Hoping to play the full game soon… the demo was really nice.

In general, I assume that you are using the 64 bit version of Windows and 64 bit version of Blender, which gives you a theoretical memory limit of 16 TB. But where does this huge amount of memory come from? It comes from the physical amount of RAM you have installed and the size of the page file (pagefile.sys).

Now, the page file can grow at maximum to the full size of your hard disk, which typically means that the limit is below 500 GB, which is far away from 16 TB. In the beginning, Windows will not make the page file so large – otherwise you would not be able to store anything else on your hard disk.

Windows starts at around 2 GB or 4 GB and expands the page file when needed. However, Windows might not be as fast at expanding the page file as Blender requests more memory. If this happens, Windows does not allow Blender to get more RAM and causes an Out-of-memory exception which crashes Blender.

Next time you start Blender, the page file is already bigger, e.g. 8 GB, and will be expanded again. It may then happen that Blender renders your scene as if it would never have had any problems. It might even happen that you can increase the particle count without any issues.

So what is the practical memory limit on your PC? In order to figure that out, I have written a small program which does nothing else than allocating memory. It does that in 4 MB pieces and it will recognize the limit before it actually crashes. It will then tell you, how much it was.

Be aware that running the program twice may cause different results. This is for mainly two reasons:

• the page file has been expanded in the meanwhile (as explained before)
• other programs running at the moment the memory limit is tested. This may also be invisible programs such as automatic update or virus scanners.

Message

Warning

I’m sorry I have only German versions of the screen shots.

Download 64 bit memory test application

This program requires the .NET 2.0 framework to be already installed on your computer.

While you’ll probably no longer be under the first 100 participants, there is still the chance to get Andrew Price’s “The Wow Factor” book for free if you join until 14th of December. Just be sure to log in early enough because the download link will disappear later. Actually that’s not just a book – it’s a 200 MB download and includes the audio recording of the book as well as some videos. So, if you want to join, join now and get this $47 book for free…

Realistic earth made with Blender

However, I must admit that this is not the result I got from the tutorial directly. In the original result, the stars in the background are blurred. But Andrew already mentions that he used a star background for his animation, so that’s what applied to my result as well.

I simply disabled the earth temporarily and rendered the stars only. I saved the result to a file and then disabled the star field and enabled earth again. Finally I combined both in the compositor. First, the alpha values of the render need to be inverted. The stars are imported using an image input node and added to the scene using an add node, where the inverted alpha is connected to the factor input, earth is connected to the first image input and the stars are added as second image input node.

Andrew actually did it different again. Instead of using a background picture, he rendered the stars on a separate render layer. Normally that wouldn’t be possible, because the stars are part of the environment settings of the scene and are not like an object which could be moved to a separate layer. But it’s good to know that stars are actually rendered as halo objects, so one can disable the halo checkbox when rendering the earth and enabled when rendering the stars layer. By the way: the stars layer is set to render an empty physical layer.

In addition I think that there’s the need for more than 64 segments on the sphere when rendering to higher resolutions, i.e. above 1280×720. When animating the scene, please be aware that you should turn it opposite way round than Andrew did in his final result video.

Well, Nature Academy tutorials are not available for free – at least not legally at the moment. And I will not make them available illegally. But when joining the course, videos can be downloaded. There’s not even the need to install a special video download plugin for the browser. Andrew just provides a download link for all the tutorials. Videos are provided in MP4 format.

Original post: While the standby page for the Nature Academy still says, the course will reopen in October, a more precise date was mentioned by Andrew Price in the forums: the course will reopen on 1st of November.

While I wished I had a vector input node, I found out that it is possible to connect an RGB node to the inputs, which worked, but had the limitation for values being in the range from 0 to 1. This was just enough for my uses, but it might not be for yours.

Luckily enough, I now figured out how to simulate a vector input node using a compositor node group. First thing to know is that R (red) maps to X, G (green) maps to Y and B (blue) maps to Z. Next, colors in Blender can actually exceed their range from 0 to 1. Anything greater than 1 will be displayed as 1. But for this vector input node, we needn’t care about this, because it will not be used as a color – but if you once need an oversaturated color, you can use the same approach. The pure R, G and B colors are multiplied with the input values of the compositor group and added together for the final vector output.

Vector input

Internals

With this set up, you have a reusable vector input node group which you can save in a separate file and link or append to your scenes. The main benefit is, that you can now set keyframes on the X, Y and Z values which is not possible in the texture node offset or scale directly. So now the texture can be animated in the compositor. Another use for this node could be the vector blur node which has a speed input connector.

