We all were newbies at some point. I remember my time vividly. One thing that was hard in Blender was to not have anything to work with. There was just that cube and rending than looked like nothing I needed a raytracer for. I wanted to render something nice, to give my shiny new GPU or CPU a whirl or to show somebody what a raytracer can do.
Since it is a lot of work to first learn the interface and modelling to even do a modest render, I looked for demo scenes to render. And finally found some, but it was not easy and hardly fast.
So this is my proposal:
Create a demo scene that is part of Blender, that can be easily called up with a menu, automatically loaded and you could render it easily.
3 Scenes
There could also be 3 scenes, one simple, another medium and the third very complex, depending on how powerful your computer is.
This should use cycles, as it looks the best and is the future of Blender.
The demo scene could change with every major release of blender or stay the same, whatever works better. Eventually it would be good if there was a little library of demo scenes that people can play around with.
Learn from the masters
This would also allow people to analyze the scenes and learn from experienced blender experts.
This can also make the new blender user proud, because he can show off the program to others, what it can do. Likely, his first scenes that he built him/herself and renders will not look that pretty and not be a good show off to others.
Blender is also currently the underdog, Max and Maya are very famous, but I think it would make a huge difference if Blender had this feature that would make doubters into believers since they could see what is possible with Blender. You can of course find pictures online, but there is nothing more satisfying and true to render it yourself.
It is similar to what the open movies do: you can tell somebody about Blender for a while, but just showing them the movies, some immediately gasp and say “This is open source and free, seriously? Cool!”
In the beginning, I would recommend to do a still scene, not an animation, to keep things simple and get it started, but later on it could also be an animation, maybe fully fledged with armatures and sound effects, showing what blender can do.
For creating this demo scene, it might be useful to consult with some experienced Blender artists (I’m definitely not one), if they would be willing to maybe donate (open source) one of their scenes for that purpose, of course attributed with their name, so fame goes where it is deserved.
Benchmark
Another nice side effect of this standard scene would be to be able to benchmark cycles at fixed settings and resolutions, to see if and how optimizations to the engine are working.
Since this could be done by pretty much any Blender user, it might open up new ways to optimize rendering, where render time is less, but the render looks almost the same high quality. We might be surprised, what people come up with.
I would love to hear your feedback on this.
Markus
Problems and issues:
One of the issues that might come up is space usage: it might make the blender installer larger, so we might first start only with the simple scene, because the more complex scenes will use more space. Also, there could be two installers, one with the demo scene, one without.
