experiments focus largely on distortion and painterly feel using the node editor, and colors manipulation using the Diffuse section of the Materials settings. Key aspects:

• The RenderLayers output are the monkey heads on a transparent background
• A noise texture is used to with a Displace node on the monkey heads to create a rough-edges paint feel
• A wood band texture is used with a Displace node to distort the monkey heads shapes in a psychedelic way
• The monkey heads are mixed with the paper texture via a Soft Light node and overlayed onto the paper with an Alpha Over node

The paper texture is from cgtextures.com.

Watercolor Test

I tried another watercolor blend using the node setup provided here. Once again, this is the cloth-on-a-stick object I created with the basics cloth physics capabilities in blender.

This blendersartists thread discusses this style and another setup in detail. I will explore this style in more detail later in order achieve some specific results I'd like to see.

Styles Comparison Test

I set up a scene and rendered it in four different styles. This should help people unfamiliar with 3D graphics techniques to really understand the power behind these tools.

The images above correspond with the following styles:

1. Plain
2. Freestyle and ink shader
3. Watercolor nodes
4. Cel shader

Attribution section:

• Lightbulbs by hunter1231
• Rope Knots by mStuff

Cloth and physics test

A quick test of the cloth simulation.

It occurred to me that having the clothing move with the rig for the character might be tricky. I figured it would be a lot simpler to have every clothed character start out in a basic 'Vitruvian Man' position, and then actually animate the body to get to the final pose. Enabling cloth physics, now the animated body will push the clothes into position.

The basic steps for this test:

• The mesh starts off as a flat circle with a hole in the center, evenly subdivided into quads.
• I place this flat circle mesh around the model waist and pin along the perimeter of the top opening.
• I do a first physics simulation to get the skirt to drape downwards, then apply it to the skirt mesh
• I animate the leg (single keyframe was sufficient)
• I run another physics simulation to have the leg push the skirt

Things are moving along...! I need to practice character rigging though, because I have a bunch of unrigged body meshes from blendswap that I would like to use.

Attribution section:

• Rigged Female Figure by AlexanderLee

Virtual Dressmaking Test #1

Here are some more interim results on virtual dressmaking. They are pretty ugly results, at least from a fashion perspective, but they illustrate the techniques I've been experimenting with so far.

There are still a lot of issues to iron out (yep, a pun). The yellow dress below was meant for someone less busty than the model I put it on. I like the way the physics worked on the hem though.

All the jewelry here are just simple torus meshes run with the cloth physics and high stiffness and damping parameters. The bracelets are like very thick rubber. The necklace stretches itself out and then lays flat on the blouse. I did try to use some of the other physics simulator options (rigid body, soft body) but I couldn't get the parameters right and the meshes were not behaving the way I wanted. Whatever works though...

Attribution section:

• Rigged Female Figure by AlexanderLee.

Blender Cloth Test #2

Alright, today I have some better results from another simple cloth & clothing test.

I created the simplest shirt I could think of; you can see the outline of the pattern pieces (same for front and back) behind the figure in the following sequence of images.

I used the sewing add-on I discussed in the last post to sew together the pieces. Then I ran another simulation to drape the clothes on the body. Finally, I added a large piece of fabric for a scarf and let it fall over the shoulders of the model. You can see how it starts out as a very simple shape which only takes a few clicks to make, and becomes a very nice scarf.

I still need to refine my skills in terms of setting up the physics simulations to best achieve the results I want. I also need to make some meshes based on real sewing patterns. Finally, I need to figure out how to rig the clothing to move with the character. I would most likely perform a final simulation after posing to make the clothing drape more accurately on the character.

Attribution section:

• Rigged Female Figure by AlexanderLee

Blender Cloth Test #1

Today I'm experimenting with cloth. I would like to use the physics engine to shape the clothes for the characters in my project.

Below are some of the simplest cloth tests you can do. Place a square piece of cloth above an object. Enable collision physics on the object and cloth physics on the cloth. Run simulation.

Flat shading is a visual style that I really love.

Smooth shading test. Subtle outlining.

Suzanne covers her eyes with a sheer cloth

Now I need to create clothes. I found this add-on for sewing clothing in Blender which seems very promising. Basics of the sewing add-on:

• Model pieces (you can use actual garment patterns to create these)
• Use edges to mark the 'threads' that will pull your garment together
• Use the sewing strength feature in the cloth physics tab to pull together the garment

I wanted to make a sheer wide neck beach type shirt, but I made the neck way too large, wasn't sure how to shrink it, tried pinning it to the model by the shoulders, and after just way too much time decided to throw on some materials and render it anyway, because mistakes are lessons too I guess.

