Cheers guys. Well, for a while I made some objects and started on my snowman. Got a body and head + top hat and then went into the materials and texture editor and got real stuck there for ages. I mean, could they make this UI any harder ? But there are some shortcuts when only once you accidentally come across them make life incredibly easier.
Firstly, I found that LMB on the main window once gave me a context menu but for the life of me I could not get it back and wondered what I did ? Well if you hold the LMB down and keep it down for about a second then it appears and allows you to place down new objects on the screen like spheres and cubes etc.
Another handy thing to know is that whilst they whitter about the one hand on keyboard.... the key stroke to move an object is Ctrl + Alt + G and to rotate is Ctrl + Alt + R etc. ONE HAND ???? Are you kidding ? Only if your Vulcan I think. Well, it turns out that it has gestures built in. So if you select an object by RMB over it you can use LMB near to it and drag a line away from the object and after a short while it picks up the object and drags with it. Also, if you make a mouse LMB arc around an object then it picks up and starts rotating it. No more Mr CTRL + ALT + Key. Dont know as yet what the one for scaling is so I have to resort to Ctrl + Alt + S for a mo.
So adding, scaling, moving and rotating objects is not so bad. Making half a snowman was not all that difficult if you dont mind it looking a bit naff. The spheres come in all blocky. To smooth them out there is an object editing mode on F9 where there is the options to make the object smooth or hard. This fixes up the normals.
I tried the light-wave import and that worked well too. So no prob. It also has a wavefront text file .OBJ import which will be excellent for my scanner.
Right - now materials. These hurt bad. It took me ages to get to grips with even the basics of what it was asking for. I think I have some semblance of it now. Normally in 3D apps you create a material and then apply it to an object. This is no different except that the bit to create a link for a meterial to the object which is the first thing you need to do is in the middle of the UI. Thats under the Link to Object on the materials editor F5.
Then you can set the base col (diffuse to old timers like me) and also the specular color. There is also a mirror color for reflective stuff. Whats obviously missing as far as I can see is that there ought to be an ambient and a luminosity colors in there too. Not exactly sure whats going on there. I think the base color can be applied to the ambient so you can have specular ambient color I think ???? I dont quite get that at this stage.
Then you can set the shader. Theres a good selection. Given I had Lambert diffuse and Phong specular only, having a pull down for each is sheer luxury. Would be good to have a custom option tho. Maybe that will be later. So I kept with lambert and phong for a while as they are nice n easy stuff. Nothings gonna go spectacularly odd with them.
The texture bit threw me for a bit. I thought texture meant what they call material. What texture is for them is some image mapping. You can use built in procedural or image based mapping and whilst I had sphere, plane, cube, blender also has some extra ones which I am gasping for like U/V.
I got stuck for a while but when I read up a bit there is a hidden F6 required to take you to the texture editor. From there you can select the type of texture to use like cloud effect that we all love on this site. All sorts of marble, wood grain etc. Havent loaded an image yet tho.
Finally played about with the mirror and refractive index effects. They were pretty straight forward but you must remember to use F10 for the scene editor and switch on mirror and refractive effects in the renderer or else they just dont come out. Thats similar to LW so I was not caught out there.
Whooping it all up together I made this and it rendered it with 4 threads for 4 cores in a short amount of time. My old LW is just treacle compared to this and I like the mirror and refraction better in this too. There were always bugs in the version of LW I had.
So its kickin ass right now. Got loads more to discover. Its still a bit painful but not as bad as I first imagined. Parts of the UI still suck tho.
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