Blender Cycles Case Study

I must admit that I’m a huge fan of FOSS (free open source software)! The whole idea behind it, is brilliant and a lot of times open source software are really competitive compared to their commercial equivalents (not to mention that sometimes they’re a even better).

It’s been some time that I decided to make a small experiment. Establish a 100% free (and if possible open source) work flow for Architectural visualizations.

For my test I’ll use as OS Linux Mint one of the best Linux distros in my opinion and Blender as my main 3d application.

Blender is a fantastic software with extremely fast development and with it’s new render engine (called Cycles) a classic path tracer, that runs super fast in capable GPUs, made one big big step further.

I found that Blenders modeling is one of the best out there and you can get used to it and be productive
quite easily. It may not have the complexity or the zillion features that other 3D modelers offer but it’s excellence is it’s simplicity.

Cycles on other hand is also relatively easy but you should dig a little bit deeper if you want to optimize both your times and quality. It’s based nodes materials gives great flexibility and a clear visual understanding of their structure.

Cycles main advantage is it’s almost real time preview that can save a lot of time during material tweaking or lighting setup.

Another great advantage of Blender is it’s Compositor, a full featured node based compositing system that allows you to give the final touches to your image without moving to another post production software.

My task is to start a series of learning exercises to educate myself and post the results here. Since I’m still learning and testing the final result may not be of maximum quality, but I hope it will be helpful or at least inspiring for others that willing to adopt Free Open Source Software in their work flow.