Blender Guru is Andrew Price's site of tutorials and tips for making 3D art and photorealistic renders in Blender.
HN commenters recommend it as a Blender learning resource, and others discuss Blender's UI and note that its posting had slowed.
Back in 2011 if you googled "blender is ", you get these autocompleted options:
blender is slow
blender is too hard
blender is hard to use
I know this because I was so frustrated as a newcomer and took a screenshot that I still have today.
Now if you google "blender is " today, you get these:
blender is hard
blender is damaged
blender is confusing
blender is free
blender is slow
In 2013 Andrew Price led an effort to work with the Blender community to point out why so many people have difficulty with Blender's UI. Check out the video & transcript here: http://www.blenderguru.com/articles/fixing-blender-part-1-why-its-broken/
Despite being a thoughtful and very patient man who made a great case, Andrew was met with a lot of pushback from the community that already thought Blender's UI was easy and usable. Unfortunately in the years since not a whole lot has changed (some improvements like tabs, context menus, and not assuming users have a numpad and 3 button mouse).
Blender tries to be everything to everyone - a game engine, a sculpting modeler, a mechanical CAD modeler, a video editor, and a dozen other things. What you actually get is a mess wrapped in a UI that is alien to everyone except for the initiated. There's a reason why Autodesk and others have so many individual products catered to industries and use cases - it's because there's simplicity in specialization.
The article makes the point that it became inefficient to use displacement maps due to their size ballooning beyond '36 times' what they would normally use. So this means that the ground displacement map was just not detailed enough and pushing it to higher resolutions didn't scale. Instead they used Houdini to generate sand grains, I presume Houdini used some sort of displacement map per grain? The final result is a mesh nevertheless.
They also mention that, "this result was driven by a combination of culling techniques including camera frustum, facing angles and distance, creating a variance of dense to coarse patches of sand for optimum efficiency."
So while they had grains each of ~5000 polygons available to them and positions that they could occupy, they cut down on that polygon count using a combination of techniques (many common in games too) to make it all work. So the polygons of any grains outside the camera frustum were ignored. The faces of the grains point away from, I presume, any light source and therefor not contributing to the path tracer were ignored and also some soft of LOD to reduce polygon count as distance.
As an amateur blender user I'm reminded of microdisplacement as a way for us mere mortals to achieve something in this space:
https://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/introduction-microdisplacements
> Blender is a nice project
Sorry, but Blender is an amazing project. Its single-handedly the best graphics software the FOSS community has produced by a long shot, and can compete with the likes of 3DS Max and Maya which are owned by the 3D powerhouse monopoly Autodesk. For me, its up there with the likes of linux and maybe libreoffice in terms of quality alternatives for otherwise software monopolies.
Anyway, I've used Blender quite a bit for games and animation and it never ceases to impress. So their devs deserve a huge applause IMO. Also, for those of you who think I'm exaggerating about Blender's quality just check out these links:
1. http://www.blenderguru.com/articles/24-photorealistic-blender-renders/
2. http://archive.blender.org/features-gallery/gallery/index.html
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=R6MlUcmOul8
4. http://archive.blender.org/features-gallery/blender-open-projects/index.html
> It's not a secret that Blender has a bad UI
> But it's clearly lacking in the UI department.
It's not a secret that a small, vocal minority of Blender users feel that way. IMHO most of them have never used industry standard tools that have way stranger interfaces eg. Zbrush that are much harder to master.
> There's even a three-part article (2013) from Andrew Kramer of Blender Guru
It was actually Andrew Price:
https://www.blenderguru.com/articles/fixing-blender-part-1-why-its-broken
He later admitted at the 2013 Blender Conference there were a lot of problems with his proposal and that the way he had gone about it wasn't that great either:
https://www.blenderguru.com/articles/improving-blenders-ui-the-2013-blender-conference
Not completely unlike the grandparent poster, which is presumably why he got downvoted.
I played around with Blender when I was in college back in 2012-2013. Cycles render was just introduced back then. Blender and it's community has come a long way since then in this short span of time.
My starting point was http://www.blenderguru.com/ (for general tips and tricks), reading about ray tracing(for understanding why my renders were not up to the mark), anatomy of physical shapes(for sculpting) and watching a lot of behind the scene VFX breakdown videos(to understand their construction). Frankly, my humble computer back then was not capable of running 3DS Max or Maya.
Apart from this, a lot of articles regarding photography helped. A keen attention to detail and huge amounts of patience is required(while watching your renders take hours if you have the wrong graphics card).
It is hard to sit down and start, so I usually trick myself with: 'I will just draw one line today and the rest can follow tomorrow'. Once you get going is always more than one line (I'm an amateur Blender user, so 2 lines are already a polygon). This stuck with me (volume, not 'quality');
https://www.blenderguru.com/articles/7-habits-highly-effective-artists-bcon-2016
p.s. And after N lines * N completed pictures you will automagically know what you want. In my case certain image will form (or an idea) - this could take days/weeks, this are usually small and stupid, but that doesn't prevent me from realization (or at least an attempt) - it's all just for /me.