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About the picture of the month

Just a few words and some tips about this picture. First of all, Blender can easily work with big files, but to work in a good environment, you have to manage each component of your scene throughout different layers. The following screenshot shows my computer on-screen workspace, so you can notice that I have used 8 different layers for the whole scene.
Click to enlarge (1600*1200)

Without these, you cannot work unless if you have a monster hardware acceleration (maybe a Nvidia Quadra). I'm using a dual pentium III 550 with 128 Mb of RAM and a TNT2 card, with a Suse linux 6.3 OS. Please note that I use Xfree 4 with the latest drivers from Nividia, otherwise it isn't possible to work at this resolution (1600*1200). After these hardware explanations, the major part of the work concerns the making of the textures. In fact, Blender doesn't use raytracing for rendering, so you can't have reflections between objects. To simulate them, I used texture to simulate the glass of the windows, and the Blender's environment mapping feature for the Porsche 1955 on the foreground. The windshield also uses a texture to simulate glass reflection. To make the different textures, I created several cameras with which I could switch quickly from one to another by selecting them and pressing Ctrl+NUM0.

To achieve a better realism with my walls, I used textures with faked shadows on edges corners, so it could look like radiosity. A tip for a better realism in your texture : decrease filtering value, you should keep the original aspect of your file. For the environment mapping, it's easy to use it but I got some troubles to set the car's painting color and a correct uv mapping. I had to juggle between specularity, reflectivity and hardness to find a good result.
Lightning was also difficult to set and it asked a lot of previews before I achieved something nice. I used 3 kinds of lamps : spot (the only one that can produce shadows), Sun and basic lamp.

I post-processed this picture with The Gimp : I added a light blur andan  atmospheric effect on the background, and I also fixed the color of the picture, because it was too cold at first.

The buildings are inspired by Antigone in Montpellier (in south of France, where I live), where the architect Ricardo Bofil designed whole districts in this style. The vehicles are a futuristic truck and a 1955 Porsche with moderns alloy wheels. At first, I wanted to model air cushion vehicles but it didn't really matched what I hoped, so I stayed closer to a classic design.
This picture will change because I've planned to add a computer warehouse on the right selling GNU/Linux boxes :-)) but I couldn't right now because I reached my RAM capabilities. I'll upgrade this picture when I have 128 additional Mb.

I hope you'll find some ideas in this work. I wish your great fun with Blender which is really a very good 3D software.

Cheers

Amicalement (in French)

Toussaint Frédéric