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!

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!

...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!

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: