vray for blender

[holmes1977]

I suppose blender/vray will really come into its own when dealing with heavy scenes. Have you played with proxies/instancing yet, or a textured model that would normally given you a hundred bug splats?

[andybot]

I'm working on a big scene as I have time. I'm finding it's quite a bit of cleanup to export something with a lot of components.

[holmes1977]

i suppose you will start collecting high poly better models to use anyway. Oh bring on evermotion models Yummmmmmmmmm

[pugz1983]

I've scratched the surface of blender to and the possibilities are good in my opinion. The only thing i havent figured oput yet is the best format to export to Blender. I don't want to spend a lot of time organising the model hierarchy in Blender. Love some pointer on the export to blender workflow.

Greetz Twan

[andybot]

The only thing i havent figured oput yet is the best format to export to Blender. I don't want to spend a lot of time organising the model hierarchy in Blender. Love some pointer on the export to blender workflow.

Hi Twan,

I'm still trying to figure out the best methodology too. So far, the two options that have worked are using SU pro native 3ds exporter, and using TIG's object exporter

My wineglass and lamp was brought in using the 3ds export. The group and component heirarchies are kept, and the shapes came in properly as meshes. I added smoothing and subdivisions, adjusted the materials to it to the render.

The objexporter gets rid of the heirarchies and groups things by material. This is useful when there are lots of small groups and components that can make it hard to navigate the model. It's also helpful because you can easily replace material since there's one mesh per material (there may be a global way to replace, I just haven't figured it out yet.) The big issue I've run into is that duplicate vertices are exported, but that has a relatively easy fix thanks to michalis' tip

There are still more parts of the workflow I am testing as I have time, but hope this gets you in the right direction.

-Andy

[pugz1983]

Thanx for the tips Andy. I'll give it a go when I get back from work today. After looking at the trailer of the Nature Academy Tutorials I really started to get interested in Blender. Do you use Blendup to make the controls more like in SU?

Greetz Twan

[dkendig]

I'm surprised 3ds worked better than the collada format (*.dae), I thought that was supposed to be the end all be all format these days.

[andybot]

I'm surprised 3ds worked better than the collada format (*.dae), I thought that was supposed to be the end all be all format these days.

Collada just doesn't seem to be that well supported. It seems like it breaks regularly with Blender updates.

@pugs1983 - I'm fine with the blender interface as it is v2.5 and higher. It's the rotate, zoom, pan that's been "fixed" from earlier versions that makes it easy to use.