Thought I'd share my latest version of my modding project over on the project logs. Modeled in Blender and rendered using Cycles, very quick on the GPUs, only about 5-6 minutes. This is fresh from the renderer so there are still a few artifacts in the image sadly. Blender's a great bit of kit. Funnily enough I actually prefer using it over Maya and 3DS Max (get access to both through uni), although I think that's down to how I've been using it for a while now. Admittedly ZBrush just destroys Blender in the sculpting front, really lovely package to use that. For those points, have you tried selecting the faces, adding a new material and then assigning them to it, on the same object? I'd be surprised if that's not working properly
The problem seems to be related to the compositor. The textures get somewhat transparent or semitransparent so that the background shines through etc when I use the Add/Mix tool to combine the different scenes. The spaceship, the trails, the jets and the background are all seperate layers, and the compositor when using Cycles Renderer seems to have issues with putting one layer ontop of another. Textures are fine when using the normal Blender Renderer, but you can't get as nice textures then. Never used Zbrush before, but allways was using 3ds Max so far. I was thinking of upgrading my copy of 3ds Max, but then decided to give Blender a try as it would save me alot of money ofc, and Blender has some features that are actually not to be found in 3ds Max, like Edge/Vertex Slide for example and then there's a good integration of LuxRender for Blender aswell, but I've not fiddled around with it yet. I'm not doing as much of 3d these days anyways besides maybe a short animation of a logo, so I'm searching for new ways to go besides 3ds Max. For everything else (architectural/engineering) I'm using SketchUp + Vray. EDIT: I trashed the whole Cycles Render Engine and went for the normal Blender Render engine. Then I rendered ebery object on different layers and did the composition in Photoshop afterwards. Gives me much more options to fiddle with all the blurring, transparency etc. The earth in the background is done in Blender aswell, using NASA-images as textures projected onto simple spheres for the earth and the clouds using bumpmaps, specularmaps and transparency.
Fryrender and Maxwell are still the best physical render engines I've ever used. Fry in particular is brilliant.
That sounds like more of an issue with how you're using it rather than the engine itself really. When I started playing around with cycles I thought it was rubbish, but then I got used to it, and now it's my renderer of choice. Cycles simply has a speed to it that's just amazing, the fact that it's integrated fully into blender makes it much more useful to me than other GPU accelerated solutions. I tried Lux years ago, found it to be ungodly slow, but that may well have changed by now. I didn't like Maxwell because it didn't integrate into my existing software, meant I couldn't do mid-modelling render checks easily.
Most of Maki's renders will do that to you. He says artifacts are still present, but that's a mindfrack if I've ever heard one
Honestly if you view the full res picture they're everywhere Plus the shadowed areas are all grainy still thanks to a lack of passes. Glad to see people enjoy them though, they've been immensely useful for planning the loops and mods.
The artefacts from rendering are less distracting than the apparently double walled reservoirs(which if intentional and going in a mod, is both awesome and where can I get one). I always enjoy render pron anyway so it's not a bother to me
Yeah that's been bugging me too, had a similar issue with the tubing for a while as well. The funny thing is while the reservoirs are supposed to not have a wall like that, looking inside my case it seems the tubing should do though. When I made the fluid and the inner wall have the same faces, or when I simply merged the meshes into one, it had some rather odd effects. This time I'm putting it down to the renderer though as I think this was an issue that was present in some of the earlier versions (which I was using for those). I certainly remember a number of people being rather confused and a bit angry when trying to render bottles and glasses containing liquids and how they didn't come out right. I tried rendering with a newer version of Cycles but it broke the scene and refused to finish. Seems that I'd have to build it all up again from the constituent parts in a new studio setup designed for it. I'll do that for my next project though.
I honestly must say the completely fooled me. Was about to accuse you of taking a picture and posting it until you said you followed a tutorial.
Oops didn't notice this, Done in Max and vray also used Marvellous designer for the fabrics. Thanks for the comments.
