Since a few months I try to learn the basics of Blender. I’m very surprised about the possibilities, the quality and how user friendly Blender 2.5 is. I wouldn’t be surprised if the commercial alternatives following the development of Blender very nervously.
My profession is cad draftsman on a engineering company in the Netherlands. In the past years I tried to learn the basics of 3d and visualization work. Normally I model, materialize and render with the cad application my company works with. With version 2,5 of Blender, the user friendliness and learning path seems so good (with the thanks of this great community) I now try to use this program to improve the quality of my work.
The image I added is an old project I used as learning model. I exported the model from the cad application and imported it as .obj in Blender.
Unfortunately Blender Render gives a very poor result. I think that that was the result of the normals which where very messy. After this conclusion I looked for an other open source render engine. Yafaray (0.11) was the only one I get to work (Thanks to the export script of Silvio Fallcinelli). Again I was very surprised of the quality this open source render engine gives.
I added the result of this trial and error practice project in this message. Feel free to give any critics.
Today I will look on what angles I can render this model without seeing bad textures. A higher resolution image is added to this message.
The street-work must be curved to let the rain flow away. In Holland, sometimes there comes a lot of water from the sky :-).
I imported the model from my cad application (it is an old project). I exported and imported as an .obj file. Recalculating the normals unfortunately doesn’t seem to work.
With Yafaray this doesn’t seem to be a problem. Only for the displacement of the water. This was a good practice to learn the basics of modelling (meshes) in Blender.
Materializing with UV maps was completely new for me. I was surprised how precise you can materialize the model.
The speed of materializing with UV textures decreases with this method, especially for textures you don’t need an advanced texture (for example a metal texture). Here I missed a scale texture to real life units and a rotate function in the material window.
Further did I only see the textures on the work screen if I made an UV-map. With normal added materials I only see the color of the material.
Sure,
I used Disp.jpg in combination with a displacement modifier (this is really cool). For the properties of the material I used a Yafaray glass material (Yafaray water.jpg).
