6 things

Support Basics & Interface
#1

  1. Is it possible to arrange the OOPs schematic to look like the outliner in say Windows Explorer? I’d quite like to be able to list every object in the scene by alphabetical order. I find this sort of thing helps when selecting objects and it avoids deleting objects accidentally.

  2. I tried rendering some glasses using Blender’s ray functions and I got some odd artifacts. Strangely, I got rid of them using lower resolution models. Sorry, it’s geocities so you probably have to cut/paste the urls.

In the bottom of the glass, there are stripes. This model followed the tutorial in the pdf manual using a mesh profile and revolving the 38 vertices with 36 steps.
http://www.geocities.com/ajr650/glass.png (total render - 42625 polys)

I then manually changed some of the inner tris (where the stripes appeared) to quads and got:
http://www.geocities.com/ajr650/glassless.png (approx same polys as 1)

I tried field rendering and got less noticeable artifacts but the render looks a bit odd:
http://www.geocities.com/ajr650/glassfield.png (same polys as 2)

So, I remodelled it using a lower resolution (about 16 vertices revolved with 8 steps) and I got no artifacts:
http://www.geocities.com/ajr650/glasslowres.png (7143 polys)

The finished result with less polys:
http://www.geocities.com/ajr650/glasswine.png (total render - 7143 polys)

Note: I rendered all of the above using subd - normally level 3. But reducing/increasing the subd level didn’t seem to affect the artifacts.

So I was wondering if artifacts appear more in higher resolution models in general. I often find that lower poly models give better results and are obviously faster at rendering. Was it just by chance that my lower poly model didn’t show artifacts? Also, why are the edges of the glasses still a bit aliased? I have full OSA on and Gaussian blur at max. Does Blender use adaptive or general antialiasing?:
http://www.architimmy.net/antialias.html

  1. Is there any way to get envmaps to display transparent objects correctly or do I have to make the maps myself? Also I’m having trouble getting the envmaps to show the right way up. For example, I tried to use envmaps to do the reflection you see in the last glass image but firstly the pink dot for the plane was directly under the glass. This just made weird shapes. I moved it but it rendered the wrong way up. I then used an empty positioned under the glass to render but still I got it wrong. Is there any way I can ensure I get the maps the right way round by checking axes on the empty or something?

  2. I came across an interesting tutorial for faking caustics:
    http://www.useddishes.com/tutorials/fake_caustics2/caustics2-tutorial.html
    It requires you to be able to set the colour of shadows. Can I do this in Blender?

  3. Can you attach more than one object to a path curve but assign each object a different IPO so that each object can move along the same curve at a different rate? I could only assign the speed IPO to the curve itself meaning all child objects travelled along the curve at the same rate.

  4. Is it possible to get Blender to warn me when quitting to save all my stuff? Sometimes I forget to save my scene before I quit and there isn’t a warning that says something like “there are items in your scene that are unsaved, do you wish to save before quitting yes/no?”. I know some people probably find it annoying but it’s quite useful.

#2

Sorry … can’t see anything…

md01

#3

Are you talking about the renders in question 2?

#4

no, what would be first?

does it really matter?

AA is going to be improved in the next release, you shouldn’t have to render a higher resolution image and then scale it down

http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Rendering_engine.320.0.html

[/quote]3. Is there any way to get envmaps to display transparent objects correctly or do I have to make the maps myself? Also I’m having trouble getting the envmaps to show the right way up. For example, I tried to use envmaps to do the reflection you see in the last glass image but firstly the pink dot for the plane was directly under the glass. This just made weird shapes. I moved it but it rendered the wrong way up. I then used an empty positioned under the glass to render but still I got it wrong. Is there any way I can ensure I get the maps the right way round by checking axes on the empty or something?[/quote]
you can render an envmap from any object, or move that pink dot with the center buttons in the edit buttons

envmaps should show transparent objects, if not there is a new bug

http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Rendering_engine.320.0.html4. I came across an interesting tutorial for faking caustics:
http://www.useddishes.com/tutorials/fake_caustics2/caustics2-tutorial.html
It requires you to be able to set the colour of shadows. Can I do this in Blender?[/quote]
sure, I guess
you’d use two lamps, one to set the color of the shadow, and a negative one to cancel it everywhere else

however, you can’t set the color of the shadow by the depth in shadow

you can add time curves to the objects to do that

many people have asked for it, there was even a build with it on blender.org

#5

no, what would be first?[/quote]

Well, I was thinking that if it was ordered alphabetically that the item named with an ‘a’ or number at the start would be first. I just think it might be easier to find objects in a complex scene.

Do you mean does it matter that I get odd stripey artifacts in my render? Probably not since that particular render’s not that important but I was just curious as to why they appeared when the lower res model seemed ok.

AA is going to be improved in the next release, you shouldn’t have to render a higher resolution image and then scale it down

http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Rendering_engine.320.0.html[/quote]

I noticed that not long after I posted this, thanks. Hopefully that’ll fix that problem.

My envmaps show transparent objects but they appear solid. I think I’ll have to mess about a bit more with them to see if I can find a way to get them the right way round, though. I’ve heard you sometimes have to change the axis order and offset in the map input section.

sure, I guess
you’d use two lamps, one to set the color of the shadow, and a negative one to cancel it everywhere else

however, you can’t set the color of the shadow by the depth in shadow[/quote]

I’ll try that, I never thought about doing it that way.

you can add time curves to the objects to do that[/quote]

Again, I’ll give that a go, thanks.

Did they remove the option for a reason?

#6

Use the dataselect window (Shift-F4).
Right click in the list to select.

Martin

#7

Thanks, that what I wanted. I also noticed that if you do shift-F4, it makes the file browser tab always select the scene data. To switch it back it’s just shift-F2.