This is why I love Blender.

Enable VBO: VBO is a way to speed up the viewport performance by caching geometry data on the graphic card so that they can be drawn faster than relying on the CPU to send the data every frame.  On scenes with large polycount, VBO can easily quadruple the viewport frame rate. I believe the only reason why it’s off by default is for compatibility with really old Intel graphics card.  All modern Radeon and Geforce graphics should support VBO.  VBO can be turned on from the Preference Panel.

Disable double-sided object: On some graphic cards (older generations circa 2006 or earlier, and the latest Nvidia Fermi),doubled sided lighting makes the video card work a lot harder than normal.  So, to speed up display of high polygon object, disable doubled sided in the object panel should help a bit.  This will make the ‘back’ side of a polygon black, which might not be acceptable in certain cases.  But it makes hunting for reversed-normals even easier.

Enable Only Render: Eventually a scene gets cluttered up with all the lamps, empties, constraints and various other ‘helper’ lines that distracts you from the final look of the image.  Turning on Only Render from the view property panel will hide all the non-renderable objects.  Not only can this give you a clean look at the scene, but also speeds up the viewport performance by quite a bit.

Go 64bit: Almost all the computers out today is 64bit capable.  Running a 64bit of Blender will automagically give you a 20-30% speed boost over the same 32bit binary.   x64 also enables Blender to use more than 2GB of RAM without crashing, which is kinda mandatory for complex scenes.

Use Multi-core CPU: First there is hyper-threading, then dual core, then quad core, and now we have eight-core CPUs WITH hyperthreading.  Luckily, Blender’s main rendering engine is very good at taking advantage of multiple cores.  It will scale up to as many cores as you can buy for rendering.

Special effects calculation like particles, fluid, and smoke is partially multi-threaded, but admittedly they don’t work as well. Having a dual-core helps, but don’t expect astronomical performance on an eight-core CPU.

Operating Systems: The never-ending debate is really not an issue at all. From my personal experience, Windows, Mac and Linux are equally fast when it comes to running Blender.

Optimized Builds: Optimized builds are Blender versions compiled with more agressive optimization for a particular CPU, generally they are 10-20% faster than the official Blender. My experience with them is very positive, they have proven to be as stable as the official release. Graphicall.org hosts many of these builds.

Texture Limit:  When working with large textures in complex sets, setting the texture limit to 256 or 512 can also help view-port performance as it scales every texture down from say 4096 to the chosen limit. This setting can be found in the Preference Window. (Suggested by Daniel via comment)

Took about 1 month of preparation, 1 month of modelling and animation in Blender, and 1 month of lighting set up and compositing work to get to where we are today.

Chances are, you’ve never heard of Gamekit.

Despite a simple website, and a whole bunch of confused users who want to try gamekit but don’t know how, gamekit is pretty darn functional already. Within half an hour, you can make a simple 3D game that compiles and runs on an iPhone. It also supports shaders, physics, animation and lua scripting. If you a looking to replace the Blender game engine with something lighter, faster and more modern, take a look at this game engine.

Sure the documentation is a little sparse, but as more artists start using this engine, hopefully we’ll see more literature on the topic.

My best imitation of Zack Snyder’s work is apparently too dark for the final cut, and so it didn’t make it into the video.

Created and rendered with Blender 2.5, 6 million faces, rendered in 2 minutes on an Octocore.

The new Cycles rendering engine in Blender really made it easy to create hyper-realistic looking images with so little effort. This model was prepared for Cycles rendering in less than an hour. The rendering took less than 5 minutes per frame on a GTX580 GPU.

This almost interactive method of rendering already allows the artist to work much faster than before, since they no longer have to wait for the entire image to render to see the result.  Even better, Cycles can take full advantage of Nvidia’s CUDA GPU acceleration.  This means that lucky owners of top-of-the-line graphic cards can now enjoy a non-stop 16 hour work day.  No more rendering-breaks!

All of the image in this post is rendered on a Geforce GTX 570 video card at 1920×1200.  Rendering time never exceeded 5 minutes for each frame, which is phenomenal considering the quality.

The source Blender file of the car model is available for download here. You’ll need a Cycles-enabled build of Blender to render it.

Some one told me that this car will be shown at FMX Germany in the next few days. So check it out if you are near by.

Above is a rendering of my ubiquitous BMW.  The total rendering time to get to this quality is less than 40 seconds. (Compare to over 3 minutes using the old Blender renderer) Even more impressive, is that the rendering takes place in the 3d viewport directly, in a progressive fashion.  So one can edit the scene while the rendering refines itself.

No more F12, rendering just went realtime Yo.

And here is a snapshot of what I’ve been working on this year. Straight out of Blender, the only touch-up I did was a minor color correction.

What bothers me is not how bad the first one looks, but the fact that I didn’t realize how bad it was at the time. Well, I am also a bit troubled by the fact that there is less fish in the ocean. But not nearly as embarrassed about it as the huge gap in quality.

The other artist behind both of these production is Dalai Felinto. So I can’t take all the blame credit.