My real life garment creation skills are just about this bad. Next time I promise something better.

Attribution section:

• Stylized Girl by OscarLeif

Blender Level of Detail Test

Studio LLB has a quick tutorial on using the Freestyle line thickness modifier (distance from camera) to deal with level of detail issues. I saw this blend by DimitrisC and while I really liked it, I felt like it could be improved a little in terms of level of detail issues, because the part of the mesh furthest away from the camera turns into a mess of outlines and draws a lot of attention in my opinion. You can build the blend he provides from scratch following the tutorial on his blog, but I just wanted to play with the outlining so I used the mesh provided in the file. Note: I disabled the Node Editor effects in the original blend file.

Guide to images in the sequence below :

1. Only the Edge feature (Render -> Post processing -> Edge)
2. No outlining at all, for reference
3. Freestyle without thickness modifier
4. Freestyle with thickness modifier 'distance from camera' using an approximately exponential curve dropoff

That was a refreshingly easy exercise...Getting Freestyle settings right isn't easy, and Freestyle is pretty slow to render, which makes it frustrating when you are trying to explore a huge variable space.

Attribution section:

• Skin the Cube by DimitrisC

Blender Experimentation #1

I'm not very creative about post titles, so I'm going to start calling these "Blender Experimentation #[n]." This doesn't apply retroactively to the stuff I posted before today.

Today's experiment involved this female head model from Blendswap.
I was inspired by the 'exploding faces' style on this other model from Blendswap.
I created my version of the exploding faces as such:

• Duplicate the head (I used two duplicate layers)
• Displacement modifier to scale along normals
• Build modifier, or randomly select faces in edit mode, to break down the head
• Manually delete areas of too much detail (mainly the facial features)

Lighting was done with Environment lighting only and the material is the result of briefly experimenting with settings using Toon for both the Diffuse and Specular shaders.

No nodes or Freestyle

Edge Nodes

Freestyle

Edge nodes and some extra fun with the compositor

It reminds me of cover art for Mona Lisa Overdrive.

My other main project today was reading about copyright law. There are some literary works I'd love to try adapting as graphic novels. Many are not public domain nor will they be anytime soon. I'm mostly interested in releasing any work I do for free online, which is unlikely to be a problem (complete text of these novels is all over the internet, free of charge). But if I ever wanted to a print run, I might find myself unable to negotiate a reasonable contract for the rights to do so (I doubt the estate of some of these authors would be interested in dealing with such a small print run anyway...they save their efforts for dealing with big movie studios). I may very well still attempt to work on these projects, maybe just focusing on a few key scenes, but with the understanding that they will be purely a free and online sort of work. I could always do merchandising I bet, since the actual novel text or story won't play into that, and my visualization of the characters would be an example of a highly transformative type of work.

• Female Head by norby

My First Completed Blender Project

"Hands." Click to view full size.

So I finally completed my very first project in Blender. I decided to make it all with open source software, so I used the Gimp to layout the final comic. Actually what happened was that I wanted to use my copy of Photoshop but I left the laptop I installed Photoshop on was at the hackerspace and I didn't want to venture out into the cold at 3am for that.

Attribution section:

• Simple Rigged Characters by DoodleNotes1
• Hand Version 1 by masterxeon1001
• Four Basic Freestyle Setups by josef
• Paper textures from cgtextures.com

A Collection of Blender Styles

Still playing around in Blender. Aiming to do some kind of more abstract short piece to help me practice. Rereading A Lesson Is Learned But the Damage Is Irreversible for inspiration.

Attribution:
The figure is from http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/71173
The chair and the room are from http://3dmodels.katorlegaz.com/

Here's a collection of styles from blendswap:

Halftone Shader http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/66588
Pen Sketch http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/67692
Ink Shader http://loran-cg.blogspot.fr/2014/02/ink-shader.html
8-bit http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/44982
Basic Ink http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/44708
Four Freestyle setups http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/18717
Edge Nodes http://blendernpr.org/bnpr-exclusive-edge-nodes-part-3/
Ink and Watercolor http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/64712
Cel Shader http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/70987

I've outlined a bunch of things I need to learn to do in Blender to make what I'm trying to make, and it definitely feels daunting. I'll just have to keep practicing until I get there I guess...