Final Sets and Backgrounds - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 226

Figure 13.2 Local and linked assets in the main set
If you are working with outdoor scenes, you will certainly want to employ the dupligroup method as well,
especially for high-polygon assets such as trees that will most likely be duplicated across the face of the set.
Trying to do that with live geometry would cause a prohibitive increase in the fi le size and RAM usage. Any
time you work with such a set, your system will slow to a crawl. Even with linked assets, you will have to
come up with a few tricks to render such a scene without blowing through the top of your system's RAM
limit. As you will see later in this chapter, there are a number of ways to deal with these sorts of problems.
Materials
No raytracing. Seriously.
That simple rule goes a long way. Yes, there will be times, such as a point-of-view shot through your charac-
ter's bifocals, when you absolutely need to use raytracing to achieve believability in your scene. Barring that,
though, just forget it.
The three material properties that will cost the most render time and which you should use only with con-
sideration are:
Raytracing, of Course
This applies to both ray mirror and ray transparency, found on the Mirror Transp tab. Ray-based transpar-
ency produces perfect refl ections and is necessary only for true mirrors. It can be faked almost everywhere
else. Allow me to introduce you to the FakeRef texture. It's not an actual texture type, but I use it so fre-
quently that I gave it its own name. Figure 13.3 shows the texture buttons, with a Blend texture selected
and the colorband set. The colorband is the key. This colorband, when mapped to an object's Refl space
(instead of Orco or UV ) and blended properly with the base color, produces a passable refl ection effect, as in
Figure 13.4. The material settings for the Beast's phony corneas are in Figure 13.5.