Blender Render

Ninjin

So, people are always saying Blender Render is not the best thing, but they never tell me what exactly is so bad. I'm doing this fancy tutorial about MAYA on digital tutors (in Blender), when I realized, my mesh is not looking as fancy as in this tutorial. The first thing is shading in Blender looks wrong? It seems like it doesn't use pixel shader or in general interpolate really bad. I attached a picture that shows weird lighting on my flat surface where I moved edges around. The second thing, the tutorial makes use of Mayas high quality button. What does this button actually do? I thought it just subdivides, but there is also the buttons 0-3 which seem to change the quality.

Defunct

That matcap you have on is whats making the shading look strange. So take that off or use the grey matcap in the bottom left corner. I think ctrl+1 ctrl+2, 3 etc in blender is like Maya's high quality thingy. That's the shortcut for adding a subdivision modifier.

JustMeSR

Ninjin wrote: »

So, people are always saying Blender Render is not the best thing, but they never tell me what exactly is so bad.

Difference between legacy shaders and PBR, Blender internal works like the first one. Plus it's no longer supported.

Ninjin wrote: »

The first thing is shading in Blender looks wrong? It seems like it doesn't use pixel shader or in general interpolate really bad.

Mat caps work in Blender how they are supposed to, the problem is in your geometry (you can get better idea of what is wrong if you disable mat cap).

Ninjin wrote: »

What does this button actually do? I thought it just subdivides, but there is also the buttons 0-3 which seem to change the quality.

It subdivides more and thus change quality?

Xizu

Turn off the matcap first. Then, you should probably change the default Blender OpenGL lighting setup (In user preferences). It uses a tri-light setup with some weird color presets which makes stuff look low-contrast and bland. Make it a single light set-up with a neutral grey diffuse color of about 0.6 and a specular around 0.8, and orient the light so that it faces straight on into the camera.
That will make the shading look a lot closer to 3Dsmax / Maya.
If you find that you are having trouble seeing the sides of your models then you can also add 2 more OpenGL lights, one pointing 45° from the top left and the other from the top right at the same angle (Hold CTRL I think to snap the angle). Make them slightly less bright than the head-on light.

Obscura

Just flatten those tiny polygons. This will make the vertexnormals facing upwards, and this should completely solve the shading artifacts, because its coming from them. It works pretty much the same, as it would with a simple phong shading.