Hauling Freight (a slow day)

[zeealpal]

Stupid question (but important), but how does one instance an object in Blender for LuxRender??

And can I represent the instances with another object so Blender can handle the modelling?

[Carbonflux]

Good question, normally I just use alt-d to duplicate a object rather than shift-d, alt-d making it a instance, however I am fairly sure this is just rote and there is a more formal way to make a object a instance. I admit I find instancing of objects in blender a bit of a black box. That being said luxblend seems to do a very good job of honoring instances defined in blender and I have personally never run into a case where luxblend missed anything.

Btw, I forgot to add in my prior post that this render is inspiring in the sense that I think we should have a pure space-ship render comp. It seems like it would be a lot of fun to try a space ship render.

[B.Y.O.B.]

In Blender's internal renderengine objects duplicated with Alt+D are NOT instanced (though they share the same mesh), because there could be different modifiers on them.
IIRC LuxBlend(25) exports them as instances, though.

The safest way to get instances is to use particles or dupli(verts|faces). If I were to instance this spacesship I'd use Alt+D because otherwise all the parts had to be joined I think... or maybe if you parent them all on one empty, they all get instanced by particles..?

[filanwizard]

If the blend file where not 100+ megs and a 650mb starfield i would offer to upload my ship files. But i did everything with alt-D once i learned of instancing. I think parenting to a empty would cause issues with alignment in a 5kmfew long space craft model built 1:1. scale.