favorite

Development Fund

Support Blender Core Development with a monthly contribution.
theaters

Blender Studio

The creators who share. Access production content and knowledge from the Open Movies.
code

Blender Developer Blog

Latest news and updates on Blender development.
people

Get Involved

Join the community and help with design, development, docs and more.
bar_chart

Open Data

A platform to collect and display the Blender Benchmark results.
menu_book

Blender Docs

Documentation on Blender's features, tools and API.

Blender Conference

The yearly event that brings together the Blender community in one place.
download

Get Blender

Download the latest Blender version, or try the beta!

You need to login to view this content

You can join Blender Studio for €9.90/month and get access to all of our training & film content instantly!

Join Blender Studio

Files & Tools

Visualization (Chapter 1-4): Value Graph

9th July 2020

info License: CC-BY
flag Report Problem

Author

Simon Thommes

3D Graph to analyze the value of texture maps Introduced in Chapter 1.4

Let me give you a quick breakdown of how the file works:

If you go into solid view, you can see that the scene consists of a whole bunch of intersecting planes.

img1.png

Those have a shader that samples the texture's value from the XY-coordinates and mixes between transparency and emission by comparing the Z-coordinate to the value of the texture.

img5.png

So a single one of these planes shows a simple line of the profile at the plane's position.

img2.png

All together they create the whole graph by using a grid of planes.

img3.png
img4.png

14 Comments

Join to comment publicly.

Jonathan Walsh

20th August 2020 - 15:42

Mate...this is the real in depth Blender learning, great stuff, many thanks.

Johnny "Brain Blast" Quasar

30th September 2020 - 01:24

Super thanks to you Simon! Visuals that let you see "behind the scenes", so to speak, definitely helps me understand an otherwise complex system.

Riccardo Gagliarducci

7th December 2020 - 00:53

I think this tools should be a standard debug tools in Blender! Not being able to visualize the output of a node is like programming without error codes or others utilities.

Huân Lê-Vương

17th August 2020 - 05:19

i used this file for better understanding the workflow example 1. very helpful!

Simon Thommes

17th August 2020 - 10:55

*@Huân Lê-Vương* Perfect, that's what I made it for as well! I'm glad it helps :)

Leslie Solorzano

31st October 2020 - 16:09

Super smart! This is very useful to visualize how textures that say 3D and 4D work in a more intuitive way

papertripping

19th July 2020 - 07:51

Hey Simon- Could you please show us how you made this .blend file? I think it'll help me better understand this course. Thanks! :)

Simon Thommes

21st July 2020 - 12:11

*@papertripping* Hey, to be honest, I don't think it adds a lot if I would make a separate video about this. But I added a quick breakdown to the description :)

Huân Lê-Vương

8th August 2020 - 04:50

*@papertripping* the node trees look intimidating :V it was easier in C4D for me with the clone system but i will have to adapt to the shading in blender.

Simon Thommes

8th August 2020 - 10:35

*@Huân Lê-Vương* I made this file a while back when the nodes were much more limited and I had to use a ton more.

Now the noding system is more convenient to use

fpowerm

14th January 2021 - 00:52

is there a way to save this tab as a default I can pull up whenever i need? I love these visualizations but have no idea how to setup the perspective in other projects Excellent work btw Simon just going through these again

Simon Thommes

14th January 2021 - 15:42

@fpowerm You can technically add it as a new workspace and scene to your startup file, then every file you create will have it as an option to switch to.

steve kacenjar

10th August 2021 - 01:38

This is moving a bit fast for me.  I tried to reconstruct your first example with noise texture but nothing showed up on my plane. It remained white.  I did notice that you have a ghost-like set of nodes behind the foreground nodes.  I don't know what they do or how to produce them.  Maybe I need to start a more basic course.  This is cool stuff but for me it is going too fast without filling in the spaces.  I might come back to this later after I go through more basic  tutorials.

Domas Astrauskas

14th September 2021 - 22:00

@steve kacenjar there are some lectures where you have to use prepared blend files and those files are not easily reproducable (as a programmer I think it is custom blend files)