- Sep 3, 2022
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It is not what you want to hear....
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Dev Talk - Pipeline Updates
July 14
This is going to be a big post because it's essentially covering a few weeks of work.
TLDR: Updating the characters and tools for Blender 4.1 resulted in a complete update of my current pipeline which was initially developed during pre-production of In a Scent.
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As I mentioned in an earlier dev talk, Blender 4.1 broke some existing things on my end and required an update. While working on adapting some of the current tools and assets for 4.1, I realized that it's probably a good time to take a step back and look at the overall pipeline with fresh eyes. A lot of my existing tools and processes were designed from a couple of years ago where my knowledge of Blender was significantly less than it is now.
I'll just start listing things now and do my best to not go into the details too much in order to keep things as short as possible.
1. Character Proxy Workflow: The standard setup which matches Daz also has limitations in Blender. The biggest limitations are that sculpting is limited to the low resolution mesh unless you want to work blind and introduce artifacts/errors. I've since implemented a proper proxy workflow to work around this limitation. This was possible because the creator of the plugin made a small but very important feature addition upon my request.
2. Cloth Simulation Workflow: This has been an off/on situation for me from day one. I kept coming up with bandaid solutions that get the job done but come with their own frustrations. I use another program to do the cloth simulations and bring it back into Blender. Taking a step back to look at this workflow with fresh eyes helped me identify the very silly and fundamental mistake that I've been making and seems to have completely resolved the biggest hurdles and now it seems to work as expected.
3. Daz hair to Blender: This was a frustrating one for me. The hair from Daz did not look quiet as good in Blender, and converting it to Blender particle hair gave some darth helmet vibes. Blender has added a completely new hair system and I've finally taken a deep look and incorporated it.
For example, this is how Selene's hair looks like straight from Daz. It's not actual hair strands and the shading doesn't look quite as good in Blender as it does in Daz.
Here is what it looks like for In a Scent where I converted it to Blender's particle hair in order to use the better native shaders.
Still doesn't look great and now it's all poofy and lost it's tight original shape, but the shader reacts better to light and I was able to introduce fly-away hairs for more realism.
Here's the new hair + shader.
Not only does it retain the original shape from Daz, but it also utilizes the new hair shader properly and just looks fucking fabulous altogether. On top of this, I have full access to every single strand in Blender's geometry nodes. In fact, I was able to break down the hair into multiple sections for even better control.
Here's just the isolated hair bun for example.
Ma also received these improvements for her hair as she previously looked like she was wearing a hairy helmet for a wig. Gary and Raya's hair was made from scratch with the older particle system so I've left it as is. Only Ma and Selene were the big offenders.
Going forward, this opens up using Daz hair assets for future characters as well. I've also dabbled with using the new system to create hair from scratch, which will be useful for creating situational hair for these characters, such as wet hair in the shower.
4. Two in the bush: The new hair system deep dive was also a big help with a bush or two. Ma got a nice bush upgrade.
Old:
New:
I quickly put something together for the old one whereas the new bush is the result of taking a deep dive at the hair tools. Turns out that it's not as complicated as originally thought and I'll be able to quickly make new pubes for the other chars going forward.
5. Geonodes Squish System: This one is just super cool. Rather than manually trying to sculpt the squish like when a character is sitting back on their thighs, I have a node system that just automatically does it for me with great results.
6. Blender Studio Tools: Blender Studio, which is in charge of doing the Blender open movies, had released their inhouse tools for one of their more recent films. I've finally gotten around to taking a look and experimenting with them and some of those tools are amazing solutions to very specific parts of my workflow. It's nothing exciting to show as it's mostly resolving very specific data and structural issues but damn did they get me rock hard.
7. Cascadeur Workflow: Another external software that uses machine learning for animation. I've been meaning to get this one working for the bigger general movements in animation as it works in real time and gets results faster than me doing the same in Blender. Now I finally got it working where I can setup the anim and then bring it back into Blender for more detailed work. This workflow was also possible thanks to some more recent changes to one of the plugins I use.
8. Custom addon rewrite: I made an addon last year for my specific workflow at the time. It worked well but would constantly break with each new version of Blender. The problem was that I created the addon using another Blender addon that allows the user to program visually. This means that if a new version of Blender presented changes that affect the addon, things could break. If the addon developer made some sweeping changes, things could break. If I wanted to dive back in and adjust something, not only would I have to try and remember how the addon works, but also hope my save file was still compatible with any new changes.
I finally got around to ditching the visual coding addon and rewriting the entire thing in python. Now it's much more stable, changes are very easy and quick to implement and it shouldn't break with every update of Blender. I've also added some new features to it that work well with my new mouseless setup.
9. Mouseless Setup: I stopped using a mouse for a few months now in response to growing wrist pains. I work entirely on a pen tablet, which completely alleviated the wrist pains but have introduced its own challenges. Most of these issues has been resolved by incorporating a CAD space mouse and using
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on an old android tablet that was collecting dust.I was writing a Blender plugin for it in order to create a live bridge over usb between the tablet and blender. Unfortunately I'm not that great of a coder and had to put the live bridge aspect of it away for a future date.
It worked great to automatically update information based on what was happening in Blender. The problem is that it crashes when handling saved files. So now I still use but more like a typical stream deck.
10. Post-Proc Workflow: Due to the addition of a home server and expansion of storage, I'm now storing every single working file and raw render formats. These also come with separate layers for better control in the grading and compositing stage. A big example being a vector velocity pass which allows me to denoise animations with a denoiser designed for animation in an external software, rather than letting Blender do it.
This means that animation renders should be less "sparkly/popping", on top of additional post-proc benefits.
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I did not intend to spend the last two weeks working on the pipeline. I was originally just fixing only what I had to fix, and about 8 hours into making some huge adjustments requiring bizarre scenarios such as replacing the dental work on the characters (I'm not kidding), I realized that taking a step back was probably the right call.
With that out of the way, actual production has resumed for In a Scent (for real for real this time).
Cheers,
Dom
