Guide: "From a picture to an animation"

@Agon I have just started to work on an importer / exporter for Blender. There are even some more issues which have to be solved in this regards. Another one is rotation and alignment which Stonehearth expects (otherwise your animation might just work in the wrong direction). It seems to me like if you export an object from Qubicle and import it into Blender it ends up with a 90° rotation on the x-Axis. Another one is the origin of your objects which can be of importance for animations.

So there is quite a bit to sort out to turn Blender into our open source tool of choice in regarding of modding Stonehearth…

Unfortunately I seem to be having yet more problems with the renders I create in blender that maybe someone can help me with. After managing to fix the initial problems that I had with the render being too bright and then fixing the white and black line issue I have come across another issue. It seems that when I set qubicle to export with only 1 pixel per colour this fixes the white line issues I had however, when I then render the image in blender all of the colours look paler than they should most noticeably with dark colours and this only happens when I export it with 1 colour per pixel so right now I have a choice between white lines across the model or paler colours. This also only happens when I render the image the model looks fine. Example below.

As you can see in the rendered image the blacks of his eyes are now grey and the green moss is darker, the mud on his feet is now barely visible, also the tree bark looks almost grey. Nothing I do in blender seems to improve this and when I compare my renders with others people have uploaded, mine definitely don’t look as good. So does anyone have any suggestions does any who has created their own renders do anything special or adjust any settings.

Maybe someone who is really working with the render-function can answer this one… @Froggy / @Pandemic?

I did not dive into the details and probably will not (as I want to use Blender for Stonehearth and this does not require rendering). There are a lot of settings in Blender which are influencing the way how light and color is reflected in the rendering process (light source, settings in scene, world, material or texture). The best way to learn about it is probably to look for some tutorials on YouTube (there are quite some).

However @The_M, you can try to go to the “texture”-settings and further down to a section called “colors”. If you adjust the values for “brightness” (e.g. to 0.9) and “contrast” (e.g. to 1.3), this should improve the rendering-result. But as mentioned, probably our pros can help here much more informed.

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Hmm.

If you send me the obj I can render it in Max. At least then you’ll be able to rule out your Qubicle settings as the problem.

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Once again @voxel_pirate you have fixed my problem, where would I be without you. I don’t know how I managed to miss these settings guess I must have been so fixed on the idea that it was a lighting or render settings issue that I just didn’t think to look at the textures. It seems changing the brightness to 0.85 and the contrast to 1.1 and then increasing the light energy to 2.0 to compensate makes it look much more like the original model, I’m sure with more tweaking I can get it to look just right. Once again thanks. If @Froggy or @Pandemic have any other tips though I would still be happy to hear those.

nice work team nerd voxel gurus! @voxel_pirate, you should add this to your tips and tricks thread… :wink:

@The_M

So, I also noticed this and I’ve found that messing with the material settings can fix this. My set up is that I have a moderately flat material selection and I continue to balance it out with lighting. 1 thing to keep in mind is that I am working from a cinematic point of view, so if you are working on a mod you won’t actually see how it turns out until it is in the game.

Switching up your rendering engine might help as well, keep in mind this will significantly change how your model renders out. If you go to the top bar to the button that says “Blender Render” switch it to “Cycles”. Blender is slowly moving away from the Blender render engine as the Cycles one has a lot more potential and options to choose from, so I’d advise you to get ahead of the curve and learn the new one instead of sticking to the default.

As far as the contrast settings go, I never needed to mess around with them. If you need help with the texture setting and such there is a very good channel that has helped me understand the program called Blender Cookie. @voxel_pirate’s channel along with this one has helped me extremely and it may help you a lot as well.

Blender Cookie: Announcing CGC Classes

Also keep in mind, tutorials and help from others isn’t as good of a learning agent then experience. Mess around with settings and other things until you get wait you need it to look like.

If you need assistance or any other help, don’t hesitate to PM me here.

