Some rendered things I've made

Flower Pot
(39 kb, 640x480)
March 21 1999

Just realized how cool the "spin" button really is. Want to know something cool? Blender has two functions for spinning. One of them creates mesh to the space between, the other doesn't. When I used the don't-mesh-with-my-image button, I got those flowers. When I used the meshing button, I got something that looked A LOT like a cooked egg. =)

Tree
(15 kb, 640x480)
June 12, 1999

It's a tree. Can you believe that this image has 64916 vertices and 70241 faces? I can. Well, I will make a better version of this someday that uses six vertices and three faces per leaf, and doesn't try to use my usual approach that is based on extruding the shape. =)

Magical place
(10 kb, 640x480)
December 18, 1999

"Magical place" indeed. Not a really kewl picture, but it has some technical points I needed to practise.

The cool stuff in this picture: Fractal Subdivide and its magical power. The blue rock and the hills behind were made with the fractal subdivision. Also, the flame was made by taking a cone, extruding it to the flame-like shape, then fractal-subdividing it heavily and setting the damn thing to "halo" mode. Looks kewl, doesn't it? =)

The bad thing about Blender is that it isn't a raytracer. As such, the shadows the objects casts were made by placing a lamp inside the fire, and then eight OnlyShadow-enabled spotlights at the same point, pointing into every direction.

Yay! Got rid of the "black stripes on smooth edges" syndrome. All I had to do was to thwack the Y key to split the edges. =)

A bird over the lake
(21 kb, 640x480)
January 12, 2000

This was modelled in Blender 1.69 on a SGI O2 workstation - those things certainly beat the hell out of my P166 what comes to the touch of rendering.

Here, my first pic that uses fog to create atmosphere. The bird was just a random inspiration and was made in around 5 minutes, don't mind if it looks like an aeroplane or even farfetchedly like Clark Kent.

A lot of fractal subdivision was used here. Everyhting you see in this picture was made with meshes.

Tilley
(16 kb, 640x480)
April 13, 2000

Made on my P166 with Blender 1.72.

To refresh my pleasant memories from the army, I'd did this picture. This is one of the things I really miss (even if these were often a real pain in the neck): Tilley pressure lantern. I was the Company Pyromaniac. =)

This doesn't exactly look like the Real Thing, because my memories are fading and my sketch was not that great...

This thing was made completely out of mesh. (I chose 8-sided spheroid as the beginning, so it's not really that great - the real lamp doesn't have that much edges =) As an interesting detail, the black valve is named "finger burning valve" in the file - that's what it often was in RL =) Oh, and that shade is really supposed to be shiny black, not green...

Now, if only I could fix the shadows! Damn, does it really say "EnvMap" in the texture settings (didn't work, though)? That would improve the steel. (2000-06-23: Yeah, I know... was disabled for non-C-key users...)

Apple
(12 kb, 640x480)
June 23, 2000

Well, the much-awaited 1.8 release is here... and while I couldn't get environment mapping working the way I wanted it to, at least the UVEditor worked (so the Slovinia Smells ad below was finished) and the proportional editing and S-meshes worked so this picture was possible. Here: a bit bruised S-mesh apple. Cool, huh? (Made on my P166 with Blender 1.80.)

Wolf monk
(89 kb, 1280x1024)
July 24, 2002

This is my first furry picture that is done in 3D, and I think it's pretty good technique. Too bad I cheated a bit and used a robe, making myself a bit easier to model. No need to model the tail, for example. =) The whole thing is about cheating: I tried to draw it as a normal drawing, but my hand started hurting when drawing all those books. But with Blender, the modelling and duplication was trivial! Anyway, the picture was made for my E2 home node to celebrate my 1500th writeup. =) Sorry for the shadows, I just couldn't make them look right and my schedule was pretty tight.. The picture is also available in VCL. (Made on my PIII-600 with Blender 2.23. Oh, and the signature and stuff added with The GIMP, not touched the other ways...)

