Archive for June, 2006
Lego modeling in Blender & rendering with Yafray
As a break from real cars projects, I tried a few weeks ago to model some Lego assemblies. Here are some of the pictures I produced :
These pictures show the progress from page 1 to 11 of the book for the model #8448. I found scan for this model on a wonderful site about this topic : http://www.hccamsterdam.nl/brickfactory/theme/index.htm (see in Technic #3)
Here is the topic I opened on SMCars.net to show model avancement.
I will post a short Howto to explain the way I did it, if anyone is interested.
Thanks to Blender autosave
I just experienced the need for an autosave in Blender (yes I didn’t save after almost 2 plenty hours of work, too dumb I am…).
And thanks to the team behind it, there is already one !
When looking in my ~/.blender directory, I find several .blend files, with names like 34521 or 6318. I assume these numbers are PID for the several Blender processes which have runned on my station. These are usual .blend files, which can be opened with Blender. Looking as the most recent one, I found almost last state of my work (well, about 5 minutes before the X server crashed making me kill it from another host)
This is default behaviour for Blender, so make sure to check in ~/.blender (for Linux hosts, I don’t know for other OSes) when you need it.
Tutorial : realistic clay render with Yafray and Blender
This short tutorial is intented to explain you how to produce a realistic and useful clay render in Yafray (after having used Blender to produce a car model) For me, useful means this render will help you to find about your mesh bumps. Realistic means, your render looks like real, physical clay sculpture :
Foreword
When I was a newcomer in CG cars world, I’v oftenly seen a word I didn’t understand (as a non-native English reader) : clay, as in “please show us a clay render”.
Asking my favorite dictonnary, I understood that clay render refers to the clay designers use to produce physical mock-up of a concept car. It’s easy for any one to draw some curves on a paper sheet or in 3D/CAD software, but to fully define the shape it’s easier for them to work with a physical medium (e.g : curves intersections or transitionnal shapes). That is, the clay.