I keep saying I’m done with playing around with Blender but this will be my last set, at least for a while. I did the above scene for example because I’d always wanted to make a nice bathroom scene but this doesn’t really break any new ground for me and didn’t involve too much work at all. There’s still plenty of things for me to learn and Blender is moving very fast forward but it’s getting to be too much work for me to try to keep up. Plus I have other stuff I want to work on next.
Blender 2.82 dropped late while I was working on this latest batch of scenes, too late for me to update and learn it so all this was done in 2.81. That was a bit of a pity as well as one of the new key features is that it incorporates a completely new fluid simulation system called Mantaflow. I could have used for the fire in this first scene, but oh well.
Partway while working through this batch of renders, Blender 2.81 actually dropped but the most important improvements are in sculpting which I don’t really do anyway. I spent a lot of time over the past couple of months working on this one scene, rendered in Eevee here. Nothing really new here in terms of technique but it stands out simply because of the sheer amount of detail present and that involved modelling each and every one of the small objects present in the scene. I think it represents my best work so far but it really did take a long time to do.
I’m taking a little easier for this month’s set of Blender project as I make the full transition to version 2.8. This is actually quite a chore as so much has changed. I regularly have to Google for how to do common tasks that I’m already very familiar with in 2.79, such as how to add reference images, or check normals or set the origin point of meshes etc. It’s especially annoying when I’m checking out YouTube tutorials and the old ones refer to settings that have now changed places. I’ll get it eventually but it takes time and practice.
Obviously the big news in the Blender universe is that version 2.8 is now out of beta and they’re now evaluating a succession of release candidates. I told myself I would wait until it’s been officially released before switching to it as there is a lot of new stuff to learn and it’s going to take a while. However I did hear that it renders much faster and more importantly can seamlessly switch between GPU and CPU rendering modes as needed. This means no more crashes when running out of GPU memory.
I worked a long time on this scene, even accounting for the fact that it reuses the potted plant I’d previously posted. There’s just so much stuff in it, the detailing on the walls for example, plus modelling the chandeliers, working out ways to make the curtains look not horrible. And even after all that time spent, it’s still far, far from perfect. You can view a larger, uncompressed version of the image by clicking this.
Some less ambitious renders this month, as the previous batch were far too time consuming. Unfortunately they turned out to be even more basic than I’d imagined. The above for example would only really work if I did a lot of compositing work on it and I still don’t really understand it yet. It also needs more light sources for the water reflections to look good. Oh well. I’ll try to put in more effort on the next batch.
