Blender Lessons Sessions

[RPC]

Video link ready!
So it was my first time recording something so problems arose:
* No audio for the first 15 minutes
* forgot to record my mic R I P

[Xephyr]

Thanks for recording, RPC.

I went on to finish the model I made, we could probably dedicate a session to more detailed stuff later on.

[RPC]

An example of the completed project + some questions I had to ask:
Example

Questions:
shift+c to center
shift+ middle mouse to move view

(surface types for textures)
Diffuse for ships
For the background I use a weak emission (strength 0.1)

(how to UV map)
<Xephyr> Select the faces you want unwrapped, then press U > smart UV project, then hit "OK"
<Xephyr> If you forget the shortcut keys then click on the "mesh" dropdown in the bottom right
<RPC> will this work if my ship is lots of models or should I join them first?
<Xephyr> If it's several objects then you'll have to unwrap them all individually
<Xephyr> If you join them you can do it all at once, even for different materials, but then its harder to edit with all the faces everywhere
<RPC> ah i see
<Xephyr> You can get away with just joining everything and unwrapping right before you render

(If you already UV map something and it's not taking a texture)
<Xephyr> If there's two materials in an object you have to select its faces and click "assign" on the materials tab

(how to make the background)
<Xephyr> mesh > plane
<Xephyr> then I just move it down the z axis a bit and set the material

[JohnBWatson]

Nice work, RPC!

By the way, does anyone know if this program is any good?

[RPC]

@Watson: Not sure how the program works. I think you still need skype for it to run. My 5 year old laptop has a pretty below average graphics card now so upping video quality makes recording slower + youtube kills quality all over the place. Not sure how to fix with my current setup.

[JohnBWatson]

@Watson: Not sure how the program works. I think you still need skype for it to run. My 5 year old laptop has a pretty below average graphics card now so upping video quality makes recording slower + youtube kills quality all over the place. Not sure how to fix with my current setup.

I was wondering whether it might be useful for recording the sessions(either for me if I can get my laptop working with Skype, or for someone else if I can't).

[TheLoneWolf]

I went on to finish the model I made

UV Wrapping/Unwrapping and Baking 101 please!


3 cheers for Xephyr!

[TheLoneWolf]

@JBW
IIRC youtube compresses whatever ain't mp4 into flv.
You can record .avi files with that program (raw audio, raw video, ie .avi) (beware. Super huge file size) and then use Handbrake to compress it into native mp4!

If you want to reduce the filesize even further, do .avi -> Windows Movie Maker -> Handbrake!

Happy handbrakin' ^.~

[Ferdinand]

How about using ffmpeg for recording? The following will record your entire screen and audio in an mp4 container (assuming you use Windows, it's different for linux)

Code: Select all

ffmpeg -f dshow -i video="UScreenCapture" -f dshow -i audio="Microphone" output.mp4

Or if you just want the contents of the skype window use the following:

Code: Select all

ffmpeg -f gdigrab -i title=skype -f dshow -i audio="Microphone" output.mp4

You can also specify video and audio compression en codecs in the commandline if desired, but the above should basically work.

[NMS]

If you have an NVidia graphics card, I recommend ShadowPlay (part of GeForce Experience). It encodes in real time on the unused parts of the graphics card, so the performance impact is minimal.

I believe ATI has an equivalent, but I don't know much about it.

[RPC]

@NMS: I have intel HD 4000. T.T


I double checked my OBS settings and realized that they were set to bad quality because I ran out of space on my hard drive. I recently got a 1TB external so maybe it might have enough space. At the bad quality I recorded, the one hour recording was already 4 GB! I wonder how much more it would be if I had it at max quality.

[NMS]

At the bad quality I recorded, the one hour recording was already 4 GB! I wonder how much more it would be if I had it at max quality.

Completely uncompressed 1920x1080, 60 fps, 32 bit color depth video would use 3.98 Gb/s, or 1.79 TB/hour. I used to use Fraps and it compressed it down to around 1.5 Gb/s (675 GB/hour).

It's possible to compress down to 10 Mb/s (around what your video is) and still have it look fine, but not with real-time encoding. ShadowPlay can be set to a target between 10 and 50 Mb/s (though it doesn't obey it very strictly), but for a program that does real-time encoding on your processor, you probably want to use more. If your internet upload is slow or limited, you can reencode it yourself before uploading to reduce the size, but otherwise I've found it's faster and easier to upload the recording straight to YouTube.

Edit: Of course, if you're reducing the size and/or frame rate, the space and processing power requirements go down. But for YouTube purposes, it's better not to reduce the size below 720 vertical, otherwise they'll resize it down to 480.

[TheLoneWolf]

Ofcourse.

FRAPS still outputs pretty huge files. Shadowplay and Raptr (part of AMD Gaming Evolved) are better suited for recording games (the quality, and the already compressed .mp4 output). I think we should use specific software for recording Skype.

[Xephyr]

I'm going to try another stream tomorrow at 4pm PST. I've got myself a headset now, so it won't sound like I'm sitting in a tin can.

This time I'll be using Google Hangouts, so nobody will have to run Skype to join in. Additionally, if Hangouts looks like it's going to work, that means I can stream directly to Youtube and have it save the recorded stream - But I don't plan on recording this one, as it'll be pretty experimental and mostly review anyway.

---

Session 2: Ship Design and Detail passes

-Review keyboard and mouse controls, and build a basic textured model
-Talk a little about designing a ship for the Transcendence setting and the ship/station scale
-Add in detail to the ship, through texturing, adding meshes, and some other tricks

---

I'll post the link to the hangout shortly before I begin - You should be able to run it in any browser. There's a text chat as well, so you don't have to go on mic/cam if you don't want to.

[JohnBWatson]

Cool, I'll definitely be there. The recording of the first tutorial by RPC was excellent, so I was able to learn quite a bit.

I was able to find out that 'enable hangouts on air' allows recording of the hangout directly to a youtube channel, which might be useful as a resource to future modders. Seems to be a built in function, too, so if anyone wants a recording, they might want to turn that on.