Tag: 2.79

Tiling procedural textures in Blender

Creating separate elements of procedural textures in Blender is quite simply – find the desired formula, rebuilt it using mathematical nodes, and as a result, get the desired shape. However, textures created this way have one feature – no tiling. Tiling – a cyclic texture duplication, most time is considered harmful, and professional 3D artists try to avoid texture tiling. But sometimes tiling is necessary, for example, when creating patterns or ornaments.

The procedural texture element is always created in a single instance. This is because all the mathematics that forms the actual procedural image is based on the initial data – coordinates that start from 0, spread out to infinity and not repeat. However, the same mathematics helps us to solve this problem.

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Creating procedural textures in Blender

All procedural textures in Blender are based on math. Even such irregular structures as “Voronoi” and “Noise” are actually generated according to the mathematical formulas. An exact mathematical algorithm is sewed up into each base material node to obtain the desired image as a result.

We can not specify such algorithms in Blender in the usual mathematical format. However, among other nodes, Blender provides us the “Math” nodes – the wrap over simple mathematical operations. Using these nodes we can build complex mathematical algorithms yourself, generating interesting textures.

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BIS: the Open storage

Materials which owners granted access to them for all other BIS users are placed in the “Open storage” section.

How to share material for all BIS users

Attention! The shared material becomes available to all BIS users. Sharing your materials you agree to their distribution under a Creative Commons license.

  1. Sign in your account on the BIS website.
  2. Switch to the “Node Groups (Object)” section.
  3. For the material you want to share, click the “Share” button.

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BIS: How to start

Welcome to “BIS” (Blender Interplanety Storage) – a service for downloading, storing, management and sharing materials for the Blender 3D suite.

Introducing to BIS:

  1. Create a personal account:

Open the BIS website https://bis.interplanety.org/ in your favorite browser:

Press the “Sign up” button.

Fill in the “Login” and “Password” fields. Please specify an active email address. On the checkbox that confirms your acceptance of the User Agreement.

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Learning loops

In general, the “loop” is usually a sequential selection of several points, edges or polygons of a mesh.

However, there is an element in the mesh structure, which is also called a “loop”. It is a combination of one vertex with one edge of the mesh. Let’s try to learn what these “loops” are for.

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How to pass command line arguments to a Blender python script or add-on

When starting Blender from the console it processes all parameters passed through the command line. However, some scripts and add-ons for proper work may require specifying their unique command line arguments. If you specify such additional parameters in the command line, Blender will also try to process them, which is likely to result in an error. Blender provides a special way to exclude such arguments from own processing.

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How to make Blender fully portable

Even if Blender was downloaded as a zip-file and started from the unpacked archive instead of the installation, the files with its settings are stored separately in the user’s directory. The history, the start scene, and user-installed add-ons are also stored there. So if you transfer Blender to another computer, all these preferences will be lost.

However, at startup, Blender first looks for a config directory in its own folder and only if it does not find it there, it accesses the folder in the user’s directory.

In order to make Blender completely portable, it is enough to copy config folders “config” and “scripts” from the user’s directory into Blender’s own directory into the folder with the version number. This will transfer the settings and installed add-ons to the Blender directory, and now all the changes will be made already here, not in the user directory. Blender becomes portable and can be copied to another computer or removable device.

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How to render an object with reflections on a white background

The single object visualization most often is performed on a clear white background. It is difficult to achieve this through the common configuring the scene – increasing the illumination of the scene “lights up” the object, decreasing – the background becomes gray instead of white. If the object itself can be simply rendered on a transparent background and then imposed on white, but what about its reflections?

Let’s consider the way how we can render the object and its reflection on a white background.

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Creating radio buttons in the Blender add-ons interface

State switches so-called “radio buttons” are used in the case to limit the choice by one value from several available ones. There are a lot of such buttons in the Blender interface, for example, switching between RGB and BW rendering modes or setting the texture mapping mode. Such buttons can be created in the Blender add-ons interface too.

Let’s create our own radio button switcher.

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How to hide the title of the Blender window

Every 3D-artist knows that the workplace is always less. The larger monitor, the larger available workspace on it – the work is more convenient and faster. Blender allows winning some extra space on the screen, hiding the window title, which is still not useful.

The key combination:

alt + F11

allows to hide the Blender window title and expand the work area to the entire monitor. Pressing this key combination again returns Blender to its original state.