Hi, I thought I'd start one single rendering thread, instead of starting many topics with my rookie works.

Here is my first interior scene, C&C are welcome!

Looks good, definitely needs some bump mapping on the floor!

+on walls, with correct UVW coords

anyway, great image

You mentioned that "something" crashed when using Blender 2.61 and the newest Blendigo. This might have to do with the fact that Blendigo received a total overhaul going from Blender 2.49 to 2.5 and further.
Also a lot of things changed in Blender itself. The crashing may well have to do with data in your old format scene that the newer Blender or Blendigo have trouble digesting.
I remember that in the early phase of the transition materials often had to be redefined even when updating to the next 2.5 beta release of Blender or Blendigo.

I still would recommend to upgrade. Blendigo is really well integrated into Blender. Not that it was bad before, quite the opposite, however,  its just so much better now.

Perhaps you can start with a fresh scene in Blender 2.61 and append the objects from the 2.49 Blender file into the new 2.61 Blender file. This often cleans things up in my experience. If that does not help you may have to delete all materials in the old Blender file and then import only the geometry.

Keep us updated. I'd love to see you scene progress!

Yeah, very nice start!

So, here is another problem. Which button am I supposed to choose to render my scene in Indigo for 2.6? Pressing the render "Image" button only starts blender's internal renderer, even though it says that it exported the scene to a .igs file.

Thanks for helping!

Top of the screen, there's a little drop-down menu that should say 'Blender Internal'. Switch that to Indigo and you should be good. Nice scene! Could be really great with a bit of improvements on materials and some detailing.

That's the problem! indigo is already selected there! And thanks, I'll try to improve it further.

Clicking on the "Image" button in Blender's "Render" panel, is what you need to do. That should start the exporting and render process.
The green section of the screen shot indicates that the exporter correctly exported your scene, so that part seems to have gone OK. However, it looks like the path to the Indigo executable is not fully defined.

In your case it says : /Applications/Indigo 3.2/
You may want to complete it to: /Applications/Indigo 3.2/Indigo.app

Once that is completed Indigo should start up automatically rendering the exported scene. If you can't get it to work, for the time being you can always start Indigo manually and open the exported IGS file through the Indigo UI and see if it at least starts rendering so you have some verification that your scene is exported OK. A bit cumbersome, perhaps but better than nothing

Also, as you seem to have some flat glass panes in your scene you can enable "Glass Acceleration" which will greatly help render speed. Once Indigo fires up, make sure that it is enabled by checking in the Indigo UI in the "Render Settings" panel. If it is not enabled you first need to stop the render to be able to enable it. I've lately had some renders not have it enabled even though it was set in Blender. That may just be me though

Another thing that greatly helps improve rendering times are exit portals. Are you familiar with that technique/feature ?

It worked, and I was able to boot Indigo up through blender. However, when trying to render my scene, I got the following error message;

A problem occurred with the scene:
Error while building scene: ModelLoadingStreamHandlerExcep: Triangle material_index is out of bounds. (material index=1).
Indigo version: Indigo Renderer v3.2.8, OS X 64-bit build.
Exporter: Blendigo 3.2.6.0
Platform: 10.6.8 i386 - Darwin Oscar-Johanssons-iMac.local 10.8.0 Darwin Kernel Version 10.8.0: Tue Jun 7 16:33:36 PDT 2011; root:xnu-1504.15.3~1/RELEASE_I386 i386 i386 - Python 3.2.1 (default, Aug 5 2011, 20:41:36) [GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5666) (dot 3)]
Author: oscarjohansson
Description:
Date created: 2012-04-01 14:08:12 GMT
Please contact support@indigorenderer.com if you have any questions.

Anyone know how to fix this issue? I tried appending my scene into a new, empty scene, but it didn't work.

Thanks,

OJ

That's a real bitch of an error and it can be frustrating to fix. Still hoping Glare will fix it soon

It occurs when one (or more) of your objects has multiple materials assigned to it, not all of which are used (assigned to faces). Check your objects for redundant materials and delete them, it should work fine.

To clarify, say if you have a Cube with 2 materials applied in the Material Panel list, but the Cube only has the first material applied to all of its faces, meaning the second material is essentially unused, Indigo will shit a brick. This can also happen if you have the same material appearing twice in the list for whatever reason.

It'd be great if Indigo tried reverting to a lower material index in these cases instead of crashing.

Sorry, for that reaction It seems you are running head first in all of the issues that have a tendency to test our patience to the limit. That means you are on the right track!

Tom is exactly right and I believe that almost every Blender user has run into this before.

Say you have a single mesh with two vertex groups. Each group of vertices has a different material assigned, so naturally you will see two materials in the list. Then you decide to separate the single mesh into two different meshes/objects each containing one of the vertex groups. Now each object still caries the two materials with it even though only one is needed for each mesh. That's when Indigo spits up

As Tom described you need to delete the materials not needed from each list and you should be fine.

Hi Tom,
A few things:
It looks like a Blendigo issue, not Indigo issue per se.
Also, we're not psychic, so don't expect us to fix issues if they are not reported. We're happy to fix issues, but they need to be posted to the 'bugs and requests' forum. (Apologies If I have missed an existing error report somewhere)
Also, Indigo is not crashing in this case. It's displaying a nice error message, which is a lot different from crashing.
If you send us a blender file showing this issue, we can look at it.

I'll try deleting unused materials, thank you very much for your patience. Boy, it feels weird to be a noob again.

When I get a better grasp of Indigo, I'm going to focus a lot on automotive rendering. I've been rendering with Yafaray for quite some time, but I feel that I've reached the upper limit of realism with that plugin. My renders were good, but not quite as good as I would like them to be. Hopefully when I'm improving with Indigo I'll be able to come up with renders just as good as the ones I did with Yafaray (see attachments).

I have heard, though, that car paint is hard to come up with?

These are fantastic!

@OnoSendai

I' have a scene in the works that demonstrates the behavior and I can make Indigo crash if the mat includes UV-mapped textures