Blender

Animation cluster for rendering

Add randomness to objects in blender

Interesting water reflection

Particle emitters and motion path display

Just came across this link in reference to using freestyle and blender together and I was trying to check out what other options were available - some rather interesting architectural effects have been generated using this piece of software - check out the gallery section of the link

Advance scripting techniques using python in Blender. A site that has been around for some time though the content material is still a viable resource to have as there are some interesting concepts that are being explored at the site.

Render layers in Blender can be a bit confusing to new people as their behavior is not related to other applications such as photoshop . Render layers are used a lot in compositing and can be used in conjunction with other techniques to reduce the computational time in rendering a complex final image.

The key to the understanding the render layer lies in two menus those being the layers menu and the render layer see below.

Creating more visual realistic images in blender is something that I’m slowly getting to grips with, more a case of trail by error at the moment but here's a demo of what I have been trying to get down with some stock images of rust.

At good piece of advice is to apply a high pass filter to the bump map.The image basically consists of a material that has a color. bump and spec reflection map, These 3 are all defined in the texture menu all at once. The only setting is that the color map setting are defualt, bump map Nor was selected (with the NOR and Disp values set to maximum the DISP may not effect the final render), the other setting is the REF or the SPEC make sure that the ref and spec values in the material setting (in the parent top menu are given )

I’m going to start playing around with the CVS version of blender - someone that’s going to be peering in the obyss of how the latest release is shaping up, so coming in the next few days are going to be demonstraintion and experiments to all the new features that are appearing in the release. Yeh right will I get around to it, just going to have to wait and see !!!

Must look at the this when i can !!!!!