why you need many polys?
edit: for serious projects? muhahaha…
for hi detail meshes, yes.
So what if I had asked: what about that danged UI? The answer would
have been:
Why yes grasshopper, they are working on it. Have patience and all shall
be revealed.
But before they started working on it, the answer would have been:
Wot?? Why you criticize my software, it’s the best, how dare you?
So the answer is no, right now nobody has mentioned anything
about this, they are too busy with all the other stuff they are doing.
Which is Ok.
Thanks Extrudeface, that was good to know.
You’re welcome 
hey ,trust me .you can’t hate blender .i tried almost all softwares but i still find blender kinda special .even if it lacks few things .and its UI isnt good .
Hey TylerZambori. Ignore the “fanboys” (I do.)
The issues with high-poly counts is known and even in the process of being worked on for this years SOC.
The abstract: One of the biggest weaknesses of Blender is the inability to render high polygon counts while modeling. I believe the way blender uses OpenGL API is the biggest cause: it does immediate mode rendering. Using VBOs and vertex arrays, sometimes called the retained mode, would speed up the rendering substantially and provide a user with a more responsive interface.
Blender also has issues with scenes with large amounts of objects contained in a single scene. Both of these issues have been discussed on Blendercoders (IRC). If you come across an issue in Blender it’s likely someone else has commented on it somewhere and that someone is in the process of looking at improving it.
I’m happy Raytrace rendering is getting optimizations…it’s the one reason I rarely use Blender for anything but modeling and UV mapping. Blender has one of the slowest rendering engines I’ve ever used. (when Raytracing) I’ve used GI rendering engines that have finished rendering an animation before Blender has rendered a single complex scene.
Just to be clear, it’s not just immediate mode that slows down rendering.
That is just a quote from the proposal…fyi. Not my analysis
lol :-d…
It affects real time rendering only.
Martin
It’s great news that the SOC project could speed up the 3d view and allow faster opengl rendering times or more responsive sculpting , but seriously, do you guys use other software?
in my experience blender is actually quite good at high poly counts…certainly faster than maya or max, though i always found Lightwave to be particularly good at chucking millions of polys around…
(Extrude face seemed to have a different experience on those packages, but hey we can only talk for ourselves)
So no, I’m no fanboy, just mystified by some peoples expectations… Honestly, only stuff like mudbox/z-brush can embarrass blender’s poly performance… Personally I don’t expect a generalist piece of software to outperform highly specialist apps, but maybe that’s just me…
And BTW if you read any of my posts you’ll see I have many many criticisms of blender and am all too aware of many “flaws and weaknesses” in the software… it’s not about"feature lists" after all, it’s about workflow… say blender does get to outperform the poly pushing capabilities of z-brush it would still have a long way to go to make me drop z-brush from the pipeline…
Blender winds me up because it can’t “round trip” data nicely with other software… (though OBJ is a staple… when you need multiple UVs, animation, a moderately complete material definition… there are strengths and weaknesses and unsuported bits and pieces… fbx export is great, but you can’t import it…collada has things like multiple UVs missing from the implementation and seems rather broken at the moment… but hey there’s always a way if you get down to it…)
The built in renderer is slow, cruftyand doesn’t handle large scenes or unevenly distributed poly counts well and sucks at GI… but there’s always yafaray, luxrender, vray, renderman…Useful, but external renderers “can’t be plugged in” and can be a minefield for finding what supports all you need for a job…
volumetrics have a massive way to go… custom tools and plugins can’t be seamlessly integrated ito the interface… It’s a very very long list of stuff and lots of it is being addressed or on the radar to be fixed at some point… That’s great as long as you don’t need it now!
The thing is though that blender is very capable and useable and as part of a pipeline it fares pretty well.
I don’t get “blender purists” who get miffy when you use other software as well as blender… any proffesional pipeline will use whatever it takes to get a job done
strange but I can make very fast render that looks great
strange…
amateurs makes very great render times and bad looking
but look a next-gen game for example Gears of War… it is realtime…
Haha ha, not strange at all, Making a great looking render that renders fast should be entry level skills to the pro market…
But i can’t make “blender internal” raytrace fast when an environment map won’t do…
BTW, i was the art director on the Burnout franchise for EA, i know about making stuff go fast in realtime!
Gears of war pre calculates and bakes a lot of data (as I’m sure you’re aware) Final render realtime, offline calculations/optimisations etc etc all adds up to a lot lot more…
making stuff look good is much easier than making it go fast on limited hardware…
you can make stuff go fast in BI, but it IS a slow renderer because of the octree scene splitting limitations and raytracing is pitiful…
but I digress, I do agree that knowing how to fake and optimise and prioritise can get you far, but why would I when I can use another renderer that doesn’t make me jump through hoops to get that effect?
Thanks but no thanks, I have clients that expect results, If I can do that with less work outside blender then why not?
but hey any pro would know! use what you need to get the job done…
BI has it’s uses, and can indeed be fast!
But it isn’t the best solution to eveything, I’ve done contracts where BI was taking a couple of hours to render a frame, I transfered the data into Lightwave and got as good results in a couple of minutes…
I could have spent a day optimising the scene for BI to get those render times but why bother when I can set export to Lightwave and tweak to a final setup in 20 mins?
Strange? LOL!
Couldn’t agree more with the general line, Michael W…
The fact is in any serious project, specially inside a company, you need to be able to use max, maya, blender, a home made editor, whatever they put in font of you. That’s it. No other way.
