Michael Fox’s series of Blender 2.5 walk through is definitely one of the most valuable video tutorials I’ve seen in a long time. He made a total of more than 10 hours of video, explaining each features of Blender 2.5 in awesome detail. Seriously, go check it out, you’ll learn so much in so little time.
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I had been lucky enough to be a part of a very cool project taking place at the Fisheries Centre at the University of British Columbia. In a nut shell, we are trying to create a 3D underwater visualization using the Blender Game Engine to display scientific data in a more pleasing way. Basically translating a stream of mind-numbing data:
into something prettier:
The visualization data is coming from EwE6, a well-respected ecosystem modeling software. Blender uses inputs such as biomass, water turbidity and light level to create a realtime visualization that allows the user to ‘swim’ around in the ocean, watch the schools of fish interact, and see their population change over time.
To accomplish all this, the project consists of 3 layers:
The server core does all the heavy computation while the visualization layer does all the graphics, AI, as well as user interaction. To facilitate the communication across these two separate processes, a third layer (called the GameClient) is created, providing the bridge.
Being a Blender artist, my main focus is on the visualization layer: the Blender Game Engine. In the following few posts, I will outline the process in creating this application, and describe some of the issues we faced. Please leave a comment if you are interested, it will motivate me to write more :)
With these tips, you should able to drastically increase your polygon-count limitation while sculpting.
1. Get Blender 2.5 Alpha, also go for the 64bit version if you have 3GB or more of RAM. 2.5 is simply a lot faster and refined than Blender 2.49. The tools and interface is also much cleaner and more intuitive. Also, a lot of work has gone into optimizing the sculpting feature in Blender 2.5.
2. Start with a base mesh, then apply the multires modifier. Do not use a default cube and rely on the multires modifier to do *all* the sub-division. It’s always better to start with a base mesh with a few thousand polygons, and use multires with a sub-division level of 2-5.
3. Turn off “Double Sided” in the Object Data panel. This will significantly speed up the redraw.
4. Delete UV texture data and Vertex Color data *might* help speed things up, but I don’t really know for sure.
5. Turn on VBO in the Preference menu. This will further speed up drawing speed. (Thanks Gustav!) Okay apparently it doesn’t according to another commenter, since sculpt mode already uses VBO by default.
What a learning experience! I know the car is far from complete, it’s still missing a lot of the trimmings and details, but the model should be good enough for a quick animation.
So without further ado, here is the packed Blender file of the BMW. Open with Blender 2.5 Alpha 2 or later.
