Blender 2.70 is AWESOME!

Even though Blender 2.70 is not officially released yet, I got to try out a test build.

The freestyle component in the later versions of Blender had major problems handling mesh data that exceeded 30 or so thousand polys (my characters are around 2 million +).  Needless to say it never rendered the characters fully and crashed the program.

With the latest build though I heard that freestyle had its code reworked, and now it works like a charm!  Still takes a long time to render.  But the results are worth it!

Just in case your not familiar with freestyle, to put it simply it draws lines around the character silhouette and other areas that may be defined by the user.  It's pretty much essential to get that traditional anime look on your rendered models.

This is an older version of the Heroin that I'm still trying to find the time to finish.  Some of the gear has been changed around a bit.  The purpose of  this scene and setup was just a quick test I did to check proportions and see how well the character moved with the equipment I made pretty much entirely from imagination.  And how it would look in a setting.  Some of the parts are messed up, most notably on the inner thigh where the under-armor clips though the leg.

I could have done one with the more recent modification but I just wanted to benchmark the new freestyle code myself.  And I have to say I'm impressed!  


EDIT:Some minor grammatical corrections.       

New Dev Comp

Last week I dropped a few coinz on a new desktop.  Last one I had wasn't bad but felt like just going a bit higher.  The 8 core AMD Is really a step up from the i5 and I have more ram to work with.  Also got one of the new nividia card models based on the new Maxwell architecture, it's a slight improvement over the Radeon I had in the other system.

Been doing tutorials in Unity again and working on enemies in Blender.  I also have to spend some time working on "ground" and props.  I'll probably spend some time learning more about the compositor in Blender this week if all goes well and I don't get swamped with chores.


New Dev Comp specs if anyone is interested in techno garble.

Vid card    -   Gigabyte GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2 GB
Processor -   AMD FX Vishera 4.00GHz
Ram         -   G. Skill RipJaws X series 16GB
Case        -    Corsair Carbide Series 500R Black Steel structure
Mother     -    GIGABYTE GA-970A-D3P AM3+/AM3 AMD 970 SATA 6Gb/s
HD          -     Western Digital WD10EZEX 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache
CD          -     ASUS 24X DVD Burner - Bulk 24X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW 12X
PWR       -     Corsair 750W (Ripped it out of the other comp)
OS          -     Win 7

Just Wanted to share

Just finished the animation for the skeleton falling and getting up.  It's my first animation that moves a character to this extent.  It's 200 frames long (or 199 if you don't count the double start frame).

The start is kind of sluggish on the gif, but it doesn't really matter since the final animation speed will be set in Unity.