Sword
(10 kb, 600x480)
January 12, 2003

A random exercise in creating a sword... a very quickly-done model that looks decent enough. One odd thing (also seen in the tree image above) is that even when the blade does touch the surface, it doesn't cast shadows properly. So it doesn't actually "float!" (Blender 2.23)

Tubular Tabular Bells 2003
(352.7 kb, 1280x1024)
March 31, 2004

This one was mostly inspired by the fact that over the recent days, I've listened through Tubular Bells 2003 about a million times. Also of inspiration were tubular.net's cool background pictures (particularly the Matrix version "What is the Bell?") I had done the bell before, but it didn't look close enough to the real thing - this one is pretty close in my opinion.

Another reason, which I recently noted, was that Blender now has a raytracer, which clearly beats the shit out of environment mapping (at very least, Blender no longer completely sucks at doing shadows!). So there's at least some possibility for proper reflections. This pic is unmodified out of Blender, and it doesn't do reflections perfectly (what is that gray mush?), but well enough. And it's an interesting effect anyway.

As for the joke, I always wanted to do a series of these things along the lines of "Globular Bells", "Specular Bells", "Spherical Bells", or whatever - not "Dilapidated Bells", though. The "tabular" part of the picture is repeated on all sides of the room and is reflected off the bell. The numbers actually are part of the vertex matrix of the bell mesh itself - exported in Videoscape format, junked everything but the vertex matrix, read to Octave as raw data, saved to file, fed to Enscript, opened to GIMP, merged a bit, saved to .png, and opened as a texture to Blender. (actually, they're from the old version of the bell object. I had to tweak the bell a bit after I produced the background).

The CDDA logo was swiped off the net, vectorized with potrace, and added to the picture along with the other texts. The font on the title is a rather famous one. The inclusion of the CDDA logo, and the "courtesy of cdrdao" bit, was due to the fact that the original album was not in bona-fide CDDA format and it took me a while how to rip it and burn it in real CDDA format. cdrdao helped with that. =) (Hint: --session 1. That's all.)

(Made on my PIII-600 with Blender 2.32, potrace 1.3, Sodipodi 0.33, Octave 2.0.17, Enscript 1.6.3, and GIMP 2.0pre3 (1.3.26).)

The Sacred Chao
(65 kb, 1024x768)
October 23, 2000

Okay, now I try combining several programs... because there aren't any good terrain generators for Blender (yet!), I needed to boot up Windows and try terrain generation with Terragen. Then, I made the Chao with Blender (less cleverly recycling the apple from previous work =), and added texts with GIMP.

The lighting may or may not suck. Also, since the free version of Terragen doesn't have anti-aliasing, I needed to muck with the picture a bit...

(Made on my PIII-600 with Terragen 0.8.11, Blender 1.80, and GIMP 1.1.27.)

Coffee cup
(7 kb, 320x256)
January 19 1999

From the manual.

Wolf
(3 kb, 320x256)
Unfinished

Wolf's head. Doesn't look like the real thing yet, though... Don't look at it if you don't know what we wolves look like, you might get a bad impression. =)

Well, I'm going to make it to look just like myself...

Tank
(15 kb, 640x480)
August 13, 2000

Woohoo! First pic made with my new PIII-600. And it had to be a simple piece of junk like this... =( Anyway, for purpose of learning OpenGL coding, I made this simple tank. I will then export it in Videoscape format. Let's see if I'll someday manage to make a loader for that format (The format seems simple enough for even me to understand...) (Made on my PIII-600 with Blender 1.80.)

Radiosity test
(19 kb, 640x480)
September 4, 2002

All right, I now almost understand how this radiosity thing is supposed to work. I'd still prefer the plain ol' raytracing, this stuff is very complicated... (Blender 2.23)

UVMap test
(44 kb, 640x480)
January 23, 2003

Stupid, stupid and unsuccessful test of face UV mapping! (The texture is a face template from WorldForge project.) Quads get split really oddly in Blender, it seems. Got to concentrate on triangles... (Blender 2.23)

Toy car
(169 kb, 320x256)
February 18, 1999

Just a simple car model... I think that it's a bit too shiny. I must make a more detailed model car someday when I have more time...

