I am now almost a month into the Blenderguru Nature Academy course. Before I started the course I had never rendered anything in Blender. Well maybe I did back in version 2.3, but the results were so unsatisfying that I didn't try again. I just used Blender as a mesh modeller. Well, due to my increasing frustration with Bryce, and the news that DAZ is not doing any further development on Bryce in the foreseeable future, I enrolled for this Blender course, and I have been working really hard at it. I have since found out many things about Blender 2.6x that I, as a Poser user, didn't know.

Blender's internal renderer is much faster than Bryce or Poser, and produces amazing results (I haven't even tried using Cycles yet).

Blender has lots of features that make it very suitable for nature scenes and realistic renders: It has a landscape generator, a tree generator, an ivy generator and a cloud generator for volumetric clouds. I still have to learn about the ocean simulator, but I am sure it is awesome. All these things are standard with Blender. The city generator is an add-on, with a very capable free version.

Blender's particle system works much better than Bryce's instancing lab, and is much more stable. You also have more control.

Texture painting directly on the mesh...cool! The compositor and node-based materials are amazing too.

Sculpting in Blender is really easy and works well.

Blender has a lot of the things that Poser users have been getting excited about, like ambient occlusion, image-based lighting, indirect lighting and subsurface scattering.

I don't know how to rig and pose in Blender yet, but it also has the weight-mapping that has the Poser users so excited.

Oh yes, and it is free.

I am posting all my course projects in my gallery.

OMG...I am SOOO jealous...lol.

Glad you're having fun. It LOOKS fun ;). I love all Andrew Price's tutes :)

Laurie

riggify makes rigging a humaniod just a matter of clicks, all the bones are already IK'ed etc just scale an tweak a bit, then the automatic weight painting is fairly good so unless you need perfection its done  (its prob in your addons but not turned on)

or theres blenrig that looks awesome (keep meaning to have a play with that)

if you like landscapes try the boids particles to make a flock of birds, I lost a full day just making boids fight rofl, or use the hair particles to make grass

and get yourself into cycles its awesome and if you have the right graphics card its really fast but it dont at the mo' work with particles

so much to learn so little time

"so much to learn so little time"

That's it in a nutshell, isn't Hedd? There's just so many hours in the day, and then all those peripheral people - they call themselves "family" :blink: - keep coming into the room and taking a pulse and wanting dinner and other nonsense of that sort.

Sheesh. Don't they realise all this is important?? :glare:

I understand exactly what you mean when describing Blender. I too have been learning how to operate the program and have to say that in many ways it even beats Carrara7pro (which is one of the programs I have been using in the past) eventually I think I will be cleaning my hard-drive and desktop to turn it solely for the use of blender and any other externaly attached program such as Makehuman and (hopefully one day) Sculptris if a script is ever developed for it. Anouther great part of Blender is the number of books available for the product of which I have an ever growing collection (even more than my mothers Mills&Boon "LOL").

hi benny long time no see, u well m8?

not sure I'd bother with blender books!! they will be out of date before the ink dries ;-)

I'm fine thanks my friend.. Hope things are OK are your end.

Still trying to get things right as as usuall LOL. Very true about the books but I find that if they are out of date (and I have a few) I can still apply the methods with just a little searching to find what is the new alternative and that actually helps things to sink in a lot deeper (one of the issues with being slightly thick LOL).

Quote - "so much to learn so little time"

That's it in a nutshell, isn't Hedd? There's just so many hours in the day, and then all those peripheral people - they call themselves "family" :blink: - keep coming into the room and taking a pulse and wanting dinner and other nonsense of that sort.

Sheesh. Don't they realise all this is important?? :glare:

LMAO...I've been trying to do the same thing for the last 8 days

They just don't get it ;).

Laurie

benney there is no need for a script for sculptris in blender

blenders sculpting engine is based on the sculptris format

rigify is in user preferences---add ons and by default is turned off

also in the object menue there are the quick effects like explode, smoke, liquify, and fur that make it a blast to play with when youre bored

also for some video tuts there is always www.cgcookie.com

Robyn, how well you put it! So much to learn indeed. I seem to be watching some tutorial or other most of the time. Television, what's that?

However, I have to say this...Sometimes I wish that the guy doing the tutorial would first figure out how to do whatever he wants to teach. If you are still fumbling around and exploring the program, and not sure what all the options do, you are not ready to make a video tutorial! It doesn't promote learning for me to watch someone making mistakes and going ummm and aahhh.

That is why I really appreciate sites like cgcookie and blenderguru, where you know you are going to learn something by watching the tuts. Ebooks and pdf tuts are the best, because you can easily skip the parts you already know and focus on the specific bits that you need to learn.

blender basics 4th editionis a great place to start for those using 2.5 and later and can be found here

http://www.cdschools.org/54223045235521/blank/browse.asp?A=383&BMDRN=2000&BCOB=0&C=55205

they also have a 3rd edition for older versions and both are .pdf

I'm doing ok benny had my bypass now so its all looking up, might be a while before I take up parkour tho' lol. Having seen your work I dont think thick is the right word ;-) but I agree about scupltris being easier to use (but I cant scuplt very well so dont matter to me so much)

@ unbroken wow not seen the quick effects good place to start even if you want to get fancy and Antonia said thanks for the yeti suit but its a bad hair day so no one will ever see her init ;-)

right I'm off to liquify something

Quote - benney there is no need for a script for sculptris in blender

blenders sculpting engine is based on the sculptris format

Hmmm? I must check that one out. Gotta get my hands dirty

Unbroken-fighter, thank you so much for the link to the Blender Basics book. It is really easy to follow and just what I needed.

And it keeps getting better....check out "Digital Makeup" at this site:

http://mango.blender.org/development/digital-makeup/

That just boggles my mind....

Hey gang..just popping in here to comment on Blender myself..I had NO idea blender could do sooooo much...

Found this little video animation..everything was done with Blender 2.5

Cute, and amazing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9fEbiG2q38&list=UUACrCnzOuKksKUYXwtA8bOA&index=30&feature=plcp

Now Im going to have even less time than I did before in my day...:biggrin: