Hi!
How important is it when modeling to model everything to real world size?
Do bigger items take up more space when rendering, or is it how many polygons total that matter?
Appreciate any help :)
It's pretty important. If you don't proportions can be off. Distortion from camera focal length happens. There are cases when you want that distortion, but it's not as common. Rendering artifacts can happen, especially with ray tracing render engines.
Bigger objects don't take up more memory. If you have to increase the camera clipping to see everything it can take longer to render due to z depth calculations and other things that I don't fully understand yet. But we're talking small fractions of a second in most cases.
Rule of thumb is to always model to real life scale, you'll save a couple of headaches, like light powers being all wacky, so it makes it harder to light a scene, linking objects not matching in sizes, etc. So yes, try to be mindful of the dimension and sizes of your objects.
Thanks :)
Since you mentioned lights, is there a rule for the radius of lights in a scene too?
The way to think about radius is if you use a light glow box(Spot light) or glow modifer(Point light) in the real world. basically it makes the shadows softer or if the radius is high enough it will remove the shadow. but just like real world modifers it also reduces the intensity of the light thus causing a glowing effect on the subject in the camera. As for any rules, there aren't any that I know of. Generally speaking the radius in blender is about the distance of my home made modifer. I haven't worked with light boxes or professional modifers.
