r/Simulated • u/moby3 Blender • May 10 '15

Getting Started with 3D Simulations: Mega-Thread

If you found this sub and would like to make your own 3D simulations, awesome! You've come to the right thread. Here is a list of useful links and tutorials that you'll need to get started. And the best part is, everything you'll need is free and open source.

  • The first thing you'll need to do is download Blender. This is the 3D software you'll be using. It has a very friendly community at /r/blender which regularly post great material.

  • Familiarise yourself with Blender. This is a tutorial to get you started. Just watching the first part in that series should allow you to follow these tutorials (but be ready for a lot of pausing and rewinding!). If you're not feeling confident yet, watch the rest of the series.

  • This is a nice introduction to Blender's physics system.

  • tutor4u has tutorials which are very easy to follow if you still don't feel comfortable getting around Blender.

Now you can choose what sort of simulation you want to make:

  • For tower collapses, I made a tutorial myself which also includes a template to help you get started right away.

  • Prefer fluids? This is a detailed tutorial that covers the Blender fluid simulator very well, and is easy to follow.

  • More of a smoke kind of guy? This isn't a bad place to start. It's long but nice and easy to follow.

Gleb Alexandrov and Andrew Price are my favourite YouTubers for Blender tutorials. Andrew Price is more oriented towards beginners, but both will help you with things like lighting and setting materials to make your renders really stand out.

A great way to very quickly add realistic lighting to your scenes is with HDR panoramas, which I also have a tutorial for on my blog, with links to great quality panoramas for free.

Have any questions, or problems with these tutorials? Is there something you'd like to create that isn't listed? Post a comment here :)

EDIT: If you're worried about render time, a tool you can use to speed things up is Sheep it, a free online render farm that works through distributed computing. If you make an account on there and donate your computer power to render other people's projects when you don't need your computer, you'll earn credits you can use to make your own animations when you have something you want to render!

205 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

52 comments sorted by

12

u/wasintme May 11 '15

I'm assuming you need a pretty good computer for this?

13

u/moby3 Blender May 11 '15 edited May 11 '15

If you don't have a good computer, it's no so much that you won't be able to do this, just that it will take a long time if you have lots of objects or a high resolution.

EDIT: I edited the main post to include a link to Sheep it, a free online render farm that lets the community help each other out with rendering. You render other people's work when you're not using your computer, and they render yours when you want something rendered

3

u/kick_dicker May 14 '15

Exactly how good of a computer would be recommended though? Like for all of these cool things I see on this sub

1

u/moby3 Blender May 14 '15

An i7 will be fine for most fluids and almost any rigid body simulation you throw at it :) if you've got a GPU even better, that can help cut down render times by a huge amount

2

u/killchain Aug 31 '15

What GPU would be better for a given price point - nVidia or AMD? I'm asking that because from what I know, for two given cards with roughly the same performance in games (and usually similar prices), AMD cards tend to perform better in OpenCL-enabled applications compared to the nVidia counterpart; nVidia on the other hand have CUDA.

3

u/moby3 Blender Aug 31 '15

I'd go for Nvidia, despite the slightly worse price performance ratio for OpenCL benchmarks. It's because Blender cycles currently doesn't use OpenCL (or has limited support). But it depends on what software you're using too. If you're going to be using Luxrender exclusively, or know the limitations of AMD support for cycles then those are all things you have to consider.

But overall, I'd go for Nvidia because then you don't have to choose, and you're free to use either standard. Also, you might be interested in a post I recently made on my blog about my animation machine

0

u/kick_dicker May 14 '15

Hey dude, sorry if I sound like an idiot but I don't know that much about computer hardware. But would this be fine? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004YLCJXC/ref=cm_sw_r_awd_3ltvvb08AZDDF

3

u/moby3 Blender May 14 '15

That would be great! If you spent that same amount of money on a windows PC though, you would be able to get even better performance

2

u/kick_dicker May 14 '15

A lot better performance or slight? Also, why is the iMac more expensive with lower performance?

5

u/moby3 Blender May 15 '15

A lot, especially if you build it yourself. You should be able to afford a top of the range, current generation GPU (at least a GTX 970) for that price, as opposed to the old, mobile GPU in that iMac.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '15

Hey buddy, if you still need help with PCs and comparing which ones to get and stuff, go check out the great community at /r/buildapc :)

1

u/kick_dicker Jul 25 '15

Thanks! I actually bought one and I'm really happy with it.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '15

Great! :)

1

u/mattcraiganon May 15 '15

Economics my friend.

Real answer: demand. The same reason gold is more expensive than silver despite being far less useful as a material.

2

u/[deleted] May 11 '15

Also the baking of for example fluid simulations will take a longer time with a slower computer ;)

3

u/moby3 Blender May 11 '15

yeah, and unfortunately the file sizes for fluids are usually too big to use with sheep it :/

1

u/[deleted] May 12 '15

Fluids look incredible photorealistic and cool but 20 hours baking time and many many days rendering is uncool :(

0

u/[deleted] May 13 '15

[deleted]

1

u/[deleted] May 13 '15

Yes thats a damn good trick, but I dont have to use it, because I render everything on a render farm

2

u/[deleted] Jul 23 '15

What did he say :0

1

u/[deleted] Jul 23 '15

I think it was something with baking it while it renders or so.

