I always wanted to model a golfball with nurbs (instead of plain old polygons) and, thanks to MoI, finally got around to doing it.

Here's the mandatory object-in-the-cornell-box, global-illumination render that lets the viewer get a feel for the object. Sunflow's render time was only 4 minutes, with one-bounce path-tracing. There's no need for a multi-day, unbiased MLT render (like Maxwell or Indigo) in this situation.


Here's the money-shot, complete with focal blur and GI. This scene has about 17 million faces. I modified the export script to handle Blender's linked-duplicates. Render time was around 23 minutes with Sunflow (SVN version).


I wrote a custom import script that handles true normals and real-time UV coords. It also adds some pretty cool vertex colors that simulates the global-illumination from a hemisphere. The light value is calculated from the true vertex normal not the average of the face normals that surround a vertex. Most graphic cards can do this calculation in real-time. Too bad MoI doesn't have this vertex shader yet.


The animated GIF below shows the difference between my importer and the standard ones that ignore MoI's true normals. This may be an extreme case, but it clearly illustrates the importance of using the actual normals. Warning: Do not edit your imported mesh (i.e., press TAB) or the normals will be recalculated.

I highly recommend the use of my importer when using Blender & MoI. You can download it for free here:
http://home.comcast.net/~gamma-ray/moi/import_moi.py