Thank you very much! I'm trying my best to make this as accurate as possible.
Latest render - bullet shield complete, vent and stack complete, deck gubbins nearly complete. Hull revamped.
Again, these are NOT final mats.
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Devin - The sharper bow precluded the more traditional Monitor-style anchor-well. I think the first ship was already built when they finally agreed on a new way of doing it. The Windlass is farther back than the other Monitors and two separate anchor chains - port and starboard - go up and over the deck under those bolt-festooned covers. From the look of the drawings that I have, it looks like the anchor chain exits under the overhang and the anchors hang down on either side of the bow of the ship. On photos of the
Mahopac and other monitors, the anchors are usually seen hoisted out of the water and stowed on deck.
Roscoe - Cheers! So am I!
DrPR - Taking your questions in order...
1. Yep. Not directly, but it imports standard formats like .obj, .dae, Collada, FBX etc. If you wanted to get a file from Max to Blender, you'd just export from Max as one of the standard formats and import that into Blender.
2. Depends on memory and machine. I've got a quad core Phenom with 4 Gb of RAM and I can handle a three or four million Polygons before it starts to get chuggy. The current Blender dosen't like large Obj files. It takes about 5 minutes or more to load a high-poly z-brush sculpt. But once its in, Blender can work with it.
3. I personally much prefer the new interface, it's much more like a 'regular' application. A few old-hands like the old one as everything is to hand, but that creates the 'Space Shuttle Control Panel Effect' which can send new users screaming for the hills. The new interface is much cleaner and looks more modern. I usually use command-keys anyway though and only hunt for buttons occasionally. The big thing with Blender is that it dosen't follow standard command key conventions - even the mouse selects with the right button, rather than the left. But once you start using it, it falls into place pretty easily. They do have a keyboard shortcut remapping feature that will re-map your shortcut keys to Maya norms, and I'm pretty sure other standards will follow shortly. This is what my screen looks like:
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4(a). First off, I'm using a third-party raytracer called 'Yafaray'. It's free and open source. I like to ray-trace my presentation clays, so they take about 10-15 minutes to render usually. It's possible to set up spots and hemi's without raytracing in Blender's internal renderer and get a reasonable render out in a minute or two. I just like ray-tracing! There is also a very good OpenGL renderer that can be used for animations and previewing textures and render settings. Blender's internal renderer is OK for basic stuff, and it looks alright if you use HDR environments, but it can't do real GI or bounces. There are a load of 3rd party renderers though, there is even a V-Ray pipeline.
The last few images took between 20 - 30 minutes. Pathtracing with 6 bounces and 32 path samples. The first image uses a studio light set-up with 2 plane emitters and the second a sun lamp and a generated sky environment.
4(b). 140,000 polys (counting smooth modifiers) and 115 objects.
The big problems with Blender are its modelling tools and it's renderer. Currently they are working on both of these but they are about 3 to 6 months away.