Dual-render materials and lighting are go. The top two screens are both OpenGL renders from the viewport. The very top one is Solid drawing with Cycles, the middle one is Blender running in Blender Internal render mode. The bottom screen is a render from Cycles.
Thanks to BI’s much nicer OpenGL integration, I can have shadows in viewport now. Took not that long to set everything up (a couple of hours if that?) and totally worth it, I think. Tips and hints to follow later.
After seeing Kent Trammell’s rundown on PBR in Blender, I got inspired to try putting some nicer viewport materials onto Gronky so that my playblasts will look nicer. I converted Gronky’s materials from Cycles to Blender Internal and had a play.
This is a viewport render from GLSL using AMITS’s usual sky and sun lighting. It’s missing a bit of fine detail but it’s way nicer than what I used to have for playblasting, definitely.
More on the rewrite in progress on Sunday, as usual. 🙂
…and now you can see the crackles in the road. Woohoo!
Since I started doing procedural textures I’m looking at all the textures around me and thinking “How can I recreate that surface procedurally?” – hexagons have been a particular obsession of late. Not sure why. I’m sure bees have nothing to do with it.
It would be so nice to have Voronoi Crackle and the other BI procedural thingies in Cycles though. It really would.
Right, now to digest everything in this BlenderArtists thread about Cycles procedural texturing…
Worked on a procedural road texture. You might need to view it full screen to make out the detail.
Turns out it’s a lot subtler than I thought. Hmm. Guess I’ll keep working on it. 🙂
Some procedural concrete rot and peeled off paint around the corners of the bus marker. The peeled off paint comes courtesy of the Blender 2.74 Geometry node’s Pointiness output.
Blender 2.74 hasn’t been released yet but you can grab the test build for yourself. Read the release notes if you’re curious to see what other new stuff has been added.