All posts by Jay Versluis

About Jay Versluis

Jay is a medical miracle known as Super Survivor. He runs two YouTube channels, five websites and several podcast feeds. To see what else he's up to, and to support him on his mission to make the world a better place, check out his Patreon Campaign.

Atmospheric Fog Planes in DAZ Studio – 3D Shenanigans #16

3D, 3D Podcast, Screencasts

In this live event I’ll show you how to use Atmospheric Fog Planes in DAZ Studio. They can be used as a subtle effect to make your scenes more realistic. Fog Planes can fill the screen, or they can be used as prop splats to show steam rising in parts of your image. I’ll show your both versions, explain the workflow in setting up your planes, and how to create them yourself with Carrara.

For this demonstration, I’m using Stonemason’s Urban Future 6.

All my Patreon Supporters get access to the fog assets I’m creating in this stream.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 55:15 — 50.6MB)

FIXED: Creative Cloud reports “out of space” although there is enough

2D,

I’ve recently migrated my cloud files over to Adobe’s Creative Cloud. I’m currently getting 20GB of space without device limitations. I made the move because Dropbox recently introduced a limitation of the amount of “new devices” that can be linked with a free account, which meant I couldn’t link my new Z600 and Z800 workstations on my render farm.

All of a sudden I see this notice that some files could not be synced anymore, telling me I’d have to clear up some space in Creative Cloud. No problem I thought, several image sequences had been converted into videos so I deleted them. My Finder window reported a correct 9GB of used space, but the Creative Cloud app still reported in excess of 20GB. What was going on?

Turns out when you delete files from Creative Cloud, they go into an invisible Trash – not on your local computer, but – you’ve guessed it – “in the cloud”. That space counts towards your quota, and unless this is deleted, new files won’t sync across your devices.

That’s different from Dropbox, where deleted files could be accessed outside the storage quota for 30 days, before being deleted permanently. With Creative Cloud, we’ll have to do this manually (but of course, nobody tells you this)… now that I’ve found how how to do it, let me show you how.

Continue reading FIXED: Creative Cloud reports “out of space” although there is enough →

Rendering with Blender from the Command Line

3D

I through I could some of my computers to good use by helping them render animations. Everyone is stronger together as a team, no matter if we’re built on carbon or silicone. Sadly though, Blender doesn’t start its GUI via RDP, which means it’s not so easy to speak to the application – unless you employ clunky workarounds.

That’s where the command line interface comes in handy. We can issue a text command to Blender, telling it which file we’d like to render, where to render to, and which frames of an animation to render.

Before I forget how it works, I thought I’d best write it down somewhere.

Continue reading Rendering with Blender from the Command Line →

Shattering my Logo in Blender – 3D Shenanigans #15

3D, 3D Podcast, Screencasts

On this week’s live stream I’ll take my 3D Shenanigans Logo and shatter it into pieces, to build a creepy backwards animation using the Cell Fracture add-on in Blender 2.79.

I’ll start by explaining how the tool works, then we’ll move on to building the logo from scratch, add materials, and then we’ll build something similar to this animation: https://youtu.be/pzi6ghRRfLg

I currently have TWO RTX 2080 cards in my system, which means I’ll do the shattering in Blender 2.79, and will render in Blender 2.80. Sometimes we’ll just have to use different versions to get a job done.

Here’s a video by Richard from CGCookie about this modifier:

  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEo_9AopfoQ

The Cell Fracture add-on is scheduled to make it into Blender 2.81 later this year.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:31:37 — 83.9MB)

Creating Animated Fog with Carrara – 3D Shenanigans #14

3D, 3D Podcast, Screencasts

In this live event I’ll create animated volumetric fog with the highly underrated Carrara. I’ll show you around the app and explain how the programme works, introduce you to some of its features, and then I’ll animate good looking fog. Once exported as a transparent image sequence, I’ll try to animate it live over my own camera feed. It’ll be a hoot!

This concept was inspired by my Skeleton at the Graveyard animation I made three years ago.

We’ve discovered a similarly simple effect last Saturday in Subnautica (the ceiling effect at around 2:15:00).

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:20:16 — 73.5MB)

How to switch game modes in Subnautica

Gaming

I’ve had a few computer glitches recently while experimenting with a new graphics card. Unfortunately this lead to some random crashes, which in turn damaged my Subnautica game files.

