Here is a challenge to get you thinking in new and interesting ways. Feel free to be as abstract, stylised or realistic as you like with your final result. The purpose of the challenge is not to make you cry but to learn something new.
The challenge is to make the best use of Instancing within Blender. Instances are a great technique for building visually complex scenes while reducing effort and rendering time.
For those who wish to, you may do a speed dating (3 minutes or less) explanation of how you achieved your result at the next session (or even as an online video if your not a Melbournian).
The Rules
To make your scene you are limited to:
- 1 quadrilateral plane with any number of vertices as a ground plane
- 2 other quadrilateral planes
- 1 particle system
- 1 complex mesh any amount of vertices that is NOT visible at render time.
- 2 complex meshes up to 3,000 triangles
- Use of Dupligroups, Dupliverts, Duplifaces in any manner you like
- Use of as many materials or textures you like using what ever techniques you can think of to maximise their benefit on the limited meshes available.
- Use of Cycles or Blender Internal Renderer
- Use of Blenders compositor (No Gimp or Photoshop retouching)
- Stills or Animated entries are permitted
- NO use of the following modifiers in the final rendered scene (use them on modeling base meshes but make sure they are applied for render time): Array, Mirror, Booleans, Multiresolution, Bevel, Screw, or Solidify.
Deadline
The next meeting (6pm, Thu 30 Aug 2012).
Recommended Reading
If you know of a good resource out there to help people, post it in the comments below.
Non Melbourne BlenderHeads are welcome to have a go at the Challenge too. I’ll try and thread set up on Blender Artists.
http://blenderartists.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?15-Member-Contests
Melbourne Blender Society 
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Quick questions…
1. Should the limit be 3000 faces, rather than 3000 triangles? Or does this mean we have to convert all quads/n-gons to triangles?
2. With the dupliverts is 3000 face count limit the base object or the face count after duplication?
3. Likewise with modifiers, is the triangle count before or after applying modifier? (e.g. cube = 12 faces; mirrored cube = 24 faces. Do we count 12 or 24?)
4. Can the two quadrelateral planes have more than four vertices?
– andrew
Don’t get too hung up on the rules only the intent to be challenged with constraints. Tri’s is the standard measure because at render everything converts down to tri’s. 1 Quad = 2 tri’s the reason to specify is to avoid people have n-gons with 12 vertices counting as 1 face.
Triangle count is after modifiers are applied except your particle system and your dupliverts.
Have fun, be creative.
Thanks for the clarification. I’ll turn the left side of my brain off for now 🙂
-andrew
OK, last minute entry…
It still needs a lot of work on the shading of the cabinets but you get the overall idea… see everyone tonight.
BTW: I did some experimenting and once you have applied a shapekey you cannot apply ANY of the Generate modifers (mirror, array, etc…)