Blender 3D (free 3D s/w)

[racer-x]

I just started playing around with blender 3D for a couple of weeks now. It's become my favorite new toy lately. It's not easy to use but it can produce some very nice effects and it's free.

Here's a [ame="http://www.vimeo.com/2586146"]test intro clip[/ame] I made for a baseball team. I'm thinking of using it before each game. The 3-D bat looks sweet and I managed to nail it on my 1st try. The ball however was a work in progress and took some time to create the raised seams effect.

Here's a great site for blender tutorials that helped even a 3-D dummy like me.....

[mrgreed202]

Yeah I've been messing around with blender a bit working on a new logo design. I've pretty much got it down and its looking pretty tight.

[Shadow_7]

Nice. I'm still addicted to povray though. Having grown up in the 80's with assembly language and code. My math skills are better than my drawing skills. I used to be able to add HEX in my head, a long long time ago in a place far far away. A bit slower than gui based variants / front ends, but nice. And you can set the background to transparency so you can overlay it on actual footage.

[somethingtohide]

And you can set the background to transparency so you can overlay it on actual footage.

You can do that with almost every 3D app


I grew up with C4D for almost six years. Recently I've been more into 3DS max because VrayforC4D is kinda limited atm. But I've always wanted to try blender, it's gotten LOADS better than when I was first modeling.

My suggestions:

Maybe make the bat go a lot faster, and motion blur and stuff. That would be loads cooler.
And have you enabled smoothing groups, phong shading, or whatever it would be in blender? The bat is quite high in sub-d's, but I can see each individual poly. Especially on the bottom of the handle.

[racer-x]

Shadow_7 wrote:

And you can set the background to transparency so you can overlay it on actual footage.

Actually the bat and ball are both image sequences in transparent png format. I did the compositing in Premiere. I tried to do it originally in Vegas, but it crashed miserably. I guess the high resolution 1920 x 1080 32-bit png's are too much for it..........

somethingtohide wrote:

Maybe make the bat go a lot faster, and motion blur and stuff. That would be loads cooler.
And have you enabled smoothing groups, phong shading, or whatever it would be in blender? The bat is quite high in sub-d's, but I can see each individual poly. Especially on the bottom of the handle.

Making it go faster is no problem. I'm very new to blender, so I can still learn a bit about the smoothing process. I created the bat using a "spinning process" where I did a half bat sketch and spun it 360 degrees to get the full size. I probably didn't give it enough key frames to go on. It's supposed to be a simulation of a wood bat with a painted handle. I think it looks good as it is..................

[somethingtohide]

Oh it looks great for such a beginner. But for my experienced eyes I easily see that stuff.

Weird that smoothing groups aren't already on. Basically it just smooths out the edges based on the angles of the edges. In this case all of the individual polys would become indefinable to the eye.

[diffid]

@racer-x

Looks good, for the smoothing you could apply a mesh modifier in blenders modifier stack.

Did you not fancy using blenders own node compositing features or the sequencer for you RGBA png's.

@somethingtohide

Both features mentioned above I believe are NOT in every other 3D package and certainly not Max. even bigger grin. :-))))))

It could also be argued successfully that Blender has better fluids, sculpting, particles and UV unwrapping than Max out of the box. :-)))

And it's not really weird that smoothing groups are NOT applied immediately. It's the ability to choose when you want to add them as a modifier stack and at what point. :-)

I'm not trying to turn this into a blender vs Max thing because we choose our tools to suite ourselves and it's our choice but I also believe in credit where credit is due. :-)

[Shadow_7]

You can always render to images 4x's the destination size, then scale them down to smooth out the edges. It's part of the reason I want to record in HD, so I can make some of the best looking SD in these parts of the woods. Although if I can also have the best looking HD, that's a bonus.

[racer-x]

Diffid wrote:

Did you not fancy using blenders own node compositing features or the sequencer for you RGBA png's.

Those are two blender tools that I've yet to use. They sound interesting and I'll have to experiment when I get a chance. Being new to blender I couldn't figure out how to import both models into a compositing project, so I did it in premiere. That will all change once I'm more knowledged with blender.

[somethingtohide]

@racer-x

Looks good, for the smoothing you could apply a mesh modifier in blenders modifier stack.

Did you not fancy using blenders own node compositing features or the sequencer for you RGBA png's.

@somethingtohide

Both features mentioned above I believe are NOT in every other 3D package and certainly not Max. even bigger grin. :-))))))

It could also be argued successfully that Blender has better fluids, sculpting, particles and UV unwrapping than Max out of the box. :-)))

And it's not really weird that smoothing groups are NOT applied immediately. It's the ability to choose when you want to add them as a modifier stack and at what point. :-)

I'm not trying to turn this into a blender vs Max thing because we choose our tools to suite ourselves and it's our choice but I also believe in credit where credit is due. :-)

I'm not really a Max person, way more of a C4D person. When I first started Blender had none of that stuff besides a little UV Mapping.

What were you referring to about the two things not in every other 3D app?
The transparency?

And I can't find anything else unless you were referring to the smoothing groups discussion. Both of those are in Max though. I even started working more in Max because of the transparency part of it.