Goodluck,
Pandemic

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@The_M you are more than welcome. Great that this one worked out for you. As mentioned there are many settings influencing the rendering and there are for sure others - like Pandemic shows - which will do the work maybe even better. If you really want to dive deeper into this topic just listen to Pandemic’s advise :wink:.

@SteveAdamo somehow this does not fit into another thread. The tips and tricks are more for Qubicle and this is kind of not 100% related to Stonehearth as rendering will not be relevant… apart from showing off own creations.

I will create a short video on YouTube summarizing some of the points out of this discussion in the next day or so and link it here as unofficial “Step 6”.

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Sounds like a plan @voxel_pirate… As always, your efforts are most appreciated… :smile:

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Part 6 - Rendering in Blender

This is a short video related to rendering in Blender which takes some of the items from our discussions above into account. You will see the settings in Qubicle to avoid the “white lines” and get a brief overview of where to find relevant color settings. Also you will be pointed to 4 settings which will instantly change the outcome of your renders to something more desirable.

Please see this only as an entry point. There is much more about rendering in Blender and if you want to get the best out of your renders… please start digging deeper into this topic :wink:.

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@pandemic I will give switching the render engine a try especially if you think this is the way things are going I will also give Blender cookie a watch as so far I have only really used videos for learning to animate. In terms of learning from experience I agree, unfortunately recently I haven’t had much time to mess around with it as much as I would like, so progress is slow but hopefully this should change soon and I can get some more animations done and some better renders out.

@voxel_pirate Once again a great video hopefully this will help people avoid some of the problems I have encountered.

@voxel_pirate fantastic work on these tutorials, I can’t get over how much I’ve learned in a such a short time.

the first time I went through the videos I was following along with my own models and everything worked great. I’ve now downloaded your files and am trying to play around with them. the .blend file from lesson 4 (“Part4_Dwarf_Animation_Bones.blend”): when I load that into blender, I get the pure white version of the dwarf… when this happened after importing the .obj file, alt-z solved it, but with the .blend file, alt-z toggles between the all-white version and an all-pink version of the dwarf.

your videos are my first exposure to blender so I’m probably missing something obvious, but any idea what I need to see the colors/textures of the model?

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Sometimes it helps to also load the .mtl-file which comes along with the .obj-file… can you give this a try? Color information are typically stored in the mtl.

… hm, actually this does not help with the .blend-file. Alt+Z works for .obj-files. I am not sure at the moment how it is with a .blend-file and I have to give it a try… which I will not be able to do prior Sunday :disappointed: .

okay, thanks in advance.

(Just on the off-chance it might work, I had already tried importing both the .mtl after I loaded the .blend file - I had remembered you saying that for the .obj file - but of course as you say, it didn’t seem to help with the .blend file.)

@mscottveach It seems like there have been some troubles with the related texture-file. If you have been going through the whole tutorial you might not have experienced any issues (depending on where you’ve saved the files)… however, I have updated the .blend-file and it should work now. Would be great if you can try to re-download it and see if it works for you. Sorry once more.

@voxel_pirate I had been going through with my own files which is probably why I avoided any trouble…
by the way, I was wondering what resource you used to learn the bone rigging you were doing? When
you switched out the skeleton you had been working on with the one you did off video, it had some
horizontal bones and I wasn’t sure how you made those (which is why I was switching over to your file).

Just went and checked the .blend file; looks like it’s working now, thanks!

@mscottveach check out the “Tutorials: Blender & Animation”-Playlist which you can find on my YouTube-Channel. I have linked the most interesting videos I have used to get familiar with Blender. Apart from that you might also want to join the “Blender Artist Community”… which is a great (!) place to find answers to questions you have not yet asked :wink:.

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Just a question: is there a way to export it to bender with the free version? Or is the limitation actually… that you can’t create the animations? :sweat_smile:

Unfortunately you cannot export into Blender with the free version. In the FAQ on the homepage of Qubicle you can find a link to buy a cheaper Stonehearth-Edition of Qubicle 1. This version should allow for it (but better check once more first). There was / is also another Voxel-Editor around in thos forum which is free afaik and should also allow exports to .obj.