Thursday, December 20, 2012

Scene one test, now with sound!

I've been playing around with some ideas for the first scene soundtrack and the first set of credits. Here's what I've got right now. Let me know what you think!

Monday, December 10, 2012

First scene test #1

... And the long awaited first scene test!


Again, I don't claim in any way that animation is my strong point!

And, here's the blend file!
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B3AzOhkYNoUUOHFzV3pVek05MDQ


In the meantime...

While it's rendering I'll put some more details on here.

 The file for the first scene is made up of four blender scenes. I have one for the world, one for the satellite, one for the asteroid, and one for the star field. If you're wondering why I can't combine them, and reduce complexity, there are several reasons. One reason is that it uses two render engines and then composites them. Another reason is that it makes it a lot easier to apply the right effects to the right parts in the compositor. For example, I use a glow effect on the world, which I think looks good and really improves the scene, but that glow effect looks really weird on the star background, so I had to find a way to selectively apply compositing effects.

Animation of the satellite and asteroid is really hard (at least for me, that's one of my weaker areas) because they are in separate scenes, using different render engines. This could be solved by converting the asteroid to Cycles, but the reason I haven't is that it doesn't look as good:

That's with the same lighting as the satellite. Doesn't look nice at all, does it?

Anyway, it can be done, but for now I'll let it alone. Video coming soon!

The taming of the Frankenstein.

Well, I think I fixed it. It's rendered 300 frames or so (about half) without crashing, so I may have solved the problem. I restarted my computer, and this time resisted the urge to open my web browser. I opened Blender, and disabled Save Buffer, Instances, Free Unused, and Local Coordinates. (I think, if I remembered right). It also seems to be rendering somewhat faster too. I'm seeing render times of about one minute on my main computer.
 The main problem I see when I look at it is that my animation skills are abysmal.
Josh, would you be willing to try animating it, and then sending the .blend file back for me to render?

Update: It's around frame 550 now! I may be able to get a video out tonight!

I made a Frankenstein!

AARGH!

Well, I'll post a short test of the first scene soon if I can get it to render. It's not working right now, to the point of totally crashing my main workstation, and when I say totally, I mean the mouse stops working, then the keyboard lights start blinking, then the whole computer reboots by itself. I was going to farm this out so we could cut down on rendertime, but I'm not going to inflict anyone with a blend file that crashes every five frames!

Other than that, things are going pretty well. The satellite looks pretty decent, as do the world and asteroid, so if I can get them to render we should have some pretty good looking results. Here's a still render, I don't seem to have as much trouble with those:



-Going into troubleshooting mode... Will update if I get any large uninterrupted render segments.