It has been great to be back to work after almost three weeks off and I had forgot how seven hours sleep and around 14 hours at work each day can kick your butt. I think I will go back to 11 hours Monday thru Thursday and leave after eight hours on Friday. That will get me home about 1:00pm on Fridays giving me almost a two and a half day weekend each week.
Works for me. (Hope it will for my boss when I tell him)
The modeling is complete on the Spaceship Corridor and I have a ‘close’ to final render. I have some tweaks to go on some of the lights particularly the colored ones which should not take to long tonight. I planned on posting this a few days ago but the site was down for some reason but it is back up now
A few tweaks to go, primarily on the keyboard lights and radar. They are colored but the blur and glare came out almost white and the glare is to spikey.
Wow, what a pain in the butt UV unwrapping the main structure is. I tried once and the results we an unmidigated disaster. I tried to render and because it was so bad I had to stop, step back and think about what I was doing. The second attempt was much better. I have been really tired lately with this flu/cold or whatever the heck it is so I won’t finish today but maybe tomorrow (crossing fingers), crossing fingers that this doesn’t turn into something more than just the flu.
Materials are not all added and a little bit of modeling left to do. The unwrapping is not great but here is a first go around. One thing I noticed, I can’t seem to add materials to specific parts of a model without separating by selection and then adding the materials. When I add a material to selected faces and click on assign the material gets assigned to the entire mesh. I need to figure out what I am doing incorrect there.
First go around – Without any compositing
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?
Sparks with Motion Blur
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.
Test render without materials or compositing
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.
Rendered with Motion Blur
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 🙂
Cute Elephant Final Render
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.
Cute Elephant Part 1
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.
Quick Render
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.
FINAL RENDER