Suddenly my save games didn’t tell me how long I had been playing, and what type of game I was playing anymore, and instead only shoed the message “damaged game save”. That didn’t sound good!

Thankfully though, when I loaded the file up, everything seems fine: I had the same base, was spawned in the correct place, had all the belongings I remember… except for one weird issue: my Freedom type game was now a Survival game. Not what I had signed up for!

Lucky for us there’s an easy way to switch from what we’re currently playing to any of the other three game types (Survival, Freedom, Hardcore or Creative) into any of the others. Here’s how to do it:

  • press F3 to bring up a secret settings box at the to left
  • press F8 to bring up the mouse cursor
  • disable the option “disable console” (thereby enabling it)
  • now press F3 again to close that settings window again
  • hit Enter to bring up a text input box at the bottom left

This will bring up a command line prompt at which we can now issue statements – much like on a Linux Terminal or Windows Power Shell. If we know what to type, we can make the game do exciting things that can come in handy when we’re stuck due to a bug or other circumstance. Developers use this tool a lot.

To change the game mode, we can type any of the following:

  • Survival
  • Freedom
  • Hardcore
  • Creative

That’s all we need to do. When you’re done, press F3 again to close the scary settings window.

Warning

Be advised that in the release version of either Subnautica and presumably Below Zero, issuing the above commands will disable the achievements feature.

Also note that in Below Zero, the changed game mode is not saved. The rest of your game state is, but when you restart a saved game a again, you’ll be back to the previous game mode (at least in the Snowfox update from April 2019).

Using Iray Canvases in DAZ Studio – 3D Shenanigans #13

3D, 3D Podcast, Screencasts

In this live event I’ll tell you everything I know about Iray Canvases in DAZ Studio. It’s a huge topic, and admittedly I don’t know everything about this subject, but it will cover how to get started with multi pass rendering and the principles of creating separate images from your scene.

About Depth Passes

There’s a great video by DarkEdgeDesign about how to use the Depth Canvas in Photoshop – check it out here. Thanks to Capra Media for bringing this to my attention.

There’s also Nabesaka’s article on Depth Canvases here.

Christina was kind enough to make a video about how to deal with depth maps in Photoshop (she’s my Photoshop Wiki). Thanks, Christina!

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:19:41 — 73.0MB)

Where does Subnautica store Game Saves?

Gaming

Subnautica game save files can currently not participate in any “cloud save” options as far as I’m aware. As such, to transfer files between systems or to make backups, we’ll have to dig deep inside a system folder to find said data.

The exact path depends on which marketplace you purchased the game from.

Steam

I got mine from Steam, and the path is

  • Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Subnautica\SNAppData\SavedGames

The folder contains an options folder as well as a folder such as “slot0001” for each save game.

Epic Games

I don’t have the Epic version, but I hear on the grape vine that save games are stored in the User’s folder. Say my user name is “versluis”, then the full path would be

  • C:\Users\versluis\AppData\LocalLow\Unknown Worlds\Subnautica\Subnautica\SavedGames

Other services

I understand that Subnautica is also available from other marketplaces such as Discord, as well as Xbox One and Playstation 4. Sadly I have no idea where those save games are stored.

Should I ever find out, I’ll update this article. Likewise, if you know any such path, please leave it in the comments below.

TurboTax and QuickBooks Self-Employed – what’s the best deal?

Reviews,

This is a slightly longer than usual story, but I thought I’d share it nonetheless – maybe it’ll help someone who’s in a similar situation than I was in April 2019, just about to file my tax return in the US. Grab a coffee and take a trip around some Intuit products that helped me transform the way Julia and I do our taxes.

Continue reading TurboTax and QuickBooks Self-Employed – what’s the best deal? →

Animating Numbers with Blender and DAZ Studio – 3D Shenanigans #12

3D, 3D Podcast, Screencasts,

In this live event I’ll show you how to create 3D Text Objects in Blender 2.8, then bring them in to DAZ Studio to animate and render. We’ll animate a single number first, then apply the same animation to the other numbers and add small variations using aniMate.

Other than that, I’m happy to answer any questions you have – join the chat and see if we can solve that DAZ puzzle you’ve been having for a while.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:34:19 — 86.4MB)