Learn how to work with materials in Blender Internal, Cycles and Luxrender in this 4-part tutorial by BlenderDiplom.
Gottfried Hofmann writes:
The new BlenderDiplom author Frederik Steinmetz has created a tutorial series that covers materials in Cycles, Luxrender and Blender Internal by example. You start with a model of an Orchid Mantis and all required texture maps so you can focus on the materials and lighting in each of the renderers.
- Part 1: Overview of the model - Frederik shows you the various parts of the Mantis and explains how he solved various dificculties that can come up when modeling insects.
- Part 2: Cycles materials - Frederik creates a rather complex material in Cycles to make the Mantis look awesome!
- Intermission: Introduction to lighting in Luxrender - Frederik shows how lighting in Luxrender is different from Blender Internal and Cycles.
- Part 3: Luxrender Materials - Organic materials in Luxrender tend to be difficult, Frederik shows his solutions
- Part 4: Materials in Blender Internal - Regarding organic materials, Blender Internal still shows!
23 Comments
Doesn't it look like luxrender has the best render? I dont use luxrender, but maybe i should start using it...
The best.. If you have the time.
Well great topic here to explain simultaneously theese render engines. What is little missed for me is Yafaray as, again, there's no any decent tutorial about how to use it straightforward and it's best in rendertimes vs. quality matter.
I made a comparision of cycles gpu vs cpu.
http://cd3dtech.com/blender-cycles-gpu-vs-cpu/
thanks for the dead link sidy3d
I've been wanting to give Lux render a try because cycles is really not for me, the problem is that Lux render takes far to long and a simple animation could take weeks.
You can use OpenCL to use your GPU, and combined with network rendering, you can reach reasonable render times.
True but my GPU is old compared to my CPU, its on my to-do list ;)
My CPU is AMD Phenom 2 x4 955 Black Edition unclocked.
My GPU is 9500gt Geforce, it has poor OpenCL compared to newer models.
When first building this machine was a little low on cash so I stole the old dvd-drive and gpu from my older machine, if i get a newer card i could drop my render times dramatically ;P.
If you could recommend a newer GPU say around £80 max(I'm having a money issue at the moment) Ill be happy to upgrade soon as possible ;)
Not sure cheap and performant are compatible. Maybe the previous Nvidia GTX series might be a good quality/price ratio, like the gtx480...
Few days before Christmas i went and got a 450gts, its all I could/can afford and tis year will be a costly one for me.
I must say tested a benchmark in cycles and my new card cuts my render times in half(a little more then half),also many other programs are reporting big gains so I'm very happy.
How ever when using the hybrid render in lux render there was no gain in speed compared to the other card, not sure why this is ;(
Forget what I just said, just reinstalled lux render and newer blender build , updated graphic card to beta driver then ran my own benchmark in lux limiting the time it takes to 2 mins.
gpu vs cpu shows that the gpu image is more clear, now thinking about starting a network for it as well.
finally its time to learn lux render ;)
Very happy here thanks for advice ;).
would like to see both images side by side. on the post.
Blendernation seems to allow only one image for the header. I did not find out how to put further images into the body. But you can get images side-by-side on BlenderDiplom.com
of course no one uses luxrender for animations
search for it on the web
lux animations are rare
okay then what are good renderers for animations ?
Not really true.
First use the console for animations.
Use a good Gpu unlike my one one to get your render to say around 4 mins a frame.
Use all your old pc's as a network do not just throw them away, thats a small render network building up over the years ;).
Use photoshop,Gimp, or some other program such as after-effects (not sure if gimp could do this) and use it to remove any noise left in the image, you can do this in batchs so its not manual.
After which then use a program such as blender or quicktime-pro to put the image sequence back together.
Not that hard ;) just remember to make sure to remove the noise the a fair level in lux--render and your software of your choice will do the rest ;)
Done a few test today in Lux Render.
I done hybrid(cpu+gpu) with network(laptop+this pc) and got a image to render very clear in about 11mins, total processing power was 21.3ghz+Gpu's and more machines spare in the other rooms.That is not bad results, anyone with at least 3+ machines could do an animation nice and clear.Any thing above 1ghz is useful, heck even a ps3 with linux on it could be used(not sure what the speed is).Don't chuck of old pcs away instead just store them and create your own render-farm.What is great is that you can even send the file to a friend to render and use lux-merger to add his/her samples to your samples therefore even faster.
I'm very sorry to say this, but I watched the LuxRender part and it's crap.
The best thing is: the author even does not use SSS! On such a model, SSS would of course look very well.
The author uses the "Scatter"-Material and thinks this is SSS - sorry, no. You can use the "Scatter"-Material as a hull for the scattering medium (which you can add in the world tab), but if you don't use such an internal SSS-medium, you won't have SSS :)
Btw. here's the wiki article about SSS in Lux: http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/LuxRender_Volumes#Homogeneous
Having difficulty downloading the Blendfile from uploaded.to. Any mirrors. Blendswap maybe.
I tried Cycles, but it doesn't find my external GPUs, and uses on ly the one shared with the display on my two screens. My display card is a GTX 260, but I have two GTX 580 with 3GB of Vram each in an Cubix Xpander Pro 2 box connected on my second PCIE slot.
These 1024 Cuda cores are used by Octane at best,but Cycles doesn't use them and I havent found any panel to select the GPU. So, in my situation, Cycles in GPU mode is very slow !
Any solution ?
oooohhhoooo! :D
Thank you Frederik for these interesting and nice tutorials.I have just a note about, but I'm not an expert so I may be wrong:the mantis looks to me totally out of scale, as the 'lobes' on her legs should roughly match the petals of the orchid,so when she is in waiting pose for a prey, they seem parts of the blossom.Anyway, this doesn't reduce at all the value of your teachings.Regards,paolo
Gottried,
thank you so much for doing this, and to Frederik for sharing these wonderful tutorials! Mc
Very appreciated!!! =)