Uplifting Vibes 😎
Hope everyone is having a great day/night so far and making solid progress on their work, study or special projects.
Here's a great mellow track to help boost your mood for whatever you have happening. I've got it playing in the background as I share the latest visuals from today.
The Concept: Sci-Fi Loop
If you've been following the Blog here, then you'll know that I've been learning to use 3D modelling software like Blender to create different visuals for various parts of the MOOVPAD project, including this site itself. This is a concept from a recent tutorial I completed where the aim was to build and animate a sci-fi inspired scene, intended to run as a loop.
Above is a screen render of a single frame from the finished product, and the process wasn't too difficult.
Building the Setting
A new tool for me, the Grid Breaker add-on was used to build the meshes you see in the two layers above and left. The initial mesh objects are actually square, but they were then made to follow a circular path and their settings changed to make them blend together as seen here.
Lighting & Camera Rigging
With the scene set up, the next stage was planning out the area lighting and the path of the camera for animation. Placing these in the scene early on helps to get a mental image of what the final result might look like as you continue building and adding more details into the scene.
Materials & Textures
I've also been trying to improve my use of Blender's in-built shaders to prepare my own materials and texture effects, rather than relying too heavily on downloaded templates. What I've found so far is that with a few types of nodes in the shader graph (shown left) I'm able to generate the kinds of common materials I need. These were mentioned in earlier posts on the Blog here, so feel free to check them out.
Animating the Scene
As you might expect, a scene like this will likely take a very long time to actually render if the animation sequence is longer than 10 seconds or so. I know this from experience, with the previously completed cube animation (shown on the Home page) taking around 4 hours to render on my system (AMD 3900x and RTX 3060Ti combo). So I'll be doing the animation render sometime later, but I have it ready to go when I get the chance. The process so far though took about 30 minutes to build and prepare the scene for animation.
Stay awesome,
EMH
