Sago Lane

Again inspired by the students’ production (revolving a scene inside a shark’s mouth), I did another quick test in Blender. My goal wasn’t to recreate the shark’s mouth, but more to focus on materials, lighting and other settings to achieve a satisfying and convincing result.

Click for full version

In a scene like this different factors need to be considered; from the light sources (mainly coming from 1 side) to characteristics of materials (teeth and gums) to other real life effects (like Depth of Field).

In the animated image below I broke it down to the more important factors and passes I used for this simple test scene.

Click for full animated version

No ray tracing was used for this image.

After doing some simple benchmarks in the school I work at, I found out my pc is the slowest of all computers. With rendering it’s even 25% slower than the infamous laptops of some of the students. Another difference however is that everyone is using Maya, while I’m the only one playing with Blender. While the students struggle with their raytraced rendering (tweaking & waiting), I’m able to render out some decent non-raytraced images in very short amounts of time.

With Blenders special Strand rendering the hair and fur is no exception:

Tip: for full versions right-click on the thumbnails and select Open Link in New Window

Non-photo realistic hairball

• around 84.000 strands
• render time 56 sec
• render size HD (1920×1080)

Blond hairball

• 100.000 strands
• render time 1 min 5 sec
• render size HD (1920×1080)

My office desktop: 2GHz – 2CPUs, 2046MB RAM

I truly love Blender…

Sacha

For my first post a lighting and compositing test I did in Blender.

The model is from Bathpups, one of the student groups that are currently in production in the school I work at.

For the technical geeks:

• no raytracing
• render time 38 seconds for 720×576 on a dual core
• FSA (Full Sample Anti-aliasing) enabled, which increased render time with +/- 14 seconds