hi,
I’ve been thinking about when i first started blender, the most frustrating thing was that i couldn’t get my renders to look anything better than S***. i later realised that the key to a good render was compositing. I think that a good implement for blender would be a few rendering presets. eg:
outside day (might add a sunflare, AO and a light colour balance)
Modelling (might change all materials to white matte and whack up the AO)
cartoon (would use the shaders and add an outline etc.)
these are just a few ideas.
of course this would not be amazing, but it would help new users belive the claims that “blender made this image,” and the users could adjust settings and see what nodes / settings make good effects.
just a thought - tell me what you think
derek
I think a lot of these would be excellent to distribute via Blendswap. A lot of my work stuff is always rendered in the same way (alpha’d 2D sprites with a somewhat consistent composite) so I have it all saved in my default scene.
Another reason I like the idea of modular defaults is that I’ve frequently downloaded an excellent model off Blendswap…only to delete the model so I can use their lights and rendering setup
I remember first starting and being incredibly frustrated with rendering my stuff and having it look… well, bland. But times are changing and I’m learning more. I’ve linked to this post before, but I’ve found the blend file here incredibly useful to study different lighting/node setups: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=204210
I’ve created two scenes for my startup file that uses two modified setups from this file (one uses environment lighting only, the other a sun and node setup). I guess that’s my way of creating simple “presets”, then I just delete the scene I don’t use.
On another note, I feel one thing that really changed my renders was reading the book Digital Lighting and Rendering by Jeremy Birn. It’s software agnostic, but the concepts really helped me understand a lot of fundamental parts of 3d that I had never really grasped. I highly recommend this book! For what it’s worth, I was able to find a used copy of the first edition for only $5.
