Vray for blender

andybot

I've opened blender a couple of years ago, but I couldn't wrap my head around it.

I had the same reaction a couple years ago, but the development community has done wonders for the interface, where now the navigation now is simple and intuitive coming from sketchup. There are many good tutorials and a great user manual online. Learning the shortcut keys is very helpful.

I tried Modo at 401. I liked it OK, but it was just way too slow running on the computer I had at the time. I also was rather lost in the shader tree too. I don't know that I'll have time for 601 anytime soon, but it does look nice.

Stinkie

Yeah, the Shader Tree can be confusing.

BTW:
http://www.cmivfx.com/tutorials/view/221/Blender+V-Ray+Introduction
http://www.cmivfx.com/tutorials/view/312/Blender+to+VRay+-+Settings+Part+2
http://www.cmivfx.com/tutorials/view/413/Blender+to+V-Ray%3A+Volume+3

andybot

yeah, saw those. So far have found what I need in the wiki and on the various forums. A lot translates from using VFSU. Except having the up-to-date and fully functional vray is worlds better!

stefanq

Andy, I'm having baby steps with blender. I've printed the keyboard shortcuts on A4 sheets of paper, and I have watched some basic tutorials. I'm having a "steam-punk" feeling about blender, and I'm loving it.
I will not use v-ray, since I'm short with money, but it's nice to have a powerful sub-d modeler and more for FREE. Thanks so much for the push.
Regards,
Stefan

andybot

Hey Stefan,

Excellent! Glad you are making some progress. The more I am using Blender, the more impressed I am with its capabilities.

As for vray in blender, I am rendering various test scenes that I have from vfsu, and trying to match the settings. I am finding that v/b is significantly faster than vfsu to render the same scene. I can't say that it's scientific, but I'm getting the output to match and I think I have the settings matched as best as I can. Anyway, it's yet another learning curve, but I am finding a lot to love.

As for control of the scenes and model in blender, it's night and day from sketchup.

Andy

solo

Yup, I gotta make the move myself, I'd like to use Blender/Thea workflow.

Any good free basic tutorials? I really mean basic, I need to first figure out the UI and navigation stuff before even atempting to create a box.

I really need better UV tools and better poly handeling software, SU has hit it's limits I believe.

stefanq

When you start blender, a box is already created
http://cgcookie.com/blender/get-started-with-blender/
http://blendtuts.com/blender_tutorials?field_level_value=Beginner
http://www.blenderguru.com/
The last one have advanced tutorials, but I had great time watching some of them, blender is awesome,when you are Andrew Price.

solo

Thanks.

Where can I find the newest version of Blender, what is it actually? as there seems to be so many floating around.

stefanq

Here it is:
http://blendtuts.com/2010/07/how-to-get-recent-blender-build.html

stefanq

http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/.
The last one is 2.62. There is a tutorial actually about how to update your blender, without uninstalling. I'm digging right now and I'll post the link . Anyway, blender .org is the place to go when you need something related to blender. This guys are moving quite fast.

andybot

Pete,

It might link from the same that Stefan posted, but anyway, here's where I started:
http://www.blender.org/education-help/tutorials/getting-started/
Then the manual is very helpful as well to understand what each setting does.

I tried, but didn't get very far with the Thea exporter. I got stuck on trying to get an animation to render.

For importing SU geometry, I've found using the SU pro 3ds exporter works the best. The main issue with the obj exporter is that the geometry is in discontinuous planes. Fine for architectural, but an issue with anything you'd want to smooth. Also, note that the default blender unit is one meter, versus 1 inch for SU.

The UV tools are a delight to use!

Andy

solo

@unknownuser said:

Also, note that the default blender unit is one meter, versus 1 inch for SU.

Thanks, that can explains a lot, I gave up when I could not find a small pillow I imported to test.

andybot

Indeed! And the real-world scale is critical too for rendering - things like lighting fall-off and fog/translucency will not work right if you have the wrong scale (I was finding this out the hard way... ) It was also surprisingly hard to track down this little bit of information...

solo

Care to share the blender scene? or the SU one (though I'd prefer the higher poly one) so I can use as a 'render this' and see how best to mach the photo.

Stinkie

Might be of interest to some: http://cgcookie.com/blender/cgc-series/interior-3d-architectural-visualization/

andybot

So I thought I would post a relatively simple 1 to 1 comparison of a scene in Sketchup and the same scene in Blender, both rendered with vray (different versions - the SU version is a year or so behind...) Here is the wireframe in SU. I exported as a 3ds mesh into blender. The camera views aren't exact matches, but oh well.
SU wireframe view
Here is the original photo I based the model on.
photograph - taking camera exposure settings for the vray physical camera
Next, I adjusted the materials as best I could in vfsu, set the lighting to real-world units (the bulb in the lamp is 1200 lumens)
Vray for Sketchup rendering
Then, I did the same in Blender - except that I used a smooth and a subdivision modifier on the wineglass and the lamp to get the curves nice and clean. The lighting is the same, using the same exposure and light source. The material properties, even though I tried to match, the fog effect seems to be completely different in v/b - much closer to the photo. The colors, even with the same color mapping, etc, are quite different, and seem much more accurate.
vray for blender - better match of exposure and viewpoint...