I just thought I'd start a thread to see if there were any other blender-fans here on bit-tech. I just discovered blender... I've downloaded it before (saw it in the software list here), but it was too confusing and way too slow. Since then, I've gotten into 3d rendering again, but no longer work at a place that had lightwave 3d licenses lying around. I've searched their help forums, and apparently I had to backdate my openGL drivers for ATI or something of that nature. Now it runs fairly well. (My PC at home is still much faster than this one at work... which is weird because this one at work is much newer.) Last night I discovered the Sequence Editor and using plugins, like the "green screen" one... can't remember what it is called off hand though. I'll post pics in programming and development later, but just wanted to see what other people here thought of this free 3d rendering software.
yay another person in to 3d modelling! i use blender and a few others blender is great when you figure out how to use it if you havent already got yafray then i highly recommend that you download it http://www.elysiun.com/ is a fairly large blender community with all kinds of information if you dont like the modeller for blender then wings 3d is a great organic modeller that is easy to use
Cool, I've downloaded the YAFRay rendering engine, but haven't played with it enough to understand it... Aparently you have to set your scene up differently to get it to light it properly, but when it does, it can be pretty realistic. (A monkey with a texture and a few lights turned out great in Blender's native, but turned out a dull grey in yafray)
I've been looking for good free rendering programs for a while, i have blender on my computer but it seems insanely complicated and I haven't really bothered messing around with it yet. Now I want to play with it again
http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Tutorials.243.0.html is how i learned blender i gotta figure out why my copy of it in gentoo likes to crash when i try to render with yafray
I've never used any of those... but I thought I'd toss out another free 3D modeling and rendering program and see if any of you had hard of POVRay? http://www.povray.org I've used it since it was a dos command line renderer... pretty miserable and slow back then, but generates some amazing realistic stuff. -TZ
Unless you've found something different, Povray is still a command line renderer. BTW, does anyone know of a free program that'll convert .obj (for preference) to .pov? - H. [edit= Found Moray, though it's shareware]
And if you want a really great way to learn, check out their Video Tutorials Fairly large files, but they are Divx, so they last quite a while. I learned 75% of what I know from those, and 25% from previous experience and playing around.
Underneath it all, it's still pretty much command line. And it's still all code, and no gui... but some of us like it that way. However, they've added a complete complier style shell that helps check syntax, and it allows you to change your render options for animations, or file quality. There are moddeling programs like moray, but they don't really allow you the freedom that pure code does.... for example. In povray, if you have a height field to generate terrain, and you want to place 10,000 trees on the terrain, it would suck to model them directly, but with code directly, you can psudo randomize an x,z location, and then fire a test ray to find the intersection of the plane... that gives you your Y location for the base of the tree.... then a little more psudo random work allows you to rotate, scale, and distort the trees so they don't look like copies. Done deal. Don't get me wrong, moddeling programs are awesome for certain situations, but they can't cover it all. That being said, I'm a pretty crappy ray tracer... I've dabbled in it for years, but never managed to score decently in the IRTC, and never been able to generate a scene that I would claim "looked real"... I'm just not cut out for that stuff I guess. -TZ
One thing I like about Blender is that plugins and whatnot are written in python. It even has a text editor built in to write code. This guy used a script in blender to randomly place grass, clumping them based on number of verticies of the terrain. I personally haven't used much python other than what other people have done, so I can't really say much.
