Monthly Archives: December 2009

Animating the beast

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15

When I started working on a car model, I had no intention of animating it.  But after seeing Blender 2.5 being able to crank out gorgeous frames after frames at insanely high speed, it would be a waste not to at least attempt to make an animation out of the model.  Besides, this car model is probably not detailed enough for high resolution still images anyways.

Render Stats for the above screen capture:

~1.6million Faces
~10MB of texture
~3 light sources + 1 HDR EnvMap
~Ray traced reflection, refraction, and Approximate Ambient Occlusion
~500MB RAM use
~Intel Quad @ 3.0Ghz
720p resolution at 1 minute a frame. (5 minute a frame when 5x motion blur is enabled)

Edit:

No crazy DoF effect on this one…  I also found out that approximate ambient occlusion causes some artifact on the car body, mainly in how it treats subtle curved panels.  So I am going back to real AO.

Those BMW Angel Eyes

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7

Continuing my work on this car, I’ve added the headlights today.  Apparently that’s what those rounded headlamps are called on a BMW – Angel Eyes.

And since a few of you asked about what lighting system I used, here is the setup I am using:

Sorry to disappoint.  Yes the car is lit with just a single Hemi light source.  (Take that David!)  The rest is done with Ambient Occlusion using an HDR image texture.