I want to start to build an environment for these guys - ground and buildings. My experimental attempts so far have slowed rendering to a crawl. Does one use a flat plane for ground or a long box? Also I’ve read that the sky should be acheived by using a large dome. Is this correct? Another thing I’ve been wondering is - does the scale of the figure/landscape etc…matter? ie…if I select everything and shrink it using scale to as small as possible in the frame, does it make it easier to render or is it purely down to poly count?
Nice work Compans. I am wandering how long does it take to render your figure? If it is taking too long just by itself, you many need to simplify object around it. You can use compositing as well.
Skydomes are good, but in 2.5 there’s a cloud generator that works quite well, and there are sun and sky settings that are quite good now too. So it’s really not necessary to use a sky dome. also, i see that there is some banding on your background gradient. you can get rid of this by pressing ‘dither’ in render buttons. Great model btw.
compositing is when you combine scenes or images. like if you took a photo of pittsburgh and photoshopped in a flying saucer or elvis.
2.5 is quite different from 2.49. It takes some getting used to. However, it does have a cloud generator, which is a big plus.
For the ground I would suggest a grid that has been displaced with a clouds or marble texture.
Size makes no difference in render times, only poly count.
Thanks very much Modron. Does 2.5 overide 2.49…ie once I install it is there no going back to previous version or does it install in a different folder?
For every new version ( including 2.56 ) I just make a new folder, inside of my existing blender folder, and unzip to that. I have every version on blender since 2.25 in there I think. That way, when you unzip to that folder, it will automatically detect your user preferences, and you don’t need to overwrite anything. I am always going back and forth between versions.
one thing though, 2.56 is not backwards compatible, so if you are importing or linking from an old blend, I think you need to run an import script of some kind.
If you install 2.5x with a version that has an installer, (you know, one click and it installs itself) it will probably change your system so any .blend file you click on will open with 2.5x and not 2.49. As for deleting/over writing 2.49, I don’t know. All of the 2.5x versions I’ve installed on my computer were from .zip files without an installer, with them, all you need to do is unzip the file. It gives you one folder that contains everything needed to run 2.5x. I then put that folder on my desktop, so when I want to run it, just open the folder and click on blender.
Good looking model!! As to rendering times, how many vertices do you have in one of these models? The speed of the renderer in 2.5x is a LOT faster.
