The Making of
Wow, a project I actually finished!
Since I started working on this car project, I’ve been getting a lot of positive feedback which really helped me move the project forward. It’s only fair that I return the favor and share a bit of what I learned here. (The full scene file including model, lighting, material and texture is available at my site)
The entire scene is rendered with the built-in renderer. It gives me more artistic control than a photon-tracer, and is also much faster. Blender is a capable renderer; learn to use it!
Supposedly, like eyes, car headlights defines the character of a car. There is really no shortcut to making a sparkly looking headlight, I just modeled everything as geometry and applied a lot of reflection/refraction to the material. As long as the geometry is there, all the cool effects happen automatically once you hit render. i also placed a lamp at where the light should be, to throw in a bit of extra lumen.
A lot of the magic happens in compositing. Here you can see my postprocessing setup.
For the animation, I rendered out the entire video at 1280×720, as PNGs. Because PNG is only 24bit, extra dynamic range is lost, which made all the post-processing and cross-fading look half-assed. Next time I’ll definitely render to floating-point EXR formats, which should help when I start applying more aggressive processings. I also realized that a single computer is NEVER fast enough; The 40 second clip would have taken 83 days to render on a single core, but with the help of 24 cores spanning across 4 PCs, I managed to push out the video in less than 4 days. Dropbox made file synchronization embarrassingly simple.
A lot of the technical issues with the video (bad driving dynamics; black pixels; flickering) only cropped up last minute in the final rendering, at which point I am just too annoyed to re-render it. So hopefully I’ll fix these distractions later and release a better version soon.
That’s it for now. Hope you like what I have so far.
