🍹Blender
Our Blender Add-on supports Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
This Getting Started Guide is for the Looking Glass Blender Add-on. Our Blender Add-on features:
Support for both Eevee and Cycles rendering
Non-destructive camera creation
Quilt presets and support for custom quilt settings
Support for regular and multi-view rendering systems
Live-display of the camera view in the Looking Glass
Live-display of your camera view as a Blocks hologram
The current version of the add-on requires Blender 2.93 or newer.
You can download the latest version of Blender here You can download our Blender add-on here
Installing
If you have not yet done so, install Looking Glass Bridge
Open Blender, and go to Edit → Preferences → Add-ons → Install...
Select the .zip and click "Install Add-on from file" on the top right
Enable the add-on by checking the box next to the add-on name on the left
Install Python dependencies by pressing "Install Dependencies" -- this should appear once the first time you enable the add-on
Click "Save User Settings" to keep the add-on enabled
Restart Blender
Usage
The main UI can be found in the Sidebar → Looking Glass Tab.
Create Render Setup
Instead of adding 45 cameras to your scene as a collection, we now create those cameras behind the scenes. Clutter free!
In addition you can now control the field of view directly with a single camera, simply grab the eye-dropper from the Looking Glass Tab and select your camera! Our add-on will automatically create a camera rig on top of your camera that you can modify to your heart's content!
Live View
If you have a Looking Glass plugged into your computer, you can toggle Live View by clicking the window icon at the top right of the Looking Glass panel. This feature is currently experimental and it will take a significant amount of time for the view to update -- we're working on optimization. In the meantime, you may get better results by changing the update mode of the Live View from Automatic to Manual.
Rendering and Saving
You can render quilts directly by using the Render Quilt or Render Animation Quilt options in the Looking Glass Toolbar. You can choose to save just the resulting quilt image, or the images that make up the quilt. Quilt images will save to the same directory that your normal renders from Blender save to.
Rendering Tips
Rendering content for the Looking Glass can be demanding depending on which renderer or how heavy your 3D scenes are. For Blender's Cycles render engine, we recommend using a lower amount of samples with denoising turned on. Denoised images are almost identical in quality to high sample count renders and render out much faster than normal since you can lower the sample size to something like 32 samples for super quick renders!
In the Add-ons panel you can switch the Single Camera Mode option to Multi Camera Mode which can result in much faster renderings.
Renderfarm Implementation (Experimental)
The rendering of still holograms and holographic animations can be a time-consuming task. Therefore, this add-on provides a command line mechanism that was created for renderfarms which want to support the quilt rendering by Alice/LG on their systems. Since it has not been tested on a renderfarm environment yet, this feature is considered experimental. If you are working at a renderfarm and need help to implement this mechanism on your system, please open an issue on the add-on's GitHub repository.
Basic Command Line Calls
As a first prerequisite, Alice/LG needs to be installed and activated on the renderfarm's Blender installation. To initiate a quilt rendering from the command line, there are two main calls which are understood by Alice/LG:
-alicelg-render: Start the rendering of a single quilt.-alicelg-render-anim: Start the rendering of a quilt animation.
Both arguments require that Blender is started in background mode (i.e., using the '-b' command line argument) and with a .blend file specified, which contains all the necessary render settings. Furthermore, both arguments must be preceded by a --.
An example, which opens the file 'my_lg_hologram.blend' and starts rendering a single quilt looks like that:
blender -b my_lg_hologram.blend -- -alicelg-render
Additional Parameters
The add-on also understands some additional parameters to fine-tune the rendering process. These parameters are very similar to Blender's internal command line rendering parameters:
-oor--render-output<path>: Sets the render path and file name. Automatically disables the "Add Metadata" option.-sor--frame-start<frame>: Sets start to frame<frame>, supports +/- for relative frames-eor--frame-end<frame>: Sets end to frame<frame>, supports +/- for relative frames-jor--frame-jump<frame>: Sets number of frames to step forward after each rendered frame-for--render-frame: Specifies a single frame to render
It is important that these arguments are specified after the mandatory -- to notify Blender that the arguments are meant for the add-on.
An example call which would start Blender in background mode, load the 'my_lg_hologram.blend' file, and render a quilt animation from frame 10 to 24 with the base filename quilt_animwould look like this:
blender -b my_lg_hologram.blend -- -alicelg-render-anim -o /tmp/quilt_anim.png -s 10 -e 24
Another example, which would only render the frame 16 as a single quilt, would like this:
blender -b my_lg_hologram.blend -- -alicelg-render -o /tmp/quilt.png -f 16
Authors
License
The Blender add-on portion of this project is licensed under the GPL-3.0 License.
Issues
If you're having issues with our Blender Add-on please email us at [email protected] and fill out our bug reporting form.
You can also file an issue on GitHub
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