Opensource is (most of the time) not about the user, but about a bunch of programmers having fun. Blender with Big Buck Bunny did something good (real usable feedback and improvements), but on the other hand Yafray really pissed me off. Because Yafray had been rewritten; now it’s Yafaray. Blender integration sucks, stability is crap – and while I still say that Blender improved a lot, the internal renderer is “not very good” (yet).
Posts Tagged ‘cg’
Yaf(a)ray vs Blender – regression in the workflow
Sunday, November 30th, 2008Tree generation
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008Building trees manually are pretty tedious, while for nice closeups I would do it for sure, I still have no idea on how to attach leaves and flowers without external scripts. So, some freeware alternatives to automated tree and plant generation:
- Arbaro: found it yesterday, it’s a platform independent java app, can even generate uv and lobes, can export via Wavefront objects (import semed to work in Blender fine), PovRay meshes and AutoCAD DXF. I really like the nice help notes in the bottom right corner.
- Gen3: Blender script, haven’t tried yet, but looks pretty promising
- L-System based generation: I used the one from Blenderdungeon (we have another script here), simple and effective, though LS trees have a distinct look.
Second life first (and last) impressions
Sunday, May 4th, 2008I downloaded Second Life and gave it a try; since being a fan of fps games – I won’t beat about the bush – the disgusting look of the virtual world uglyville really really surprised me. I know about Havok and how hard it is to manage entities in such a big world (the islands), but graphics was glitchy, unstable and downright as ugly as good old vrml. The polycount is ridiculously high and of course they target the average Joe, who knows nothing about lowpoly modelling (when a tutorial shows how to make a necklace out of toroids I’m getting utterly sad), but who is willing to pay to upload a photo of his dog or to customize his hairdo.
Blender materials
Saturday, April 26th, 2008I started looking around on the net for free materials and textures, I thought I won’t find anything useful, but fortunately that’s not the case; some very useful links:
- Oscar Alvarado’s blender materials: mostly metals and some rocks, they’re pretty nice (see the silvery cube on the picture bellow).
- Some very useful posts on BlenderNation; actually, that’s a nice blog.
- CGTextures: nice hires images, daily download limit is 15mb, but that should be plenty; on the image bellow the green tile is from there. I made it tilable, but since CGTextures doesn’t allow raw texture redistribution, only the render is here.
- Gimp normalmap plugin: converts b&w heightmaps to “colorful” normalmaps; similar to Nvidia’s cg toolkit converter.
- Gimp texturizer plugin: bit unstable here (right now I’m under Windows, so maybe that’s the problem), but very useful plugin. Terribly slow at times, but that’s the price for the heavy math.
BTW Blender’s interface really annoys me, but the features are getting better with each and every release. On the picture above I used the internal raytracer (no full/skydome GI, but still acceptable and much faster than Yafray).
Blender with Yafray
Tuesday, February 12th, 2008Lately I haven’t followed Blender and Yafray, unfortunately I don’t have enough freetime for having fun with 3d apps – now (after a year or more) I downloaded yaf and blender just for fun, and I’m very happy to see a better external renderer support along with all the improvements.
I love Yafray’s image quality, so here’s a small junk I used for testing bitmap formats in Yaf. The windows build seems to like targa files saved by Irfanview:
