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Hi,

This is a project I did last year, well part of it. This is not the final scene. I used it to try the awesome beta add-on of Maxwell Render for Blender by Ildar. When I did this job Last year I had to render the scene in Form-Z to export the scene to Maxwell Render and render the grass in Blender and composite into the Maxwell Rendering. Not anymore! Yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This has a lot of strands in it. The add-on is very efficient this whole scene only took less than two minutes to export and used about 9 gigs of ram to render. I my core i7 920 and had a bench mark of 250 after 48 minutes of rendering to 9 SL. Those rocks are very high poly too, created in Blender as well.

ARGGG! I am officially jealous -- I want to play with hair as well... maybe it's time for me to break down and finally look at Blender.

Best,
Jason.

I have to say that Blender is an awesome app. Right now the add-on works with Blender 2.6.1. So you have download that from Blender.org. Right now Blenders current version is 2.6.2. But the Add-on is not ready for that version. In April Blender 2.6.3 will be out and will be supporting n-gons. This huge. Now no more funky triangulated meshes when the mesh does not have quad perfection.

So get Blender 2.6.1 Got to Blender Cookie.com and Blenderguru.com to get to learning Blender first. You will be a happy man. believe me!

Yeah baby!

Sooo glad we can finally use hair along with Blender.
Does it work with particles as well?

Not sure I have. I have ony tried with strand particles. I will try it out.

How many segments per hair?

Mihai,

I used 5 segments per hair. One thing I have noticed. And it is either user error or a bug. When I try to map a gradient, no matter which uv channel I use in the mxm it always maps it as if it were using uv 1. Across the hair and not along the length of the hair. I asked Ildar if it is a bug, or just not in the development yet. I have not heard from him yet. But either way this is an awesome add-on in the sate that is right now. It is so efficient. I mean this project is big. When I have all the trees, high poly rocks, grass etc. It exports to Maxwell very fast. 10x or more faster than exporting this from Form-Z. This is going to change my work flow.

Great find, the plugin makes the workflow much smoother ! Thanks for your tests Asmithey !

I can't make "traditional" particles to work with the exporter, but not sure how it should appear/work on the maxwell side.

It's possible to scatter objects or objects groups using particles, but you have to convert the dupliverts (blender instances) to meshs before export, by selecting the emitter object and doing ctrl-shift-A.

Cheers !

Victor

Hi Victor,

That is how I did the yellow flowers. I used the hair particles and the flower object, scattered them with the hair particles then converted it. It worked great.

Aaron

Here is an update in the golf clubhouse rendering using Blender and Bmaxwell. With the added foreground hair/grass, golf carts, trees and more building elements, the file exported in 70 second from Blender to Maxwell and is using 10 gigs of ram at 3600 x 2250. Ildar, the developer, says he has not developed the mapping yet for the hair. So that is why I am getting the horizontal banding from brown to green across the grass instead of along the length of the grass. But because each landscape element has 4 different particle systems, it so not so noticeable. Except for the land mass to the right of the main stair.

Aaron, although your texturing and materials seem to be detailed enough, a lot of the time your images seem a bit flat to me. I think it might be the physical sky that's causing it. Have you tried finding some hi quality HDRI's to use for lighting? You'll get a much better range of lighting and reflections. The metal roofing will definitely benefit.

I will try that. I have some crappy ones. Need to invest.

Thanks,

Aaron

Brian,

Can you recomend a HDRI package? One that would be used for exterior renderings?

Thanks,

Aaron

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Hervé wrote:The best ones... ever.. and you can DL some free...

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Wow Hervé!, didn't know that one. Really is the best one. Thanks a lot.

josé