Progress - not much

So Christmas is a busy time. I've had to look after my son, Noah while Clara is on shift. I've managed to load up Blender but not get much deeper. By way of an apology to my ambition I bought Blender 3D Basics in e-book from from Amazon. Hopefully I can digest Blender mojo while reading brief snippets of the book when I'm not able to actually use the application. Alas, 3D is an area demands hands-on time.

Here's a tinker to shows progress of sorts. I've been trying the cycles renderer, which is Blender's new render engine that supports interactive real-time rendering along with a very respectable - if not currently very feature rich ray-tracing system.

I'm using my graphic card's CUDA computation (number-crunching) system to produce the renders, which is cool although I'm not sure what the benefits actually are in terms of render times. Plus, I've read that large complex scenes will defeat graphics cards at the moment.

I tend to see lots of heavy grain and occasionally 'fireflies' (white dots) when using Cycles. The image, above, shows how turning the render settings to final greatly reduces the grain effect. I've read up on fixing the fireflies problem -- although in the case that I experienced none of the suggestions (turning off caustics, clamping your light sources, setting your materials to "multiple importance sample") had much effect.