Material Index test
(71 kb, 320x256)
March 20 1999

I did this to understand the Material Indices better. Material Indices are most definitely our friends. =)

Lattice Deform test
(24 kb, 320x256)
December 19 1999

Nightwork, so not too fancy. Just shows my first successful lattice deformation experiment...

Stupid zoom blur
(1.5 Mb, 352x288)
Nov 14 2002

Stupid zoom blur trick, quickly thrown together in Blender... don't take it seriously, just exploring the possibilities of doing stuff like this in Blender. If only I had some kewl composition/special effects package... but hey, here's one. =)

Made with Blender 2.12 on my PIII-600MHz. The picture made in The GIMP.

Blender → Blender
(19 kb, 640x480)
May 14, 2002

So, do these conversion scripts work? Here is the example scene rendered in Blender (JPEG compression, but what the heck). Actually, this scene also shows one of the things that bug me about Blender: When smoothing meshes, there's sometimes "edges" visible (look at the cone and the Teapot™) and finding the cure for them is sometimes pretty hard. The shadows are turned off.

(Blender 2.23)

Blender → PoV-Ray
(46 kb, 640x480)
May 14, 2002

I tried using the scripts provided for Blender conversions. The use is fairly simple, but I noticed one thing: textures won't be transferred. =( Also, this PoV vision is somewhat squashed?

(Blender 2.23, PoV-Ray 3.0.20)

Blender → Renderman (Aqsis)
(16 kb, 300x300)
May 14, 2002

Aqsis may or may not be a nice renderer right now... (Did Auto-Stretch Contrast in GIMP! Sorry, got to render this again with better luck...)

(Blender 2.23, Aqsis 0.6.0002)

Blender → Renderman (BMRT)
(49 kb, 640x480)
May 14, 2002

...but it seems that the real reason why it didn't work was that the export script didn't have clue about spotlight intensity values. When I ramped up the intensity, BMRT did its best!

(Blender 2.23, BMRT 2.6)

Blender → Renderman (Aqsis)
(40 kb, 640x480)
May 14, 2002

Okay, this time I upgraded Aqsis, used the same modified .rib I used in BMRT example... but got no shadows???

(Blender 2.23, Aqsis 0.6.3)

Wolf Monk: almost unaltered
(25 kb, 800x600)
November 15, 2002

BMRT totally choked on the picture, so here's the thing rendered on 3Delight (BlenderMan doesn't support Aqsis, they say it's too slow and buggy at the moment)... Here's the scene rendered almost unaltered. The only thing I did was to remove stuff that was on the invisible planes (invisible planes are not detected by the script). The problem? Spotlights don't work as expected (in retrospect, maybe because the script noted they were "shadow only"). I used Gain 3 and Light 2 multipliers, and it's still too dark. But this has its sides: the picture really reminds me of a blackout. "Damn the power company. It'll take a loong time before I find the damn shelf..."

(Blender 2.23; BlenderMan 0.1beta7.3; 3Delight 0.9.3)

Wolf Monk: lighting fixed...
(32 kb, 800x600)
November 15, 2002

Then, I removed the 6 spotlights (Used those to simulate shadows/raytracing in Blender, a common kluge...) and used two "sun" light sources. Too bad they're too bright (changing them to normal lights didn't help at all), but at least I didn't need to mess with the gain/light multipliers. Please, don't say anything about "gray-muzzle plastic-cloak"... =) And no shadows! Look mom, I'm LEVITATING! =)

(Blender 2.23; BlenderMan 0.1beta7.3; 3Delight 0.9.3)

Sword
(34 kb, 600x480)
January 12, 2003

This is the sword picture rendered in 3Delight. Now, I split the handle to a separate mesh and actually changed the surface shaders to more friendly values. Still no shadows, and the metal is... dark!

(Blender 2.23; BlenderMan 0.1beta7.3; 3Delight 0.9.3)

Wolf Monk: claymation
(21 kb, 640x480)
January 19, 2003

First picture I could produce with yafray... not really that impressive, huh? =) This thing doesn't seem to get this "material" thing that well yet.

(Blender 2.23; yafray and yable 0.0.3)