Still the First Still, Luxrendered

It’s done!

Click for high-res

This was my first go with Luxrender, and I have to say I’m impressed. Will be using again! The final compositing (saturation and contrast, and DoF) was done in GIMP.

One of these days I may go about writing a tutorial on taking a completed scene you’ve done in Blender to Luxrender. It’s really not just installing, pressing a button and ta-daaa, photorealism. All the materials must be reworked, for example, and there’s plenty of other stuff to work on.

But that’s another time. Now, it’s time to get back to The Book!

First Still, Second Version

You may remember my very first still in Blender:

Nice effort, innit?

Well after all the awesome feedback I got from this thread at BlenderNewbies, this thread at BlenderArtists and Andrew Price’s Focused Critique, and about twenty hours of Blender Internal rendering (ouch), I am proud to present the new and improved version of what is still my first still (ha!) in Blender:

Click for high-res

Love it? Hate it? Tap-on-the-back-saying-yeaaaaaah-good-effort-mate? I’m not sure myself! What bugs me the most are the tiles, the DoF makes them look like a cheap texture when they actually had volume and bumpiness and reflection and this and that. But after those twenty hours, and seeing the tests I’m doing with Luxrender (yep, watch out for version 2.5 soon :P), I think I’ll leave this as it is!

Gotta mooove on!

Before we get into that

I’m back! I’m now posting from a new city, and better yet… wait for it… a new country!

I’ve actually been back to Blender since yesterday, and I know I owe you a new post for Blender Foundations’ chapter on Lighting, but… you know when you start something just for fun, to check something out, and then it becomes sort of an obsession until you feel you’re done with it? Well I just had one of those – I first modeled a perfume flask as an exercise on materials, and it suddenly became…

… my first still scene in Blender! I call it “Date in the sunset”:

Click for high-res

Things I used/learned in the process:

• Materials! Reflections, transparency, etc etc etc.
• Procedural textures! The marble is one and the not-uniform look in the tiles is due to another one. I know, I know, I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself, we’ve only just covered modeling in the book. But what the heck, this is fun!
• Modifiers, lots of them. For example, the tiles are actually modeled and arrayed, not a texture. The DoF (more on that later) doesn’t let you see, but each and every one of those little tiles has its own reflection of the scene, it’s awesome.
• NURBS! Yeah, I used them to model the faucet’s handles real quick, thanks to a tutorial by 3D Immortal.
• Depth of Field (or DoF)! A node in the compositor basically, this was my first chance to play with it.
• Fur! Making that towel was a lot of fun, and thanks to Andrew Price for his awesome tutorial on this. Oh yeah, I used a cloth simulation as well for this. That’s also covered in that tutorial.
• And lots of other stuff. It’s really is in the small projects that you learn the most.

So now that that’s done (or is it? I’m looking for feedback in BlenderArtists.org, so I might improve it even further!), we’re back to the book. For tomorrow, I promise a post on Lighting! Catch you then :)