Akta's Way – Blog

Physics have always been my favourite stuff on Blender since the Bullet Engine is very well done for rigid bodies simulations and also soft bodies, fluids and particles are handled in an excellent way by this application.
Fur is really important to give to our characters realism or to create grass and other cool stuff such as hairs with Blender. So I link you this really nice and simple tutorial on how furs really works in Blender:

Fur tutorial

Enjoy and happy blending!

Rendering is the most important part in 3D animations and artworks in my opinion since it can really change the quality of a scene, making it look much better or worse than it is. What it comes before rendering is a long process made of material settings, texture, shaders, raytracing and mirror settings for glass and metal, subfarce scattering to achieve realism in materials such as skins which have a lot of small imperfections and they are really difficult to render in a proper way. However this is not the argument I’m going to talk today. Today I’ll talk about rendering engines that you can use with Blender.

Let’s list the ones I use most

• Blender internal
• Yaf(a)ray 1.0 (Yafray is not anymore under development and the latest version was 0.9)
• Luxrender

There also a bunch of other render engines, but today we will compare them. It depends on what are you going to render. If you want to render internal and exterior environment I strongly suggest to use LuxRender. It’s powerful and the results can be really amazing when settings are well used. You can find it here, take some time to read the Wiki before starting to use it.

Yaf(a)ray is “the try to completely renew the YafRay core, because the old structure just reached its limit after years of evolutional changes.”. I use it especially with close renders such as a table with a bottle and a glass, I really like how the caustics are handled by it and the photon mapping can give you really high quality results. Also interiors may have an excellent quality, however I do prefer LuxRender for those.

Finally the Blender Internal, that I use for everything deals with characters, objects renders. It’s not the best maybe among its competitors, but it’s still a great engine! Once you understand how to use it and how to set the materials within it, you can get really whatever you want from it (except caustics!)

Here an example for each render engine, check it out:

Yafaray

LuxRender

Blender Internal

Now it’s your turn to try them out and decide what’s the best for what! I suggest to check also Indigo, even tough I never used it.

Happy blending!

Many times I’ve heard this question: I’m a blender novice and I’d like to know how can I start, where is the manual, how do I make this kind of stuff and so on..well Blender at the first shot could be quite unfriendly, especially for the interface. Other applications such as Maya, 3DS, Cinema 4D have coddled us, showing nice looking interfaces, colorful buttons and all this kind of things that make the 3d environment much more easy to use. However this is not always true. Blender in the beginning has a quite complex interface. Buttons everywhere, tabs, sliders, unknown words like DupliVerts, IOR, Fresnel, words that if you are not an expert of 3d graphics you could difficultly understand. But once you get used to that, Blender becomes intuitive and powerful much more than any other 3d suite on the market.

Then the question is: from where do I get started?

I strongly suggest this approach: if you are totally new to 3d, then you need to start from the low basics such as what is a vector, how objects are represented in the tridimensional space, what’s a material and so on. Go here, you will find the most complete source of tutorials and documentations for Blender. A lot of external links are also provided that makes your source of Blender knowledge almost infinite!

Another source that I strongly recommend is the super3boy channel on Youtube. More than 24 videotutorials will help you to master some functionalities of Blender. Well no more time for talks, let’s start using this wonderful and powerful software. Happy blending!

Like every blog at its beginning, I need to put something to introduce what I’m going to say on this blog and share with you people. Well, this will be mainly a Blender related blog, but anyway there will be news and posts about other stuff concerning CG, programming and some hack. I’m not that kind of person who likes to write a lot, so I do prefer to write short posts (better and less boring also for you!)  and to attach multimedia content to it.

So hope this will work, enjoy and share your own ideas and comments!

M.