what in the world view

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

hi, Vue has it, Bryce has it, Terragen is it.
Are there any plans for Blender to get it too?
Yes I’m talking about Atmospheres mapped to the World View, with Light sources & Ambient lighting & all the things that go with it. Fully adjustable clouds, sun, haze, sky, with options to change colors for all those settings.
NO this is not a feature request, my compositing skills are good enough to fake it in most cases.
However, I am interested on peoples thoughts on how this could be done in Blender.
Is it needed in Blender?
Would it simply be far too much work?
I think it would be great.
Is there anyone working on this or any future plans?

One thought I had would be to import Terragen 0.9 series .atm files into Blender.
This would mean using Terragen first, so might as well composite it.
I do believe that file format is only readable in TG anyway & well, you couldn’t make adjustments.

What I would envision is an Atmosphere Editor similar to TG 0.9 that writes directly to
Blenders World View. Anyone know the guy’s at Terragen well enough to see if we could borrow their code (For the atmosphere editor only) to write a Patch/Plugin for Blender?

Or anyone working on writing one?

Ah well, I’m allowed my dreams.
m.a.

2

Wasn’t the soc last year focussed on a project like this?

3

And all of them are programs to do mostly just one thing: creating environments. Blender is not.

(it would be nice, but you’re comparing apples with peaches, that’s my point here :))

4

Yeah, it would be nice, there is already some small ground work, code base by way of the stars settings that effect the world view. I don’t think they have been worked on for a while, the code could provide a way towards more complex atmospheres.
Maybe there was once an idea to expand on this.
Who knows, maybe in a few versions, when there will be greater power for plugins & other integrations, it may come to be.
One way to look at it I suppose is that there are programs that specialize in Sculpting, Modeling, Animation, Compositing & many other things that Blender does.
So why not Environments as well. It would certainly round off Blenders toolbox nicely.
m.a.

5

Sometimes I think, “I can already do that with the tools I know how to use” and sometimes I think, “Doing things this way is a pain, I wish someone would automate this for me, what’s the use of having a computer to draw with if you can’t automate the grunt work?”

There seem to be two things driving Blender development: requirements of major animation projects like ED and now Project Peach, and individual developers’ personal goals. I think craigomatic is right, some developer took this on as a personal goal, but I haven’t seen the outcome yet. It may suddenly spring, as if from nowhere, one of these days. ED didn’t have a lot of blue sky, clouds and sunshine atmospherics, Project Peach may have a bit more, but probably not enough that the current tools can’t handle it. So it may wait on some major action/adventure project set outdoors while things more appropriate to forests and furry critters gets worked on.

In your dreams, do you dream you already know how to use the new tools, or do you dream about trying to google scanty documentation and find only tutorials based on a CVS build that was changed by the time it got into the stable build? :evilgrin:

6

Is this what you know from looking at the code, or is it what you think from looking at the starry view in Blender?

Not meant as an insult, but it’s often quite hard to comprehend how much code is going into a feature. Same goes for how much code a feature exists of.

Have a look at pixelshading.c, the current stars are nothing more than a bunch of random halo’s. That’s not “some small groundwork”, and you can not compare that to a complete sky or environment system. There’s a lot more work to that, unfortunately.

(trust me, if it would be just a few lines of code I would have added it myself already :))

7

Is this what you know from looking at the code, or is it what you think from looking at the starry view in Blender?

I don’t look at the code, not educated enough, though I will be diving into Python heavily soon. More what I presume from looking at the starry view, that someone thought to map to the world view, even if it is only random halos, it’s a start, so at least there may be something to build upon.
I have no doubt it would take an incredible amount of work to fully code an atmosphere editor into Blender, as I said “would it simply be too much work?”, after all, entire programs are dedicated to this.
I wouldn’t even say it was needed, only that it would be good to have.
m.a.

8

There was a Google Summer of Code project that handled physically based sky, and volumetric clouds, but I guess it died. There is still a build up on GraphicAll, though.