Blender Scenes, Now and 1 Year ago!

I have been out of the game, and I’m a little bit unsure of all the new settings blender has these days, so I’d like to ask a couple of general questions about how everyone has their scenes set up:

Lighting:

It used to be(because of scanline) that either radiosity or spotlights were the only things to use, because no other type of light cast shadows.

With the inclusion of the ray tracer, all lights can cast shadows while ray tracing, so what light setups do you guys use?

Is the good old 3 point setup still working well, do you have your fill and back lights casting shadows?

Do you still use spots lights, or do sun/hemi/area lights work better now that they can cast shadows?

Also, what is the deal with area lighting? can someone tell me the point of area lighting and how it is meant to be used?

Rendering:

Is radiosity still a decent solution for lighting? Or are most things AO/Ray traced these days?

I know there are always special times when you’d use different things, but for the bulk of your work, what do you use?

As far as ray tracing goes, are there any options for it, to make it faster and less rays traced? I can only find AO settings and then a “ray” button…

Materials:

Does anyone use ZTransp and EnvMaps anymore, or have they been taken over by ray tracing too???

hmm thats about it for now… I just don’t know all the new features, and can’t tell if the modeling i’m doing is outdated or whatnot…

Thanks for any help!!!

-MacGyver

PS please post about anything new and useful like Loop cuts too, I just found those, and they’re AMAZING!!!

if there are any new gems in blender in the last couple months, please post them!

pss I know there are a lot of post on new features and such, but I’m just wondering which ones people are actually using in their everyday modeling, and which methods are archahic…

The answers to many of your questions will be somewhat subjective. That said, here are my solutions.

Lighting:

Raytracing is great, significantly easier to use, and consistent, but over-use can drastically increase rendering times. I still use a lot of buffered spot lighting for animations because the rendering speeds are much faster.

3-point lighting is good for the same things it always was, the same reasons it has been used in photography, film, and video thoughout the last century. It’s good for compositions with a central subject. That hasn’t changed.

As with other software, the point-based raytraced shadows are not true to the real world where shadows become less distinct the further they fall from an object. Area lights make the ray shadows more realistic, but the rendering times increase.

Rendering:

Radiosity still provides the same advantages it did in the past. Raytracing doesn’t replace radiosity, and the new radiosity is also much easier to use now than it was previously.

Recently there has been a lot of AO use, but AO doesn’t replace radiosity either. It is just another option, another tool in the artist’s arsenal to create better renders.

I almost always use raytraced reflections, but depending on the project my lighting changes between buffered, raytraced, AO or a combination. Each is good for different things.

Raytracing gets much slower the higher the OSA setting. I don’t know of any other methods to speed raytracing, except to render from the command line instead of from the Blender interface.

Hi,

Stumbled across this post and have a few questions as I’m trying to understand the many, many options Blender provides! My problem lies around a short animation I’m working on. There’s a link to the thread I’ve started in my signature. The pics on that thread were rendered with AO/Ray rendering and took about 15 minutes each. If This was a 5 minute monologue from my character…do the sums and it would take over 10 weeks of full time rendereing at least. My project is going to be much bigger than what I’ve got now so I need to revise my options and techniques!

I’ve considered Radiosity because from what I know (and I’m very limited! :wink: ) it works it all out and renders fast! But I just don’t seem to be able to get my scene to “light up” when I calculate the data! Any suggestions on how I should properly do this would be very much appreciated. I lent my Blender tut book v1 to a friend so I’m trying to remember how to do it.

A question about radiosity - how does the light behave when things move around? Do you have to recalculate each frame? i.e My pear is two metres from a wall. If I use rad rendering, will the radiance (greenish/yellow light bouncing off pear onto wall) grow as the pear approaches the wall?

I love the images I’ve been able to produce so far on my project and would like to keep it that way with much lower render times but I just dont know how to do it! I’d really like to see a full integration of a renderman renderer such as 3delight because of rendermans power and speed…but it just doesnt seem to be happening right now. All the Blenderman integration seems to have stopped. Do you think renderman is such a good thing?

I’d better stop now as this post is getting way too long…sorry about that! I’m just so fired up to get a good project finished and I have soooo many questions! So I’ll ask them another time!
Hope you don’t mind answering my annoying post - hey I’m just another Blenderhead wanting to make use of this GREAT product - I love it!

BTW - I’m not new to Elysiun - I used to enter under the name “Flimz” but my account wouldnt log in for some reason so I just started again! :slight_smile:

Thanks in advance,

Tim

I like your work on that :smiley:

Blender’s radiosity, even though it’s now much easier to use, still works the same way it did before with lighting setups – meaning the radiosity is calculated with “glowing objects” and not with normal lamps. As before, it is also important to have objects with many vertices – especially important with flat surfaces like walls and floors. There are a bunch of great tutorials about radiosity lighting setups here (do a search) and over at blender3d.org.

Check your render buttons. Once I couldn’t get radiosity to work, spent hours beating my head against the wall, only to find I didn’t turn the radiosity feature on in rendering (I felt pretty stupid). Also make sure your materials have radiosity enabled.

Radiosity is still not the most efficient solution for animations, because yes, the radiosity needs to be recalculated for each frame when the objects move and the scene changes. While the results are excellent, that’s a lot of processing time…

To solve this problem, I often still use the “old” lighting with buffered shadows and “fake” GI domes with buffered shadow lamps. 70+ buffered spots take less time to render in a complex, high geometry scene than any raytracing features (including AO). For example, one HD frame of my animation takes 7 minutes with buffered shadows but 1.5 hours with AO and a raytraced Key light. It’s not as drastic with less complicated scenes, and it’s obviously not as big of an issue when rendering stills.

Even though it’s not quite as high quality as the other methods, the buffered spot GI method delivers decent results – and I am willing to live without the better results of radiosity and AO in order to finish my animation project within my lifetime :wink:

I don’t have any experience with the Blenderman plugin, so someone else will have to help you with that…

Just a note on radiosity - if you’re comparing the current Blender to one a year old, a change that happened in version 2.28 was the ability to apply radiosity at render time - i.e. None of that annoying ‘Collect meshes’ nonsense in the radio buttons. You just need to set the emit value on your materials as before, and make sure that ‘Radio’ is set on each material that you want to be included in the radiosity calculations. Then just render with the ‘Radio’ option set in the Scene buttons and all the radiosity calculation will happen automatically per frame.

I’ve found that it’s quite hard to get the animated radiosity working well with high-poly models though. The illumination tends to change each frame, causing a jittery grainy effect.

Thanks for your compliments on my work akator! And thanks both of you for answering the questions really well! This is one the reason why I love the Blender community - always ready to help and none (well far less than other areas) of the ego nonesense!

Broken Wrote:

I’ve found that it’s quite hard to get the animated radiosity working well with high-poly models though. The illumination tends to change each frame, causing a jittery grainy effect.

I’ve noticed that in lower quality AO rendering…it looks like noise in a video signal. Wish I had a Cray supercomputer to render on…no more worrying about render times!

Akator wrote:

To solve this problem, I often still use the “old” lighting with buffered shadows and “fake” GI domes with buffered shadow lamps. 70+ buffered spots take less time to render in a complex, high geometry scene than any raytracing features (including Ao)

I have no idea what this is still…can you point me in the right direction on how to do this?

Thanks again!

Tim.

Many of these models use the buffered-shadow-GI-technique…
http://www.blenderman.org/models/effects/lighting/index.php

These methods are not suitable for all situations and will have to be adjusted based on your models and scenes, but they should give you several working examples of how to apply the technique.