A bit of blender by a noob ;o)

[Pizik]

OK, I have dabbled with Blender several times in the past but never kept it up because it's so dam confusing when you first start. Over the past two weeks I have decided to have another try at it and see what I can manage to do. With the help of Blender 2.46, Indigo Renderer 1.0.9 and GIMP 2.2.9 I have been playing around and I would like to share the first of my renders with you.

(Note: I have done more than these, but I would rather do a progression of noob to not-so-noob and don't want to post too much at one time. Expect more in the coming days. In addition, these are not PS themed renders, but I plan to do some that will be in the near future.)




The basic un-textured model mainly run as a test of Indigo. This one took 11 hours to render (so, not the frame rate you would want in CS ;o) )




The above render was my first attempt at texturing, as you can see the grass texture looks fairly poor because of the noticeable dark repeatitions.




The above was after lots of time spent working out how to do 'realistic' looking transparencies in Indigo.

[Keldrena]

Very nice, Pizik. I would use different grass texture, but beyond that I like it. Maybe try to make your textures look a little less than prefect? Right now it doesn't look like something you'd see in real life. It's too clean. Your geometry looks good though.

Anyhow, just my opinion. I'd love to see more.

[Anumesa]

oh wow...

* Anumesa is seriously impressed

[Wavan Levironk]

Pizik for president 

[Satha]

Wow, that's really good. I really like the glass. Keep it up!
I also agree with Keldrena, it's looking a little too clean. Real life is hardly ever so perfect. Remember not to go overboard with dirt and scratches and etc, though.

[Pizik]

Okie, as promised, here is another render. This is a combination of several things I have been working on since doing the glass I showed in the last post (Infact, the glass is on the table ;o)  ).

This involved alot of experimenting with UV texture mapping and a bit of work with lighting to get an effect that pleased me (A light source (Sun) outside a window). This scene only features a single light source, but now I am going to start playing with emitters ;oD

[Zweitholou]

Pizik, that looks terrific. 
The models are very clean and clear cut, and the textures fit together very well IMO. Can't wait to see more! 

[Parallo]

Add a bunch of books and a laptop and it is my house. Lovely.

[Nikodemus]

You guys are too nice ;P



The edge pattern doesn't match the top of the table planks ;P

[Pizik]

Correct ;o)

The edges of the table use the Orco function for assigning textures to the mesh, and the 4 faces on the table top are UV mapped because they didnt work right in the previous method and I was too lazy to UV map the whole thing ;op

Welcome to the world of Ikea MDF with textured plastic coating ;op

[Bragan]

@Pizik: Really like the lighting you did on the last one, the golden sunlight is a great touch  Your UV mapping looks pretty good, except for the bottle where it looks a little blurry -- was the source blurry or a low resolution image?

How long did the last image take? It doesn't sound quite right that your first image took 11 hours to render -- they're simple shapes with no texture and only one light source that I can detect. A raytracer would get that done in a few seconds, unless you had quite an old (Pentium Pro- or Pentium II-class) CPU.

[Pizik]

firstly, thank you for the compliments.

The bottles label was actually from a pretty high resoloution source, and is applied, after rendering, in The GIMP because im still not sure how to get an alpha channel working right on a texture that is not to be transparent all over. The blurring is probably due to me using the scale function in The GIMP.

All the renders take pretty much the same amount of time to give decent results, although the time can be halved and then a despeckle filter run on the resulting image to give passable results. Although the filter inevitably gives some loss of image quality. In addition, the images lose some of their clarity when I compress them to JPG for ease of displaying here. They look alot nicer in the original PNG output from Indigo.

Anywho, I wasn't planning on posting this yet as it is a rather rough test render from an experiment I was trying out, but here goes, my most recent render with my first use of an emitter mesh:

[Dajoji]

Nice Pizik! I love floors and the glass. They look really good!

Since you seem to well on your way to making very realistic images, let me suggest you be careful with the depth of field of your images. In the lens of a camera, just like the human eye, only a certain area can be in focus, the rest needs to be slightly blurred, and sometimes a lot. For example: in the image with the bottle, many objects are equally sharp despite being at different distances from the camera. And in your last image, the picture in the tv should be as blurred as the tv itself, if not a little more.

Keep it up! Can't wait to see more.

[Anumesa]

I love this!! Your pictures are always so clean and crisp!

I agree with Dajoji about the TV, i think the edges would be a bit blurred or so..it looks a little unnatural being perfectly clear like that.

That said, i have no idea what i am talking about and this is merely my opinion 

Keep up the great work 

[Eliseth]

Looking great Pizik! Seriously good work, this is motivation for me, I've seriously got to learn to texture properly.