JR Startup Scenes for Blender

These startup scenes are a collection of the modified settings I typically use when creating and rendering scenes in blender. I very rarely work in Eevee, so all modifications are for Cycles.

The adjustments I’ve made are:

• Hugely increased clip end values for both the viewport and camera (to accommodate large terrains and volumetrics).

• Higher resolution render settings and output to 16-bit uncompressed TIFF (saving is much quicker without compression).

• High Contrast Filmic look rather than None (which is Medium).

• Assets workspace available next to Layout: the assets browser can be found on the right in this workspace.

• Viewport denoising on by default.

• Optimised volume rendering settings for faster rendering (0.05 step rate, 18 max steps).

• Increased Diffuse and Glossy max bounces to 6 and Transparent bounces to 32 (to mitigate black artefacting, especially with transparent foliage materials).

• Render Passes included by default: Mist, Normal, Direct and Indirect volume, Emission, Environment and Ambient Occlusion. I use all of these regularly when doing render post-production in Affinity Photo.

• Mist start and end points visible via the Camera by default.

• Depth of Field Marker added by default and linked to the camera for easy depth of field control (just move the marker around).

• GPU compute used by default (if enabled in blender’s Preferences).

• When using the Nishita Sun Lighting startup file, the World shader is set up to use the Nishita lighting model with some adjusted values: higher sun elevation, increased Ozone layer strength, and reduced Background strength so the lighting is more suitable for the default scene exposure.

• Camera positioned straight ahead rather than angled downwards towards the default cube. Speaking of…

• No default cube (boo!).

Please see the included readme PDF for installation instructions.