It’s still a RC but maybe those who try it out can give opinions about this future release ?
I played with it a bit, and i got to say that i use blender mostly for modeling, and UVing.
Cycles, nodes, anim, etc, is of no interrest to me.
The BIG pros i note about this RC is:
CTRL+C, for the UV copy is FINALLY integrated !!! tho long awaited it seems to work fine
Slicing a mesh with a plane can be done with the provided ( but not activated ) addon. It is a very important addon to me that works fine though lil unexpected side effect on UVs after the slice.
Aside these points, blender modeling and UVing seems to work as fine as the 2.63a did…
I got to dig further though.
Regular (F12) rendering now also works tiled, and supports save buffers to save memory during render and cache render results for compositing. This gives somewhat faster rendering, and makes it possible to render with very large resolutions on the GPU, as the whole image no longer needs to be in GPU memory.
I love it. I especially love the new tile rendering for cycles. I am finding that it is much faster, and I can actually use my computer while it is rendering haha
I was looking forward to the new Spot Lamp, it’s been a long time since I could use them in a scene (haven’t touched BI in a long time). Sadly though the Spot Lamps emit very little light and you have to bump up the strength to crazy amount to make them visible, which naturally incurs a lot of fireflies - maybe as it’s RC1 it’s still being worked on, hope it gets sorted soon
On other areas I’d love to know how to try the new non-progressive rendering options, but I just can’t seem to find the options. I think it’s CPU only - where are the settings?
It’s nice to see the node editor being more user friendly with the new coloured high-lights and also one thing that always bugged me was nodes getting stuck to the movement of the mouse after you thought you’d deselected them. Simple, but very nice to have it fixed.
Don’t know if it’s a bug or not, but rolling the mouse over the menus does not show the option without clicking it.
I’m sure over the next few weeks I’ll find more things to play with, right now I’m hoping that someone will do a demo of all the new features - maybe Blender Cookie?
Spot works fine with me, i used efficently with a 80-100 strenght…are you sure your model is 1 Blender Unit=1 Meter? Perhaps you’re modeling 1 BU = 1 cm
Also fireflies are really few now with spots. Take into account to use also the new Despeckle node, when you’re doing post production in Blender compositor.
Yeah, from the past, make a box around a mesh light, use a lightpath/no diffuse material on this (avoiding fireflies) and have a spot light. Make it invisible to camera or whatever. The cycles nodes way…
Well, after further study I discovered, that the problem exists if I use “Save Buffers” option in rendering panel. On the other hand, with “Save Buffers” disabled, Cycles doesn’t respect number of tiles. It always gives me 299 tiles regardless of what X and Y values are selected. Anyone can confirm this bug, or it’s working OK for you guys?
