My friend Diana said I am jumping too soon to the “nuts and bolts” before properly introducing Blender to those who never heard of it before. I was amazed such people existed but now that I am aware of that I will try to make the proper introduction and explain what made me invest time in it and why do I think it is a good tool for building architectural visualisations, also what I think the drawbacks are.

Blender is an open source project,  it is free and can be used for personal and commercial purposes. There are ways to financially support the people and work behind it, by donating or buying DVDs and books – there are several useful titles on the Blender site. So the price is good, but as I had to replace Max I was looking not only at  affordability but also at getting a really good replacement! So I looked around for commercial affordable alternatives and tried some demos but in spite of great promise these applications lacked the complexity I was used to. I really think Blender manages to do a lot more than many commercial software and can compete even the big expensive names. …If you get past the original interface! But I wouldn’t suggest changing it (and any Blender fan would be outraged by such a suggestion) as it is a very good flexible interface. Once I got used to it I felt very at ease navigating the 3d space, I liked the object selection and manipulation methods,  found a good set of precision tools. I also tested with some large scenes and it handles complex projects very well. At first I imported in 3ds format models made in cad software and the results were good but then I decided to model in Blender directly and it also went really well.

As regards modelling, some people think that architects need software designed especially for the task, with parametric building elements as walls and windows and a mix of cad drafting and 3d modelling.  This type of software can be indeed useful to make simple visualisations during the design process but seems to me too awkward to use for professional visualisation purposes only. They introduce too much detail that is not actually seen in the images and the standard elements are difficult to twitch into nonstandard shapes and configurations. The ones I tested offered too much of the cad features to have enough complexity in the 3d, materials and texturing part. I always prefer a program that offers most flexibility in the visualisation area, in which I can model the exact amount of detail I need. So I don’t mind if Blender lacks architectural elements and good drafting methods. (Actually I have tried a script for building stairs and it was rather good – though I ended up modelling the stairs from scratch as the script presets did not match my project – so possibly some other interesting architectural scripts might be out there or might be added in the future for those who like using them. There is a list of the scripts here )

What about materials and textures? Well, if you can convincingly texture an alien and a rusted spaceship with it I say it’s good enough for architectural presentations! 🙂 Really, the materials module is very good. You can also make your material libraries as well as object libraries.

Lighting is the most tricky point for any 3d artist but especially for architects who are in search of Photo-realism, more so with all the great competing software out there. The options in Blender are the simpler internal renderer and some fancier external renderers you access via export scripts. You can use some free or commercial external renderers but I will write about my findings on the subject in a different post. For now I decided to focus on the internal Blender renderer for several reasons. The first one being the results are good. I worked for now on exterior scenes and Blender internal with the Ambient Occlusion setting looks very nice and convincing and it renders fast enough. Maybe not as fast (yet) as Max but ok. Interior scenes are the true measure of a renderer’s strength, I dindn’t get to test this part but I found a promising tutorial about it and will try it soon. Another reason for wanting to give Blender internal a chance is the fact that it works best with Blender materials. The Yafray renderer, though it’s “integrated” into Blender, has its own material settings so you have to re-work them separately which doesn’t sound very efficient.

Blender can also render animations, can make interactive walkthroughs using its game engine, has a module for image editing and one for video editing. I am just mentioning these to complete the picture but I didn’t “get there” yet so I can’t offer much detail for now. Sounds good and hope they work as well as the rest of Blender’s modules.

And the most important reason you should take up Blender: you can say “Happy Blending” to a fellow blender user! Isn’t that cool? 🙂