Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Nightpod

So I officially finished my first DT course: Intro to Maya 2009... over 9 hours of video tutorials. Yay! At the moment, I'm doing a relatively high quality render of a frame of the animation that I produced over the course of the course (that's alliteration, sorta). The tutorial would have had me render the full 200 frame animation, but considering that I've been rendering this one frame for half an hour and it's not halfway done yet, I think that would be a bad idea... think a week-long render here.

Anyways, in the meantime, here's a render that I did during the dynamics part of the lesson, where I simulated a lightning type effect between the engines and a smokey dust cloud from the back of the engines. Usually renders have default lighting, like the textured pods from the last post, but in this case, since the lightning effect carried its own light, the default lighting was disabled, leaving an eery nighttime looking shot that I kinda like, so here it is.



Remember, you can usually click on the images to get a larger view of the pic, but just click back to get back to the post. That sounds obvious, but when I do that, I always close the tab accidentally cause most web-apps open a new tab when you click on an image. Bah. Then I have to right-click on the tab bar and select "undo close tab" which is one of the awesomest things about firefox. Yes, I said awesomest.

So, just think, when I get my awesomest new computer, I'll be able to render out animations like this with ease, instead of waiting for an hour for a single frame.
It's gonna be sweet.

Next up.... I guess I gotta finish up color grading a little piece that Daryl and I have been working on so you can also see that. I'm pretty pleased with the effect that we achieved there, but you'll have to wait and see for that one.
I'll also edit this post to include the final image once it's done.

Alright, here it is after an hour and a bit. Comments and crits welcome as always. The background was supplied for the tutorial.


Later,
Stuart

4 comments:

  1. Nice Jorb. All I can see of the first one is a blue line. Kinda dark. I would add lots of the lightning things and thinner.

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  2. Sweet-awesome render, there... worth every minute?

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  3. Nice... I really like the motion blur. Do you have much control over that? Is it just like a post effect filter thing, or some sort of particle effect? The first one looks cool too, though I agree with Erick... might be cool to add more and smaller lightning things... though I guess the purpose of these training exercises is more just to get you familiar with the tools and how to use them all.

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  4. Thanks for the comments... yeah, I have some control over the motion blur, it's a render-time effect, so drastically increases time it takes to render. I'd like to add some more lightning effects, with branching too, though I don't know how to do the branching yet.

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