The two 3D apps I use are Blender and Poser5. If you’re not familiar with Poser, it comes with lots of great human models, poses them and does a nice job rendering the high poly figures, although it’s a slug. I prefer Blender for everything else. Unfortunately, Blender doesn’t do as good a job rendering the figures as Poser does.
Is anyone familiar enough with the newer and older Blender rendering options like shading, unified rendering and smoothing options, to help me out?
Hmm… not much info to go on
Unified render: renders halos and transparancies at the same time as the rest of the render (or is it just halos) which gives slower, but better effects. Note that halos will look different in UR than standard.
Shaders: use orinayer Blinn in 2.28 for most realistic results.
Lighting: Use arrays of shadow spots (check clipend and clipstart distances) ie 4x4 grids pointed from one direction. This will give softer, more natural shadows.
Smoothing has two types, auto and normal. If Autosmooth is clicked (editbuttons) the angle below is the minimum angle between faces defined as smooth, greater angles are not smoothed. Normal smoothing (set smooth on its own) smooths all angles. Subsurface divides and thus smooths the model without creating new vertices. First box is modelling subsurf level, second is rendered subsurf level. subsurf 1 divides faces once, 2 twice etc…
Decent textures can hide a multitude of modelling sins (not that I would do that 
)
Oh and browse the tutorials at the top of this topic, get the Blender guides from www.Blender3d.com.
Sorry if you already knew all this or are lost by it but you didn’t give much indication of your Blender knowledge so I pitched for the middle.
Hope that helps
Thanks for your help! :O) The Orin_nayer shader makes a real difference. What about the roughness setting? What does that do? I’ve been monkeying with Blender for a couple years and have the 2.0 guide, but the app has advanced since then, :O), and there are a lot of new tools that aren’t covered in it. Any good tutes specific to the new rendering tools?
Use the search here and on the web for Orin Nayer and Blinn.
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Roughness is the amount of microscopic unevenness in the material. It would be low for, say, polished objects and high for porous objects. It changes the way the material responds to diffuse (low angle) light primarily.
Does anyone have any suggestions regarding a configuration for the new shader options for human skin and hair? That’s where the render quality is breaking down for me. Otherwise it’s great.
Ahhh, hair…
Long hair, now to do that you could use the technique on the makehuman site:
http://www.kino3d.com/lab/index.php?id=100&lang=english
With refinement it can look spectacular.
However if you want thin hair you want Ripsting’s brilliant fibre script (now in version 2.0):
https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8561
(or for 2.0 try the general blender chat forum)
As for skin also try the makehuman site, I believe they could have info on that as well there.
Alex
I found the key is to keep mipmap/interpol enabled and crank the filter setting up the 3.00 to get the look I’m trying for. Thanks for the help, and do consider a more detailed, TASK ORIENTED explanation of the new shader system. Theory and history are nice, (did you know that Jim Blinn developed his algorith way back in 1967?. but it’s time to get serious about helping people use Blender to its’ maximum capabilities.