  Download vector input node group for Blender

To receive your certificate you need to apply by submitting one finished render that proves that you have learned something from the course.

Well, and I definitely have learned something from the course. Starting with a simple checkmark, I am now able to render complex scenes which I couldn’t even dream of a while ago.

Anyway, Andrew did a critique on my render which says:

• lighting is too flat
• the overall image is too blue
• the sky is too dark
• the petals of the flower are paper thin

Actually I don’t really know what “lighting is too flat” means. I agree that the overall tint was blue, because that was intended by me: due drops are more likely in the morning, so I wanted to give it a slight morning touch with my blue color. I definitely agree that the sky is too dark. I had a look at the morning sky today and it is much brighter. Thanks Andrew for this hint. Regarding the daisy petals, there are two types of daisies around: Bellis perennis (common daisy) and Leucanthemum vulgare (oxeye daisy) having different height in their petals.

Anyway, I’ll try to change the petals just in order to show that I can do it and I have learned something from the course and then I’ll resubmit the image. Actually, I am changing my scene while writing this article and it turns out that Andrew could have done the tutorial in a way which allows making changes more easily:

• Some of the petal verticies could be in a vertex group so that the verticies can be selected at zero time. If this is done before duplicating, it would save me a lot of time now.
• The changes in the height of the petals could have been assigned a shape key. This would allow adjusting the depth of the petals at zero time.

So yeah, Andrews critique made me a better artist, knowing what to do better in the future: thinking of vertex groups and shape keys. And I consider Andrew as a customer who – in case I would do 3D graphics as my primary job – would pay me for the results. And if the customer doesn’t like the results, I need to change the scene.

Flowers - certificate attempt 2

I started with almost zero knowledge about Blender. I have just done one render completely on my own and until the start of Nature Academy, I have just watched some of Andrew Price’s tutorials but never actually modeled one. Together with the start of the Nature Academy I set up this website, so almost all content until today is related to the Nature Academy.

The beginning

Immediately after I had paid the price for the course, I received an email with my login data. This is really good, because I don’t like waiting for virtual things. On a special website there’s a lot of content available for download instantly. I have a quite slow internet connection, so the ability to download stuff is great. However, you can’t use download managers because the links will expire.

For download, there’s the Drag’n'drop collection which is a series of Blender models for use in any scene in case you don’t want to model them yourself. It includes grass, trees, rocks, mountains, plants, shrubs and skeleton trees. However, I can’t get the grass work well. I have no idea on how to import it correctly and there’s no tutorial on that.

Next, there are reference photos of beaches, clouds, fields, flowers, forests, grass, lakes, leaves, oceans, pathways, plants, rocks, shrubs, flowers, snow, streams, stumps, trees and trunks. The quality of those is ok for a reference picture, but not suitable for background images (but that is not intended).

Third, there’s a bunch of textures related to nature such as leaves, ground, rocks, shadows, skies, tree bark and also some seamless textures. This is great for people like me who have not set up a texture collection yet.

In the beginning, there were some download issues. Some files referenced wrong content. This is fixed now, so if you join the second course, everything will be fine.

The courses

Every week a new tutorial is released. A tutorial is a series of more or less videos, depending on the complexity of the scene to create. Typically, only a still image is rendered, but for some tutorials, bonus material exists which is about animating the scene.

All in all there were nine courses and the topics are grass, rocks, trees, plants, lakes, flowers, oceans, mountains and forests. The next course however will include three more courses which are rivers and streams, waterfalls and aerial shots. Andrew announced that the price will increase which is probably due to the new tutorials.

The quality of the tutorials is just the same as you can see on Andrew Price’s regular BlenderGuru website. So if you like the tutorials there, you’ll like the Nature Academy videos as well.

For me as a complete newbie, I could complete the scenes without asking additional questions. At the beginning, I needed 16 times longer than the length of the video, at the end I could finish the scene in about twice the time of the video. And finally I could even answer other participants questions in the forums.

I confess I didn’t have time to finish the animations (and I didn’t have a fast enough PC at first), so I rejoin the second course (which is for free by the way) and do the animations then.

One thing to note is that not all tutorials are purely based on Blender. There are three tutorials which make use of free 3rd party software which is Arbaro for generating a realistic tree (week 3), the ivy generator for creating ivy around a tree (week 4) and the ocean simulator (week 8), which is actually a different version of Blender. For me, using that software is fine, but if you’re already familiar with those topics, you might not benefit so much from the course.

