Playing with Blender Cycles render engine

So, I've played with Blender in the past, but having installed Ubuntu 12.10 and with Blender Cycles render around, I solved to give it a try again and see what could be done.

First the 12.10 repository doesn't have a Blender version with Cycles render, so you will have to manually install it from Blender website, fairly easy if you as me.

Installing CUDA to have GPU acceleration is quite a different matter, I leave that for other time, as Nvidia only supports/provides a version for 11.x Ubuntu...

After installing CUDA I found out that I wasn't entitled to GPU acceleration, my card is too old for that, following this thread you might get the idea:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?238557-Blender-Cycles-GPU-Rendering-Shader-Model-gt-1-3-Required

But that doesn't prevent me from using Cycles, it is just a pain to render, but, the normal Blender Render engine is quite the same.

I started with a simple scene and quickly went to nodes to see what could be done...

... Looks nice doesn't it?

Aside from modeling some stuff, I tried more render features, textures and more stuff with nodes in a simple scene, It all went well till I added some extra stuff to the scene ... and then:

Those white dithering specks are due to the emission planes that are lighting the scene.... I have no idea how to prevent them, removing caustics had no effect :/

Maybe all that white in the background has something to do with it... but the artifact is there when it shouldn't, I noticed that the more sample rays I add the more likely it is to happen in the given scene (though they start to fill up as circles/blobs).

I could set more sample rays to reduce the dithering effect, but with 20 mins of rendering time that would be quite a longer wait.

Well, not that bad, but quite annoying... quite a pleasant surprise that I still knew my way around Blender.

I leave with a model of an Yordle (from League of Legends lore), no textures I'm afraid, I didn't have the time for that:

It is rigged with a simple skeleton, enough to make small animations :]

Playing with blender (UPDATE v2)

I've always looked at blender as a complex and hard to use tool, at least when compared with Art Of Illusion, however it is a very powerful and complete tool and since my trouble with using it is the lack of experience, I solve to give it a try and create a 3D model of one of my favorite cars, the VW Polo.

After 2 hours fighting with the keyboard shortcuts, cameras and lights, I managed to get a very nice model of the VW Polo overall shape done, I rendered it, and it looked quite nice... The metal of the car body was complete.

I saved and then quit, thinking in continue it later.

A few minutes later I though in render it and show it on the blog, so, I run blender, load recent file "VWPolo.blend", and.... only the first save was kept, so ... only the front of the car!
I tried the recover thing blend has... without success, I searched the entire hardrive for blender files ... nothing... It vanished.

This is what survived ... FML

I obviously give up of doing it on blender... or on anywhere else (this was actually the second attempt of doing the Polo, the first was on AoI... it crashed when I saved)... most likely my luck will strike again and delete it no mater what...

UPDATE:

After struggling into understanding what happened, I found out that after the first save, blender asks for file overwrite when saving... the way it does is by showing a dropdown menu... if you move the mouse out of the dropdown menu it disapears and file is not saved D:

Well, as a bonus I did a low poly version of the 3d model I attempted earlier:

Around 1000 triangles and a 512x512 UV mapped texture

This is my first attempt with textures on blender... pretty easy... but a labyrinth of menus is what it takes to do it.

Texture itself was mostly a side view photo and brushes on GIMP, not exactly the most refined one, but it serves as a nice test.

Perhaps I try M3G export and start doing JSR 184 enabled apps ...

UPDATE 2:

And I did...

Running on emulator

On my Nokia 5800 XpressMusic runs at 14~16 fps (if I run with fullscreen, without J2ME Commands, it will probably be less) .... hmmm ... maybe I should do some little game. Probably I won't...

Blender...

Ah... o blender ... aquele programa de modelação 3d que 'ninguem' consegue usar devido a uma interface intragavel... bem... eu nao o consigo usar mas isso nao evitou que perdesse uma hora a tentar fazer algo ... lol... bem o resultado fica aqui exposto para todos os que quiserem ver... eu puz texturas ... mas nao faço a mais palida ideia de como as renderizar correctamente...

"fear the mad kitty" XD