Working for 20 years as a Manufacturing Engineer for various Aerospace companies the only 3D programs I had any interaction with were CATIA, Solidworks, AutoCad and NCAD so it is no surprise Blender is a new world. I love it!
I also enjoy most outdoor activities, fishing, hiking, camping etc. Most music and College Football (UW Huskies!). Favorite vacation spot: Hawaii.
Rendering out this animation took as I had predicted around 15 hours. After loading the frames into the video sequencer I saw some strange anomalies. The animation seemed to look great up until the 15th frame and at that point it looked like a loosely packed Roman candle sputtering after every five frames or so. I went on to re-render the frames that seemed to sputter, that was another few (quite a few) hours added on to this project and now everything within those frames looks pretty good. Now the question, if anybody out there is actually reading this besides me, do you know why this happened?
Back to the spaceship corridor now. I am almost complete with the modeling of the corridor with the end of hall door/hatch to complete which will be quick. Next will be lighting, materials and compositing. I added a couple of lights and rendered without materials or compositing and it does not look bad at all. Adding materials seems to be giving me some fits for some reason but I will handle that. I am sure I am missing somthing, there are so many settings you can miss or accidently turn on or off it actually makes me proud when somthing doesn’t work quite right and I know right away what it is and where to look. Here is a small test render.
I tried the sparks with motion blur and a single frame took 8.5 minutes to render with this computer. This would be around 15hrs for a 100 frame animation. I am going to attempt it over the next couple of nights. Here is a render of a single frame with no depth of field set.
I finished the materials for the Little Elephant this morning then dabbled a little with Open Shader Language (OSL) scripts put in place at 2.65. Although the information out there is scant at best I can see the potential of this and will take as much reading and practice as Blender itself I think, which is a good thing. You can never stop learning new things 🙂
Spent the day trying to log into the computers at work and check email preparing for the upcoming week and they installed new servers over vacation which has affected my ability to work from home, darn them. After doing my due diligence trying to connect online I completed this little guy. I’ll do the textures tomorrow. Have some books to go over, yes, I brought work home just in case.
Here is a little quick tutorial I finished yesterday afternoon. I enjoy doing these tutorial but my own projects need to start coming my way. I am one that knows practice makes perfect (or close) as well as repitition.
It is the day after Christmas and I was not happy with the results last night. It was late and I wanted to get to bed. I did a little camera rotations and came up with a result I like and here it is.
Spent the last week trying to figure out what was wrong with my computer and there was nothing wrong now that I updated my video driver. I just had to sit back, relax and figure out what could possibly be different from one release to the next of Blender and I am talking about their daily releases not just the official releases.
Now some new pictures testing the fix. This was pretty quick and fun.
Final Render (Do not like, ghosts are not aligned correctly)
Final Render with node tree.
As you can see I used node groups to define certain sections of the render. Makes it easy to tweak only the areas you are testing knowing you will not affect any other area. I am going to re-watch a CGcookie tutorial using the compositor which I think will allow streamlining of the inputs of the different node groupd.
I’m still around 🙂 I have been doing some work learning compositing and materials with new videos from Cgcookie. I have finished the test logo animation and will load the YouTube video when I am satisfied with it. I’m close but learning new things makes me want to tweak things here and there. Almost bed time here and I am doing some more test renders of the logo checking the time difference between .exr and .png. This test has more to do with the tutorial I watched this morning than the content of the animation.
See ya tomorrow!
I am also updating to the latest version of WordPress right now.
Work here is a little boring right now so I thought I would check on the net and find out how to insert or embed a YouTube video into this blog and on the first swing I think I hit a home run. All it seems I need to do is update my profile. Let us see if it worked.
Looks like it worked!
Edit: Well, maybe I only had to be using the “HTML” tab.
New site covering miscellaneous activities including my favorite activity: Blender