Topics covered

The grass tutorials is much about hair particles. I spent much time, getting it right and experienced crashes due to the wrong Blender version I used (not Andrews fault).

The rocks tutorial uses various displacement modifiers, texturing and an advanced method of duplicating objects that look different when moving through space.

Arbaro is the main point of the trees tutorial. It includes lighting an outdoor scene and texturing the leaves. In this tutorial, only the tree is created. The final render should have some grass.

The plants scene is using the ivy generator mentioned before. Next, it uses array modifiers to create the leaves of a fern. Here I think Andrew could have spent some minutes on reducing render times, like I did: render times of 18 minutes or 7 minutes is a big different in my opinion.

The lake tutorial introduces reflections and fog. Modeling is limited to the lily pads, other plants are imported from the drag’n'drop collection.

The flowers tutorial is again about particles, including weight painting. Modeling is another part and for the background, alpha-masked trees are used.

The ocean simulator creates the ocean of this tutorial. Texturing and reflections are other big points. In this tutorial, the horizon is not flat, which looks a bit awkward. And actually there is a solution described by Gav Bain.

The mountain tutorial uses the ANT landscape generator which is built into Blender. Snow and mountain textures are done using material nodes, which was really impressive for me. Sculpting is also used to enhance some parts of the mountain.

Finally, the forest tutorial uses pre-modeled objects again and is about weight painting, particle systems and some texturing. As described in my forest blog post, the puddle reflections looked like melted glass and needed improvements.

The bonuses

Every week, there’s a live cast session where Andrew answers questions and does a focused critique session. The live casts last 1 hour each and after some initial issues, it worked well then. Actually I could never participate on my own, because the live cast time didn’t match my working time, but there’s the possibility to send Andrew an email and he’ll answer the question then.

The live casts are FLV videos hosted by a 3rd party provider and aren’t available for download directly. The size is at ~110 MB each but actually there’s not much to see – just Andrew talking. That’s why I converted the videos to MP3, which reduces the size to ~30 MB and I could simply put it onto an MP3 player and listen to it when I cycled home from work.

All scenes are available as Blender files for download. I think it is a good idea to have the scene available in order to review the settings Andrew made. Actually I never needed it, because I was happy with my results.

The inspiration boost is a collection of videos which are hosted on Vimeo, so not special content of the Nature Academy. So you can get that for free if you don’t mind browsing through thousands of videos to find the good ones.

During the Nature Academy, a photographer donated another collection of reference photos, the Oliver Huth collection. These photos are higher quality than the reference photos provided by Andrew; you can see that the photo was composed and lighted properly.

The forum is actually not a forum but an enhanced commenting system. It is split into four parts regarding support and questions, finished scenes, suggestions and off-topic comments. Today there are ~3500 comments posted and some of them are really valuable.

The end

Once all courses are finished, you can apply for a certificate. To do so, you have to submit one of the finished scenes you created.

In parallel, a competition starts. All participants are asked to create a realistic nature scene. The price is ~500 US$ in hard- and software. While you have to submit the picture only, the winner needs to send the Blender file as a proof.

My conclusion

The course was nine weeks of work where I spent much time and where I neglected my wife in the evenings. But it was also nine weeks of intense learning, much better than watching TV or drinking in a bar.

The tutorials made by Andrew are just great. His pronunciation is clean and good to understand for foreigners like me. Sometimes it’s hard to follow, especially the Compositor sections, but works with the pause button.

I absolutely liked the Nature Academy. I learned a lot and all the topics were quite new to me. But if you’re a professional Blender artist with several years of experience, you’d better consult someone’s review who started on the same level like you did. For all the beginners I can only recommend the Nature Academy.

So far I know only one more review, which was written by Alex Telford, who also describes himself as a newbie. His review includes comparisons of scenes done before Nature Academy started which I obviously can’t have.

Forest - Improved scene

Here’s how I corrected the bad displacement on the puddles:

• I removed the displacement on the ground which was done by manually editing the mesh with proportional editing enabled. To undo, select all verticies and scale the Z axis to 0.
• Add a displacement modifier instead. Make sure it’s at the top position, otherwise the plants will be off. For the displacement texture, I used a cloud texture at size 1.5
• Weight paint the displacement to not show up on the path directly. Use a different vertex group in order to differ from the puddles.
• Put pebbles all over the path, including the puddles.
• Put foliage everywhere except the path.
• Use grass on the path but not the puddles. Otherwise the puddles would reflect the grass only.

Now as I think the scene is improved, what is your impression?