I’ve been working on a Blender project (since yesterday) called “Dancing Tacos.” Here is my result so far:

Jalapaño pepper from Dancing Tacos (work in progress)
It started out as a simple rig exercise, but as I worked on it I modeled it into a hot pepper (a jalapeño, probably.)
The rig consists of two bones in one armature, linked to the mesh with the Armature modifier. I am using envelope to influence the mesh’s deformation. The first model I rigged was quite objectionable and ugly.

The ugly vegitable. Jagged shadows and ineffective texture
But before I went on I decided to change this object into it’s true calling: a hot pepper! 😀

The jalapeño model. The blocky shadow is still apparent.
But as you can see, I had a problem: the texture made it look as though it were some green jewel, and besides that the shadows were extremely blocky and jagged.
So I sent some renders and a .blend to a friend of mine, Tim Formica who kindly fixed the pepper’s texture and the scene’s lighting, and sent me back the file. When I rendered his result it was like “Wow, this is weird… it’s cool, new, and weird to have my Blender work modified and enhanced by someone else.”

Tim Formica's result
Then I reverse engineered what he did, which was fun. 😉
Tim added subsurface scattering, fixed the lighting, added a plane, added the red to the tip of the pepper stem, and deleted the background colors. Thank you Tim for all your help!
From there I added the mexican background, the mist effect in the World Buttons, and ultimately came up with the result I showed at the start of this post. Here is what it looked like when it was rendering:

Rendering the jalapeño pepper for Dancing Tacos
I will probably tweak the pepper some more before I’m satisfied with it, particularly the red in it.
Anyhow, I hope the quick concept turns into a final animation, featuring bouncing vegitables and a mock taco ad. 🙂
God bless and Happ New Year 2009!!!
-b
P.S. Gotta hit the hay, but I will be rendering a little animation overnight…
P.P.S. JaNoWriMo starts … today. Well, in about 10+ hours for me… 😀 (JaNoWriMo is similar to NaNoWriMo, but some friends and I are doing it in January.)
Is Blender as good as 3DS Max for professional 3D renderings?
October 27, 2008I received this very good question in one of the comments:
And my answer:
Mike,
Your question is a very good one, but I am really not the person to ask. However, I will try to give you a good answer nonetheless.
As you well know, the quality of the final render lies heavily upon the work done in the modeling/animation application prior to the rendering. The detail of textures, proper placement of lamps, and correct shading and maps all play into getting the stunning result we all want.
Blender’s internal renderer may (or may not) render as high quality results as 3DS Max – I do not have experience with 3DS Max – but Blender’s internal renderer results are definitely satisfactory for general usage.
With the use of an external renderer such as Yaf(a)Ray or Indigo you can achieve higher realism in your photo-realistic renders, and with a program such as Freestyle (coding for the integration with Blender is still in progress as far as I know,) you can create artistic stroke renderings as well. I have also heard of another photo-realistic renderer called Pixie.
Now onto your question directly:
Is Blender as good as 3DS Max for professional 3D renderings? I don’t know, but I would say a big “yes.”
Give Blender a try, learn online with all the great tutorials out there, and you will soon see that Blender is a very capable program. I highly recommend it!
To find out more of what Blender can do, see the features page (and also see the new features for the 2.48a release,) and check out the image gallery (I do not like some of the images here for various reasons, but I hope you will be OK with them.)
If you have any more questions, feel free to ask! I am welcome to answering your questions.
God bless and best wishes!
-b
P.S. All of the above programs that I have listed are open source.
Posted in 3D, blender, Open Source, Professional, real-life | Tagged 3D Max, 3DS Max, Autodesk, blender, comment, Indigo, Lazy Animation, Mike, photorealistic, Pixie, Professional, question, rendeirng, render, Yaf(a)Ray, YafRay | 2 Comments »