You can join Blender Studio for €11.50/month and get access to all of our training & film content instantly!
Login Join Blender StudioFiles & Tools
9th July 2020
info License: CC-BYPublished by
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.
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.
So a single one of these planes shows a simple line of the profile at the plane's position.
All together they create the whole graph by using a grid of planes.
17 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
Gary Brimer
2nd July 2022 - 20:29
Just a note as I start into this, all of the example files come up with Risky Connection and Virus warnings from McAfee. Might be something to look into.
shmuel lowenbraun
20th November 2022 - 22:38
@Gary Brimer have the same problem
Albert Campos
5th December 2022 - 16:00
love this one
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)