I have this building block, that I need to layout as a floor, but in a specific layout (square with hole in it). The blocks are only 50x50cm and the layout is about 70meters long. So they are going to be a lot of blocks.
What I did now…but modelled 1 block, and used the array modifier to fill the layout. I only did one side…but already I can tell its memory intensive and its slowing down my system. I did not apply the arrays btw.
Is there a better, more memory efficient way, to tile these blocks? Please note:
the blocks are all the same
in a later stage, I need to be able to change shape, texture, color for the blocks. Here’s what im trying to do.
in the final render, the blocks are not going to be shown in much detail.
Thank you for your answer. No, i havent tried dupliface. Im not sure what that is really.
And to answer your second question… I need to make a couple of renders from different perspectives from this layout … but nothing will be very close to these blocks. At least 10 meters away.
So, based on that info… would I need it to be 3D? or would a normal map suffice?
There’s not enough information to be sure, test, but that sounds like you don’t even need a normal map. You might have problems it showing up in the render correctly, if the image resolution is too small. The grid makes a small detail, and camera being far away, there might not be enough pixels to describe the lines with anti-aliasing, let alone with intricate detail like fake or real thickness.
There are other ways to fake depth, like burning shadows in diffuse map, or only using specular/glossiness map. There are also rendering techniques. Those depend on the scene setup and how the render is done.