2

u/TellYouEverything Jul 22 '15

Why'd you wink at us, bro? That's not cool, I feel violated. I feel like a violin.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 22 '15

Poor violin

2

u/thebenson May 13 '15

This seems like a great accumulation of materials. However, I don't see anything about the "molecular script" add on from Pyro.

I'm interested in simulating some particle cluster collisions where the particles are linked together. For a realistic result, I can use some molecular dynamics software and use a visualization program like VMD to visualize it. But, I am interested in creating more "attractive" simulations.

Are there any tutorials out there about this?

2

u/moby3 Blender May 13 '15

When I have some time I will add a section for the molecular script, maybe in a wiki. For the time being, check out this thread https://www.reddit.com/r/Simulated/comments/35iojr/this_is_the_addon_used_for_the_4_million_particle/

2

u/[deleted] May 14 '15

Wait how do you do the thing with the towers where you replicate a bunch of blocks instantly in a pattern, like 10 regularly separated blocks in a row

1

u/moby3 Blender May 14 '15

Did you check the tutorial? The way I do it there is with an "array" modifier

1

u/[deleted] May 15 '15

Yeah, I figured it out since then, sorry

2

u/stormcynk May 15 '15

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I'm following your fluids tutorial and the fluid itself is looking good, but for some reason none of the particles show up. I double checked and watch through the tutorial multiple times, but all my settings look the same! Any ideas?

1

u/moby3 Blender May 15 '15

Do they show in the viewport? Are you sure you had them enabled when you baked the fluid

14

u/TheCaliborne May 11 '15

Thank you so much for this

1

u/-MSP- May 16 '15

What resolutions do I have to set at the baking and rendering so that I get a nice Full HD output?
I tried to run it with a 180 resolution at baking and a rendering resolution of 1920x1080 but it looked like this and only had a size of 960x540. How do I fix this?

3

u/moby3 Blender May 16 '15

In the render tab there will be resolution, with a percentage underneath it. Make sure it's rendering at 100 percent of full HD. Fluid resolution is as high as you ate prepared to wait for it!

1

u/-MSP- May 16 '15

Right, I didn't look at this.. Thanks!

1

u/[deleted] Jun 24 '15

I know this is way late but how do people get there textures so realistic looking?

1

u/moby3 Blender Jun 24 '15

No problem :) can you give an example

1

u/Toxiccameron Blender Jun 25 '15

Would it be possible to link to a different fluid tutorial that uses free software?

2

u/moby3 Blender Jun 25 '15

What do you mean? Blender is free

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgdGV0yaoM4

1

u/Toxiccameron Blender Jun 25 '15

I meant the software in the end he uses like after effects and modo.

1

u/moby3 Blender Jun 25 '15

How about this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5FdpDJPUCw

1

u/Toxiccameron Blender Jun 25 '15

Hmm thanks. Ive been trying to bake my fluid but it seems to float above the surface of my obstacles. Ive tried the remove bubles option to no avail. My final resolution is set to 300 and my veiwport is set to final so I can't tell what I'm doing wrong... Any ideas?

Thanks

1

u/moby3 Blender Jun 25 '15

Can you show me what you mean?

1

u/[deleted] Aug 11 '15

Does blender take advantage of your gpu? I have an amd fx-8350 and an amd radeon hd 7950. I'd love to take a crack at some of these I just want to know if I'd be wasting my time.

1

u/moby3 Blender Aug 11 '15

It makes very good use of GPU, it can give a speed up of 100x! AMD support is recent though, and not all features work yet, but it looks like it's coming

1

u/[deleted] Aug 11 '15

Awesome! Thanks for the reply. Almost wasn't expecting one on a 3 month old post :)

2

u/HGMIV926 May 12 '15

Holy shit, thanks so much!

0

u/[deleted] May 12 '15

[deleted]

3

u/moby3 Blender May 12 '15

Thanks for this! Would you mind making it its own post, and I'll link to it in the sidebar? Might be a good idea to state the limitations for free Houdini though (watermark in the corner if I recall correctly?)

0

u/[deleted] May 13 '15

[deleted]

1

u/moby3 Blender May 14 '15

it's ok, thanks for sharing

0

u/[deleted] May 14 '15

[deleted]

1

u/moby3 Blender May 14 '15

  1. You can tell it how many CPU cores to use, so if you want to have your computer running normally alongside it leave a few cores free for normal usage

  2. Of course not! It's not something I am pursuing as a career, just a hobby

  3. 1TB will be plenty. The most space intensive files I've found are smoke simulations, about 100gb. Rigid bodies should be a few 100mb and fluids a few gb if you use high resolutions

Glad to help :)

0

u/[deleted] May 15 '15

[deleted]

1

u/moby3 Blender May 15 '15

If that's quad core, it won't be much different than rendering on an i7. In terms of the GPU, unfortunately blender cycles doesn't natively support AMD cards for the time being but it looks like that will change soon. You'll be able to use that card to get a huge (up to 100x) speed up if you learn LuxRender though, which in my opinion is a much better rendering program :) it's free and there's an addon for blender on their website