Blender F1 Challenge Winners announced

The winners and top rated images from the Blender F1 challenge have been announced, you can check out more info on the blenderartists.org site.

LuxRender for Blender

I have been following the development of a number of renders over the past few years waiting for one to really stand out as being

• kickass quality
• well thought out interface
• easy to use
• opensource
• works well with Blender
• works on OSX

and it looks like Luxrender really has come up with the goods, it has taken over from Yafray for me as my easy to set up good quality renderer. The Blender internal is good but i don't always have the patience needed for mucking about to get it spot on, i would prefer a renderer do this for me. You need to experiment with the settings until you get the kind of setup you are happy with, but from then on its smooth sailing.

The blender exporter is starting to integrate really nicely with blender, there is even a use blender materials button which could be really handy. Don't forget if you are using uv textures make sure you map them to the uv co-ordinates instead of just leaving them in the unwrapper image browser in Blender.

Render time is obviously dependent on the scene but leaving things to run overnight should yield some good results, this is an unbiassed render engine so the longer you leave it the more refined the image becomes.

Check out luxrender at: http://www.luxrender.net/
Also Alan Brito has some excellent resources at: http://www.blender3darchitect.com/

Game Creation in Blender

In case you haven't got the idea by now i am a big advocate of Blender 3D as a content creation and training tool due to it's great feature set and excellent development community.

A group of students from school have been working very hard on developing a game for the Blender game contest... and thaey have done a fantastic job!!!! here are some of the details, so check it out and the rest of the entries, it is amazing what can be achieved with good tools and a great attitude to learning.

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=157542

game site: http://burningrubber.awardspace.com/

Title: Burning Rubber

Team: SpewBoy (Ben Evans, 15) and PiroManiac (Callum Howard, 16)

Categories: Graphics and Gameplay

Description: This is a full on racing / stunt game featuring two cars, a criminal organisation and a US Military Airbase.

Features:

-> A vast open airbase level situated in a desert environment
-> Two completely different cars, both highly detailed
-> Realistic vehicle damage
-> Fully destructible structures
-> A mysterious storyline and a nice surprise at the end
-> The latest graphic effects such as Bloom, Depth of Field, Motion Blur, Realtime reflections and SSAO
-> Great gameplay as well as great graphics
-> Stylish menu system and music to suit
-> Can easily be optimized for better performance or quality

Requirements:

-> GLSL support is recommended but not essential to play the game.
-> 1GB Ram. Less is untested.
-> Blender 2.49.
-> Should work with Mac and Linux operating systems as well as Windows. Intel Macs will have no sound, as Blender doesn't support this yet. Linux is untested.

Tested only on Windows and Mac. I can almost guarantee that this will work on any Intel Mac. Works on a Macbook with integrated graphics card. Works on a Windows PC with nVidia 9600GT graphics card, 2gb RAM and 2.0GHz dual core processor. Any resolution will work for the blend but the runtime must use 1280x800 or higher to work correctly.

If your playing on a computer with very little graphics support, clamp the textures to 512 in the blend for more performance. This is done by going into the preferences section and thene going to the openGL section, there you will find an option to clamp the textures. Lower means more performance. If you have a very old system you may clamp to 256 or 128, but this will severely reduce graphical quality.

NOTES:

How to reset car: What isn't mentioned in the game, as it is a recent feature, is that if you hold down the "R" key for one second you will be able to restart the level, in case you get stuck.

Other controls and problems: Scroll in and out to zoom in on the car when playing or in garage. Press "c" to change camera but make sure Depth of field is off when using an interior or hood camera or your vision will be quite blurry .

The menu system: For anyone who might be confused:
- RIDE menu item takes you to a car selection screen
- TWEAK takes you to a garage where you can view your car and is a good place to activate the visual effects
- BURNIT takes you to a level selection screen, from which you can start playing the game
- COOL OFF is the quit game item. Select this to quit the game

If you get into trouble and something isn't working right or you just want to quit fast, press F1.

Download (Both downloads are FIXED. A fatal bug meant the game could not be finished but that is fixed):
Blend - For Windows, Mac or Linux. Use this if you have a Mac, use Linux or would like more flexibility, such as texture clamping.
Runtime - For Windows. Should provide performance improvements, but less flexible, so no texture clamping for older graphics cards, and has a fixed resolution.

Screenshots: