Blender rendering coming along

by way of general interest for those of you who may be looking for a free
open source rendering solution Blender 2.31a has been released recently and
does a decent job on VRML files. www.blender3d.org
the interface is now a bit friendlier and a decent manual is in the
pipeline.
Yafray is an add-on for raytracing that produces v.good results imo. next
year it is planned for Yafray to be better integrated with Blender.
www.coala.uniovi.es/~jandro/noname check out the gallery
Blender supports alpha, caustics, environmental
mapping,halo,shadows,emissive bodies, antialiased labels etc ...of passing
note is some recent experimentation with a plug in for caustic rendered
animation.
Blender is evolving all the time -I follow progress for SW use - will keep
you posted - could really become useful into next year....
cheers people

 

How do you interface with solidworks models?

Johnny

 

you need to export SW bits as VRML - give your SW assy parts individual
colours -makes life easier later when you assign textures etc. and you need
to auto smooth the objects when in Blender.
Blender takes a bit of getting used to and playing around with -its main
weakness presently is the lack of good info for new users -which may put
people off- not ideal but hey its not bad for free....
I have thought about writing a tutorial for SW users purposes -maybe I'll do
this early next year

 

Sweet! The mini cooper renders are way kewl!!

http://www.coala.uniovi.es/~jandro/noname/forum/viewtopic.php?t=471

...

 

Hi,

I've spent a lot of time recently coming up to speed with this
software, in particular, linking Solidworks -> Blender -> Crafter ->
Yablex -> Yafray to create the type of raytraced images they show on
in the Yafray gallery.

I found that rendering in Blender can produce nice results, but the
clunky approach to creating reflections etc is very painful.

I have a feeling that for simple presentations, Blender's "toon"
shading with black outlines may be useful, so will investigate that
more (a lot like Rhino3d's 'Penguin').

Have yet to produce anything spectacular, but am slowly getting the
hang of it. Would be interested to see your results...

Regards,

Anthony

 

Anthony,

I have not used Blender in years.. last I tried it out it was painful
then so, I would not expect it to be a lot better (hey, it's a free
tool)?

I may play with it though.. do you have a simple procedure you can share
here?

thnx..

 

Paul,

I saw your latest post via Mailgate, but it hasn't shown up on Google
Groups yet (my usual newsreader - what do you use?)

No, I don't have a simple tutorial on how to get all of this running
together. I'm planning to write one, so that the experienced posters
to this newsgroup can leapfrog me and show us all how to do the really
cool stuff.

In the mean time, please look at:

http://www.d.umn.edu/~dhomich/training/yafray/blender2yafray.html.

....it should have enough to get you going.

The basic steps are:

1. Export model out of Solidworks as VRML, then open in Blender
2. Set up camera angle, light positions, ground plane etc in Blender
3. Run the Yablex script from within Blender, and use it to assign
general material qualities, specify nature of each light etc
4. Create special materials in Crafter, and pull them into Yablex
5. Use Yablex to create an XML file of the scene
6. Open Bagisas and use it to run the render (Bagisas is an interface
to the XML file, offering the kind of benefits a good HTML editor
offers over, say, Notepad).
7. Bagisas calls on Yafray to do the rendering
8. Tweak lighting, image size etc in Bagisas and re-run rendering

Its not essential to use Bagisas, since the latest Yablex scripts will
generate the image automatically if you choose to. However, I've
found it quite a handy tool for fine tuning.

Have seen UV mapping used to good effect, but am personally used to
more simple 'projection' and 'cube' based mapping.

Hope this helps, curious to know how you get on.

Regards,

Anthony

 

there was actually a discussion in the Blender developer community about the
same renderman compliant renders however I don't think there was a lot of
enthusiasm for it.

 

sorry Name, I cant find it ,can you be more specific about location please

 

thank you Mr Wilson....
yours in complete grovelling sincerity
neil