Satellite POV

A little more grunge, and this will probably be seen in the first scene. ;)

Just before collision, the asteroid is shooting towards the satellite...

I like this effect for the satellite POV

Edit:

Looking back, I really need to turn on dithering next time I render that!

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!

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.

...And here it is!

Here is the .blend file for scene one: 

http://www.blendswap.com/blends/scenes/asteroid-satellite-and-world/

Don't forget to unpack the textures!

Within a few hours of me posting it, it was on the front page of blendswap! Here's proof:

(O.K., so it was in the recently downloaded, but still... :D)

I will upload it to Google Docs if anyone wants, otherwise I'll just host it at blendswap. Reading through blendswap's terms, I realized that they will have limited usefulness for us, as they will not accept WIP (work in progress) blends, and I expect we'll have quite a few of those! Also, I need to learn how to make my own textures, because it's just so much easier not having to keep track of every single texture used and the license. I can only make so many though, the earth ones obviously have to come from NASA ;) Anyway, enjoy, and please post if you do anything interesting!

Title

This could come in quite handy:
http://www.blenderguru.com/videos/how-to-create-a-professional-logo-animation/

Very professional looking. I've got some fun ideas for our logo, (VA FX), but they'll have to wait, because I'm about to release the long-awaited asteroid, earth and satellite .blend file! Here's a render:

Notice any problems? It's rendered in 4K, and I tried something different with the link, so you should be able to download it and view it in full resolution. (Hint, the problem has to do with the compositing, and it's not the lack of it), I still have to put the rest of the nodes in before I release it though.

Satellite, asteroid, and earth

I now have the satellite, earth, and asteroid all rendering together! There are still a few glitches though, see the image below.

There are still several issues with this render. The .blend file is getting so complicated I'm going to start .blend file version 3 soon to try to simplify it. Here are the current problems I see with this render.
1. There is a outline around the asteroid.
2. The glow effect that looks good on the satellite up close doesn't scale down well. It looked O.K. when the satellite took up most of the screen, but now it just makes it look blurry.
3. I would like to have some sort of depth of field.

Anyway, I'm going to start working on blend file version 3, and see how that goes. It's really coming together nicely so far.

First scene update!

I've been working on the first scene some. I've learned quite a bit, and made some good progress. I have previously posted renders of the satellite and the earth, but never combined, as one was in Blender Internal render engine, and the other was rendered in Cycles. It turns out that compositing them is actually pretty easy. Here are some early renders, I'm pretty excited about this:

And, just for fun, here it is again with the alpha channel:

(I don't know how the blog will display the alpha channel. I uploaded it as a .png, which supports alpha channel as well as the standard RGB. In the Linux image viewer it has a nice alpha checkered background)

I'll try to post a link to the blend file soon, which brings up a question; are we willing to use Blendswap for this movie, or should we stick to posting or e-mailing links to Google Docs? Please reply in the comments below.

Here's a screenshot of the node setup, as you can see, nothing too complicated, right?

Wrong! (and only one of the node groups is expanded!)

I just figured out how to use node groups, and it can drastically cut down on clutter in the node chain.

Asteroid to be added soon!

Less menacing asteroid

If we wanted something a little more bright: