Finaly this is my first Blender-to-POV-Ray image. It took ~ 3.5h to render because I used high quality radiosity and arealights with softshadows.
Comments & hints are welcome.
Very nice work. Inspiring. I love the bookshelf and its contents, the pics on the floor and the floor itself. My favorite objects are the plant and the pictures.
How did you do it? Are you using POVAnim?
I’ve used POVAnim a few times, just to see if I could get it to work. I made very simple scenes. I also became a used to adjusting the .ini files as well. However I need to make good UV maps before I render something worth posting.
So you UV mapped every texture, and modeled the details versus using bump maps and regular textures, correct?
I know POVAnim recently added the ability to set up a bump map from its script, seperate from whatever you may have created in Blender itself. I had trouble with it, as I tried to produced a quick test.
Here is a thought. What if the chair legs were crome or metal?
Yes, I’m using POVAnim - it does a good job (thanks to ‘jms’!). All objects are uv mapped, I didn’t use bump maps. Well, it was a lot of work to create all these image-maps.
POV rocks and so does pov anim, Im doing a car and I was getting impatient coz it took 15mins to render! You say 3.5hrs and the guy who made a lego car said 40 hrs! I think my comp would overheat and die if I left it going that long. Saying that though the 15 min render still came out really well, using radiosity takes up a lot more time, if only I could use my schools network to render my stuff. Anyway great work patient one.
Yes, POV is great! Elsdon, a view weeks ago my opinion was exactly the same as yours. The reason was, that many POV-Ray galleries only show the famous (but rather boring) sphere on chequered floor - in all variations. A lot of POV-Ray users only use it’s scene description language. In POVs manual you can read that this language is very powerfull. Indeed it is, but in my opinion it’s POV-Rays only disantvantage. Images made with this language often looks ‘strong mathematical’. With a good modeler like Blender (BTW: there’s no need to change the GUI in further versions of Blender, it’s nearly perfect) POV-Ray shows it’s power and potential. POVAnim is the missing link to connect Blender with POV-Ray so you have a powerfull combination.
Blenderage: radiosity, soft shadows, caustics and all that features will increase the render time, but it looks nice then, doesn’t it?
Oh, there are some guys I know who can do fantastic things with POVs scene description language. Gilles Tran, a French POV-Ray artist is one of them. Visit his web-page on http://www.oyonale.com and you know what I mean.
beautiful. very inspiring inded. i love the way the light seeps in through the window…how did you make image maps work in povray. so far i found it impossible to do.
The chair seems to be floating a bit, althought it is not nearly as bad as some that I have seen.
blenderage: you must be patient when working with CG. I have had renders that take 30 min per frame to render, and that was for a 3800 frame animation! Took over 2 months
Maybe I should have created a new post for this in another section but I know you know what you are talking about. How do you create soft shadows, (i though you just but in a light and povray does the rest) what are caustics and do you need to do radiosity in blender before exporting to Povray if not what buttons do I press in the radiosity window for maximum effect. And two months to render blimey. Does this mean that you can continue unfibished renders?
Hy Xtra, nice image indeed!
What about a tutorial on the PovAnim export process you did, illustrating the setting in the blend file? It could be very useful for all of us which still don’t understand how to make it work properly…
To create softshadows in POV is really simple. It works with area_lights and even with spotlights. The only thing you have to do is to add an area_light directive like this to your lamp definition:
Please refer the manual to get some infos about the keywords. BTW: a 10 x 10 area_light matrix (like in my example above) is very big, so it’ll take some time to render.
And for spotlights you should use other values for the area_light itself (in this case: <0,1,0>, <0,0,1>).
You asked about caustics? Caustics are a way to produce true reflections and refractions. POV-Ray has two possibilities to enable them: one so called “faked caustics” - very fast but not very realistic, and real caustics - slower. You have to use the photons directive (and some others) to use them. It’s a little bit complicated, so RTFM please
Yesterday I re-rendered my unicorn picture with POV-Ray and this time I used caustics. You’ll see them on the ground:
Regarding radiosity: no, you don’t have to enable it in Blender. You have to add a radiosity statement in the global_settings section in your main***.pov file (if you’re using POVAnim). Radiosity has a lot of options, so you should read the manual to understand it.
Render time for this picture was 3.5 hours! Two month? Oh well, my computer would exploding! As far as I know you can say, that POV-Ray shall render the picture particulary (line 1 - 100, 101 - 200 and so on). But you have to put the parts together manually.
Regards,
Xtra
PS: env, I didn’t use all the POVAnim options to export the scene. Instead of this I export the mesh, lamps and so on and for material editing and fine tuning I use the exported ASCII files.
The greatest problem is to explain how to simulate Blender
materials and lights in povray.
For the moment, in blender, you have to think and set up
parameters with the aim to export to povray.
(I can add buttons to define a standard “finish” for alls
exported materials. There is yet a slider for reflection. One for
ambient, diffuse, spec…?)
My POV-Ray manual gives an “<1,0,0><0,0,1> 2, 2” example for spotlights (are there different versions available?). The reason may be that spotlights have an infinite small dimension, so the area light should be small too? Of course you can use higher values. I made some tests with spotlights and <5,0,0><0,0,5> and higher, but sometimes the shadows where spreaded out to much then - at least for a spot light.