Glitch3d

Glitch3d is an automated render library that uses glitching techniques applied to 3D meshes. The original intent was to focus on 3D glitching techniques and the idea evolved into making a render bot.

You can read a bit more about where it comes from here and see it living there.

This gem uses the Blender Python API to produces renders headlessly and leverages the raytracing engine Cycles to get optimal renders. Calls made to the Blender API have been tested with versions 2.78 and 2.79.

Cycles rendering engine does not support GLSL shaders so the shader library is using a node-based system but could be extended to serialize materials in the Open Shading Language.

Overview of the process

1. the subject model (main argument of the cli call) is altered by one of the available 'glitching' strategies
2. the base Blender scene is loaded and the subject is loaded and ajusted
3. random canvas objects are picked up and drawn across the scene
4. actual render begins and the scene is animated in each frame

⚠️ Warning

Setting BLENDER_EXECUTABLE_PATH in your environment is required. In general this gem relies on the presence of Python and Blender on the host machine. I am very aware this is not standard practice and plan to split components later down the road but this proves convenient for now.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'glitch3d'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install glitch3d

Usage

• glitch3d file.obj

CLI Options:

• mode: (localized|default|none) default: randomized => glitching strategy (how the subject model is altered)
• shots-number: default: 4 => the number of images desired (only taken into account if animate is false)
• quality: (high|low) default: low => size of the render (low is 200x200 pixels and high is 2000x2000 pixels)
• animate: (true|false) default: false => enables render of .avi file
• frames: default: 200 => number of frames for the simulation
• assets: default: nil => URI to an asset folder that has the following subfolders: /osl_shaders /fonts /texts /textures /height_maps /models
• debug: (true|false) default: false => allows to re-raise errors from canvas specific code (otherwise the program just exits with status code 1)
• webhook: default: nil => url of endpoint to post potential error data to (useful for debugging)
• seed: default: rand(1000) => randomness seed that you can pass to the generator to reproduce a specific render result (useful for debugging and refining a canvas result)

Renders (wether it is video or an image) will be output to ./renders along with an export of the .scene file so that you can potentially fiddle with the resulting scene setup and adjust lights for instance.

Examples

In your favorite terminal:

glitch3d /path/to/model.obj --quality=high --mode=none --shots-number=12 --frames=100 -> will fetch your .obj will and render 12 high quality visuals (in current folder under the folder called renders) of it without glitching it at all.

glitch3d /path/to/model.obj --animate=true --frames=1000 -> will render a video in .avi format long of 1000 frames

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Roadmap

• extract fixtures management from gem
• allow fixtures to be scraped from online resources such as Thingiverse
• use Blender Compositor feature to streamline post-processing
• use realtime Eevee engine to visualize intermediate renders
• support more 3D file formats (fbx, etc)

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/pskl/glitch3d. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

License

Copyright © 2016 PSKL [email protected] This work is free. You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License, Version 2, as published by Sam Hocevar. See the COPYING file for more details.

NOTE: Above license is for the code part only. Some of the materials used as fixtures could be copyrighted (models and textures). Please be careful.