Getting Started - nodebench/Exporter GitHub Wiki

[Introduction](https://github.com/nodebench/Exporter/wiki/Getting-Started#introduction)
[Installing exporter](https://github.com/nodebench/Exporter/wiki/Getting-Started#installing-exporter)
[Assigning material](https://github.com/nodebench/Exporter/wiki/Getting-Started#assigning-material)
[Light types and mesh lights ](https://github.com/nodebench/Exporter/wiki/Getting-Started#light-types-and-mesh-light)
[Camera and motion blur ](https://github.com/nodebench/Exporter/wiki/Getting-Started#camera-and-motion-blur)
[Global illumination settings](https://github.com/nodebench/Exporter/wiki/Getting-Started#global-illumination-settings)
[Instancing ](https://github.com/nodebench/Exporter/wiki/Getting-Started#instancing)
[File formats](https://github.com/nodebench/Exporter/wiki/Getting-Started#file-formats)

Introduction

First of all you need to get four things in your system.

  • Latest blender application
  • Java Development Kit with server VM
  • Sunflow executable jar file version 0.07.3
  • This exporter zip package

the links for downloading all these are given in the download page. After getting all four packages,install the first three according to the information given in their relvent pages.

Installing exporter

  • Start blender

images/installing/install_startblender.png

  • Then File > User preferences or press Ctrl+Alt+U to get the user preference ui. Then click on addon tab , and in the bottom click install from file.

images/installing/install_addons.png

  • Choose the exporter zip file downloaded, using the file browser.then enable the script by ticking the checkbox on the corner. Then save user settings at the bottom to make the change permenent.

images/installing/install_addonsInstall.png

  • Inside blender in the main ui, the engine to use dropdown menu near the blender logo, select sunflow.

images/installing/install_installed.png

  • Go to the properties buttons panel and select the renderlayers panel , you will see a configuration tab in the collapsed state. click on that. give the path to the sunflow file and java jre path , also give the memory (in MB) you wish to allocate to the renderer when running, start by a small value like 1024 Mb

  • Then press save config button to save the values in the configuration file.

images/installing/install_configuration-settings.png

  • You can choose the render output path by going to render panel then output tab , select the directory name which exist in the file system. but this step is optional.

  • Then go to main ui see if the active object has some material assigned to it. If not assign one right away and press F12.

images/installing/install_make-sure-material-assigned.png

Assigning material

images/installing/sett_material_tab.png

  • Sunflow needs object to be assigned a material to get it rendered. Otherwise it will be rendered as a black object. You can choose material in the material panel. There are nine material types available
Constant 
Diffuse
Phong
Shiny
Glass
Mirror 
Ward
Ambient occlusion
Uber shader

The details of these and their parameters can be read from sunflow wiki

Light types and Mesh light

images/installing/sett_ImageBasedLighting.png

Mesh light is added as a material. So use it carefully as the samples are calculated per triangles , so multi polygonal objects means more triangles and more triangles means longer time to render in case of meshlights. You cannot put common shader and meshlight together on a single object. Normal shaders will be overridden by meshlight.

Blender lamps are mapped as follows HEMI: spherical AREA: meshlight SUN: sunsky POINT: point SPOT: directional world_texture: ibl

For sunsky if it is not selected in the world panel then it is considered as a 'directional' lamp with radius 10000. When using world texture, if the scene looks black the change the center and up parameters. Make center to 0.0 , -1.0 , 0.0 and up direction 'Z'. If a Hemi light is the camera field, then it will be rendered as a sperical light object.

Camera and Motion blur

images/installing/sett_camera_panel.png

There are four camera types supported by sunflow. For rendering still image, two of them is commonly used, pinhole and thinlens. Pinhole camera is the common blender prespective camera. You can use camera shift feature with this and thinlens camera. If you select thinlens camera and scene rendered appears blank , you need to activate DOF otherwise thinlens wont work. For DOF you need a DOF object, add an empty object and assign it in the dof panel. Lower apperture means large depth field and higher apperture means shallow depth of field. You can enalbe bokhe effect by changing the number of shutter blades.

images/installing/sett_Object Motion Blur.png As motion blur is a camera technique they are added under active camera property. Motion blur objects needs to be added to a group. For improved image quality when using motion blur lock AA ie put AA max and min size to same number.

Global illumination settings

images/installing/sett_gi_settings.png

more information about fine tuning global illumination settings can be found out in the sunflow wiki page and general faq section. The links for those two sections are given in the downloads page

images/installing/sett_render_tab.png The override methods can be used to fine turn the Gi settings, at a time only ine type can be used. GI only will give only the contribution from gi calculation. If caustics is enabled you can see the contribution from photons if you enalbe potons only.

Instancing

images/installing/sett_uncheck_instances.png

This version of exporter supports following types of duplication

VERTS
FACES
FRAMES
GROUPS
PARTICLES with OBJECTS
PARTICLES with GROUPS

Sunflow can only instance objects, not instances of instances. Currently they will not work as expected. If something goes wrong with instancing, deactivate it. Then all objects will be calculated as normal mesh types.

Mesh export was not tracked by any progress bar, it may seem like the whole window is stuck for large meshes. But it should work.

File formats

images/installing/sett_Fileformats.png

There are four file formats available as render output. The current sunflow gui only allows rendering PNG files. If you need to render other three formats, it can only be rendered through command line. Current exporter allows this but you wont be able to see the render progress, but you will know the rendering is active by looking at the render progress bar on the top panel.

You can fine turn the settings by either using IPR render or using sunflow gui.Use lower AA and sample settings to render out test images and render the final version using command line, using production quality AA and sample settings. Rendering tiled blocks directly to the blender image editor is not possible currently, images/installing/sett_render_progress.png as the frame buffer of sunflow is not available outside the java engine. If that is possible any way I will try by best to incorporate it as it is a nice feature and current work flow is little cluttered ( when you press F12 you have to wait for render gui to appear after finishes you have to press close or escape to close the gui and back in blender again you have to press F11 to go back to View port to make changes. Aahh!)