And, yup, no package is perfect. I also like Max and Wings, and none is perfect (Wings is so near… ;))
the day I find no quirks in a tool, I’ll be a fanboy. That is: never.
It’s great news that the SOC project could speed up the 3d view and allow faster opengl rendering times or more responsive sculpting , but seriously, do you guys use other software?
definitely good point…
in my experience blender is actually quite good at high poly counts…certainly faster than maya or max, though i always found Lightwave to be particularly good at chucking millions of polys around…
(Extrude face seemed to have a different experience on those packages, but hey we can only talk for ourselves)
yep, what I was saying is that indeed, Blender pushes a load of polies compared to others. In my experience, quite more than max and several other (painfully admiting here that way a lot more than Wings.Is indeed my only lowdown about it, tho I tend to model charcaters in low cage/sudiv Mirai style. rarely a prob,(I’ve even done very fine wrinkles with it, like using a zb… ) but… )
Indeed : The only one I saw pushing more polies (apart of course of ZB and Mudbox, but those are specialized on that and they can focus on that…) was that Metasequoia LE, my previous modeler… It indeed handled quite well a 3d scan of a million of polies there where my old P4 died in blender with it… (would have never tried tho to open in other tools… at least blender could load it and handle it…the rest crashed and stuff… ) In general, Blender handles thousands of polies more with same hardware than most commercial high end tools. Am not saying anything revolutionary: IMO those packages are thoutght for super powerful stations, special cards that redraw very fast, etc, where the companies wont be aware of the difference in performance, or just wouldnt affect them… but you certainly notice in a very old poor average joe machine…
My last issue with Blender would be polycounts… (probably would cry first for performance in complex rigs, or some other stuff. But I have completed several commercial (not to disclose) projects with it, and lately even a lot of texturing stage… ) I find actually no show stopper issue to do whatever the problem, there’s always a workaround with any software. the more things are polished and more quality on the package, the faster we do the projects, and the thing starts to be more cost effective. That’s all, imo. of course, certain features you have in max, kill a load of time and give fast a bunch of quality. We would be silly to not want that. In 2002, gizmos were seen like evil, also any auto ik thing, many things that i remember mentioning, no genius thing, just they were already in Max and others, and knew by work hours experience how much of an advantage can be to have ¡em as an option for some operations (btw, I use keys, but gizmos a lot while rigging and animating…)
So no, I’m no fanboy, just mystified by some peoples expectations… Honestly, only stuff like mudbox/z-brush can embarrass blender’s poly performance…
But in my tests, would embarras more max or maya… 
Personally I don’t expect a generalist piece of software to outperform highly specialist apps, but maybe that’s just me…
That’s my point. And why I like Wings (in this way of thinking I should like also Silo, but I don’t…nothing against it, is a jewell. )
Blender winds me up because it can’t “round trip” data nicely with other software… (though OBJ is a staple… when you need multiple UVs, animation,
have you tried *.b3d plugin made by some one who’s nicks is gandlaf or sth like that? it supposedly export lighmaps, so probably several UVs. b3d format only carries 4 UV channels, I think but some multitexturing can do with those…
It also is great for animation export, and my best animation ever exporting character animation to an engine, have been md5 of der_ton.
*.x works for me, also…
Surely you know about these as well.
The big movies has optimisations too, it uses baked datas etc… So amateurs think: oh I use GI, 92342 ray lamp and why it so slow? Why I cant make Pixar quailty.
I think the next coming soon: “I hate Blender because it is not a render farm” LOL
making stuff look good is much easier than making it go fast on limited hardware…
tell that to me!
I made half of the models for a 3d mobile game, and all of the ones for another (and items for several others) …freaking all was having some sort of fake as the machine is as underpowered as you could think of…at least some time ago…now I don’t know… To me was fun doing th e2d pixel art ones, …also the 3d, but more suffering. I prefer 3d for pc ones. (been working on some, but by far not of the level of where you worked at, Michael… (btw, I like car games… But I always ended working on some medieval stuff, prerendered or real time, or some fps…lol… ) )
[heck, there are more relaxing jobs than that…now I have an almost normal life…]
The big movies has optimisations too, it uses baked datas etc… So amateurs think: oh I use GI, 92342 ray lamp and why it so slow? Why I cant make Pixar quailty.
I think the next coming soon: “I hate Blender because it is not a render farm” LOL
no…I guess Michael speaks about the same speed in raytracing a very simple sample (not a newbie scene adding wastefull settings crazily), I guess he knows what he speaks of, compared between Blender and another package. I cannot speak about it, as I have not made that comparison (I only made the poly count one and was quite favorable to Blender…)
Thanks Martin - I always wondered about that one!
Just because some (maybe a lot?) of the user base is inexperienced/ ill informed , that’s to be expected for a free open source tool after all …doesn’t mean that any criticism is unfounded…
YOU YOURSELF post issues and problems on occasion and insist we listen “because you’re a pro who knows what he’s taking about”…
Do you live in a bubble where you think “i’m the only pro in the forum”?
Now, i can agree with the sentiment that often “limitations” are just in the artists head and “brute force” solutions whilst easy technically lead to long render times…
…but how you deliver the message is important too.
surely you didn’t arrive fully formed and had to start learning this stuff somewhere right?
Extrude face, thankyou for understanding what I’m talking about.
Endi I hope it’s just a language thing, but you don’t do yourself any favours
I must be missing something?