Animating the beast

mike pan — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 22:53:05 +0000

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.

Project Durian, aka Sintel, is gaining momentum!

mike pan — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:00:20 +0000

Movie making is an expensive business. Blender Foundation’s upcoming short film Sintel is no different. Luckily the Dutch Film Funds had just approved another grant to help extend the project to June 2010, this much-needed funding might even allowing them to hire more artists.

Seriously, if you haven’t pre-ordered the DVD, do it! For 34.00 Euro, you get not only the movie, but every file, texture and asset that is used to create the movie. Isn’t that super cool? This DVD will probably be the best (and cheapest) learning resource for Blender you’ll ever find.

mike's digital anthology » animation

Animating the beast

Project Durian, aka Sintel, is gaining momentum!