Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> > Now that you got a new pc, you should try out the latest blender builds with
> > cycles enabled and play with it a bit (like downloading some ready scenes,
> > choosing the cycles engine and hitting F12).  It's the new, unbiased
> > render-engine and is quite fast.
>
> Huh. I didn't even know Blender had a rendering engine... I thought it
> was just a modeller?

It's a complete graphical studio, it also got animation and rigging tools,
sculpting and painting, a video editor, physics, fluid and particle simulators
etc.

So yeah, for many years it featured the so called "Blender Internal" renderer,
which was a mixture of scanline and raytracing.  It also got a radiosity engine,
but it was to much trouble to get things quite working fine, both for artists
and coders, so they've opted now for a streamlined renderer coded from the
grounds up, that is unbiased and physics-based.

>
> > If your gpu is a new nvidia, it can run on it,
> > if not, just cpu.  But it's rather fast even on my humble dual-core at work, so
> > should do just fine on yours.
>
> nVidia GeForce 260 GTX. Is that new enough?

I meant that it's CUDA-based.  Should work.

You can find blender builds with Cycles here:

http://graphicall.org/?keywords=cycles

Here's a nice test scene:

http://www.blendernation.com/2011/10/21/bedroom-blend-file-ready-to-be-used-for-cycles/


> Bitmap textures have the advantage that if you want wood, you can just
> point a camera at a physical plank of wood, and you're done. It has the
> obvious disadvantage that it takes up gigabytes of storage, and looks
> blurry as hell.

Oh, certainly a gigabyte-worth bitmap wouldn't look blurry, unless looking at it
through the microscope.


>
> POV-Ray has some really damned nice wood and stone textures. (I mean,
> unless you're enough of a dendrologist or geologist to realise it's
> scientifically inaccurate.) With the right noise generators and spatial
> transformations, you ought to be able to make something really nice.
> It's probably not even all that expensive either.

No povray wood is good enough on close-ups, it simply lacks the grain.  Even
with noise or combining with other texture...

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