Simple pic (help wanted)

Artwork Works in Progress
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hello, im new to blender and 3d modelling/art stuff in general. I just turned 16 took a basic intro course to computer science this summer and for the last week we did some stuff with POV-Ray and that got me interested in 3d.

The teacher suggested blender and so i tried it out a while after i came back.

This is something i did in POV-Ray, took me about 3 days (there’s more that you can’t see), pretty good i thought for about 4 days on the program.

Anyways…since this is about blender…

basically, this is an image of three trophys (sort of), and some other stuff i tossed in. Here it is. sorry if its a tad small but the image hosting site i’m using has an upload size limit :< . (BTW anywone know a good free imagehosting site with not that many restrictions?)

http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2003-9/369607/trophyswordproto4small1.JPG

I don’t think its bad but there’s some things that are bothering me. One thing is the environment mapping. Can anyone tell me exactly how this works? Right now i have the env maps for the cups set to an empty inside each of them. ditto for the swords. For the floor, i have an empty mirroring the camera under the plane. I don’t think im doing it right though. Especially on the trophy thing on the right.

The gems and stuff i did pretty quick and will probably move around a bit. Also, they look a tad…not…gemmish…(for lack of a better term %| )

The black background has to stay because its going on a website eventually and i want it to blend in with the background on the site.

Please tell me anything you think about it, good or bad. It would help alot if you could be specific, as in what could be better, don’t worry i have a thick skin.

Also, some semi related questions:

Is there any way to convert curves into meshes so that i can spin/spindup them? Or is there a way to spin a curve? For the trophys, i did the edges as curves, then extruded a line to approximate it. It worked but its a bit tedious.

thanks to anyone that can help.

[EDIT]: looking through the site, i saw a lot of people talking about exporting blender files to Yafray. Is there any way to export blender files to POV-Ray? I’m doubtful because I know that blender renders objects as triangles and POV-Ray uses mathematical formulae but i think the POV-Ray renderer would look nicer. If not I might try out Yafray later.

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The images look nice, but i think you could work on the materials some more. As far as the webspace, I run a freeserver for Blender users. Just email me with a request, username and password and I will set you up.

You can export to POV with Blender, in fact someone wrote an excellent script to do this a while back (does anyone know where Eeshlo went?). I will see if I can find it here. I admire your dedication.

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About converting a curve to a mesh:

Just select your curve and press Alt-C, then click the popup that says “Convert to Mesh.” I guess you know how to spin already! 8)

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With regard to environment mapping, there is no need to put empties inside your objects. All you have to do is give the object a name in the edit buttons, and in the settings for that object’s envmap just put the name of the object (case sensitive of course) into the “Ob:” box. Tada! Then set the texture to CMIR and turn the slider down a tad. If you want more specifics…I’ll give them.

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Hi zdk1,

Try Povanim by jms. You can export your scenes from Blender to PovRay. The home page for the script is comprehensive. However here is a recent thread on Povanim.

Lastly, you can download a patch for PovRay called MLPov. It has the ability to create HDR renders. Here is the link to v0.81 in english. The current version is 0.83, you can download it here.

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You could reduce the specularity of the trophies a bit and increase the overall brightness.
For the gems: Try to bring them to a separate layer and light them with bright GI on the same layer (lamp lamp, Icosphere sub 2, check Layer for this lamps).

To spin a curve object (profile of your trophies) just add a nurbs circle and make the trophy profile BevOb of this circle. Maybe you have to ajust the centerpoint of the trophy curve or to mirror it in edit mode (best is to model in top view for curves). The width button (of the circle) is usefull to fine tune the the “trophy”.

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thanks everyone for the feedback. I’ll try out your suggestions and play around a bit more with the scene, probably put some textures on things.

hmm, i just looked at the tutorial on creating reflective water and i assumed that env maps required emptys. This way sounds much better thanks.

I’m not exactly sure what you’re saying tordat but i have an idea and if its what i think it is its probably simpler (and better) than what I’m doind. I’ll definitely try that out as well. Thanks tortxof for the curve to mesh thing.

I am definitely going to try out those two programs ec2. i like the POV-Ray renderer better than blenders but modelling and making stuff in general is much harder, I’m not that good with visualizing with psuedo-code type stuff (even with graph paper and all that).

shibbydude that sounds really nice. atm i don’t have much to put up but i’ll contact you when need it.

Thanks to everyone, i’ll touch this up and post again when i’ve made some decent progress.