Good news! I’ve finished the live-action celebration video, and my new external hard drive has arrived! It has 1 Terabyte of capacity, while my computer itself only has about 350 GB’s. This means I can clear out a lot of space on my poor desktop and resume the bonus 1,000 car drop video!
Here’s the 1,000 candle and paintball video:
Great stuff i wish id have just one of those cars and make vidoe game with it lol i like the dreamy fantasy idea and now that your pc will be up and ready i will be looking forward to the outcome good luck and happy paintball lol 
Thank you, bluexray! Yes, it would be a lot of fun to drive this sports car in a video game; I’ve made a very simple car rig in blender before, but it was very basic. I wish I knew how to make the cars behave like they do in GTA V, that would be a lot of fun!
Welcome to the forum!
Yes indeed thank u very much for the welcome, ive seen alot of crazy scripts in the form and one of them was an automatic car rig script but i dont know it realy does work i dont have a car model. I real thought rigging cars was easy 
That was funny James, it looks like those kids had fun with it as well. Glad you didn’t burn your house down with those candles:)
That was nice, James, and congratulations again on the 1000 subscribers. And man, how these candles burned.
bluexray - I would recommend downloading a car model from Blend Swap (that’s where I got this one) and using that. If you search for “blender car rig” on youtube you can find several videos that take different approaches to it. Some give better results than others. Mike Pan had a pretty decent car game available in the downloads section on his site, but I don’t know if it’s there anymore.
harley - Thanks! I was disappointed the gun stopped working after only a few dozen shots (it had a leak which emptied both compressed gas tanks very quickly), but was glad that we had enough people on hand to manually throw paintballs. I’ve said it before, when we get to 10,000 subscribers, we’ll rent guns from the local paintball field and fire 10,000 paintballs. That will teach John to wait until the day of the shoot to check his gun!
minoribus - Thank you! The candles burned quite a lot more than I expected; we didn’t even get them all lit before we decided to start blowing them out. Fortunately, it was John’s house and not mine, so I wasn’t worried about the ceiling catching on fire.
This idea is funny. 1 car model = cool. 1000 cars falling on top of each other? I don’t even think there is a word for that.
Thanks, Scotchtapeworm! I wanted to do something I hadn’t seen before, so your words encourage me that I’m heading in the right direction.
The render times are very long, for the shot that is rendering presently, the average time has been 8 1/2 minutes per frame. Sometime next year I may invest in Octane, as I would like to reduce render times as much as possible for these all-CG videos. Luckily, Andrew Price just posted his Cycles baking tutorial, so hopefully that will help me in the mean time.
So it’s rendering now, that’s good news 
But over 8 minutes is really long per frame. I dont know how much octane costs, but wouldn’t it also be an option to invest in hardware? Or to use a render farm service?
I’m really curious, James, how this video will turn out. Did you solve the color issues, btw?
Most of the shots are closer to 3-4 minutes per frame, this particular shot is brutal because it’s a closeup of the car:
I’ve taken the clips into Premiere Pro and exported a video, and the colors seem much more accurate. I haven’t checked them directly against the stills, but the car didn’t look orange anymore, so that’s a good sign! The issue in After Effects may have been related to how AE handles color management.
I’ve considered using a render farm service, but I feel this project will be done too soon to warrant spending the money. I do plan on investing in new hardware later this year or early next year- my current PC is still very useful, but there are certain things that it simply is not very efficient at. With big scenes, photogrammetry scan generation, HD files and complex simulations, it slows down. So I’d like to build another computer that will be used only for 3D stuff, and with the power to tackle heavy VFX for my films for the next 4 or 5 years at least! Hopefully part of that system will (eventually) include multiple GPUs for rendering. From what I have seen of Octane, the results are very fast, and look very good. I will continue to use Cycles, but for certain videos, a real-time GPU renderer would be the better way to go, especially for the VR movies I want to start creating. Those will demand much higher resolutions than just 1280x720, so speed in rendering will be essential!
I’ve finally gotten all frames of the intro rendered. I would estimate it took about 48-50 hours of rendering to get to this point. There are still some “clean ups” that have to be made, where I’ll have to re-render some frames due to the undercarriage moving around unexpectedly. I don’t know why it’s doing that, it’s not parented to anything animated, and it has no keyframes. I’m probably just missing something. Fortunately, I just found out about rendering with Borders in Blender, and that is a huge time saver.
To fix the jumping undercarriage, I just moved the camera keyframes ahead enough to where it has settled down (about 50 frames ahead) and render from that point. I should have the fixes done tomorrow night. Then I can start bringing in the remaining 999 cars!
The car is looking wonderful in this close up takes. I really like the car paint shader. And the color is nice.
The only thing that makes me wonder is why the windows doesn’t reflect the environment. The headlights have a little reflection on them, but the windows not. I went back through your last posts and I saw that the reflection of the environment is missing also in these renders. I’m sure you decided that for some reason, but I wonder why? Did it save some render time this way?
True…
lol, didn’t think of that. good on you Sterlingroth.
Cheers,
Jim
Yes, that is very helpful, I forgot you could specify unique colors with the Color Ramp node. Thanks for that, I’ll give it a try!
minoribus - I remember thinking the same thing when I first started rendering with the current windscreen material. It only uses a simple Glossy node, with a very dark gray color and roughness of 0.005. I don’t know why it doesn’t appear more reflective, maybe because it’s so dark, and because of the angle of it.
One thing I have noticed, the reflections that do appear on it are very stretched, almost like an anisotropic reflection would be. I know the windscreen mesh is much lower poly than the rest of the car, perhaps that has something to do with it.
Thanks James
With the opening sequence pretty much done, I began work on the rigid body shots. Currently I’m using a combination of mid-poly and low-poly versions of the car, but once I get past about 100 cars, Blender freezes up. Buying more RAM would solve the immediate problem (I only have 3 GB’s, so there is a lot of room for workspace improvement), but I have to still be able to render on my GPU. So the better alternative is to swap out the mid-poly models as early as possible in the sequence- maybe even entirely. The cars fall so fast, I don’t even know if there will be a noticeable difference in the video. I also need to update the random paint shader.
Here is a frame from tonight. Low poly cars are in the foreground, mid-poly in the background. 100 cars total:
Should it not be the other way around???
Low poly in the background and Mid-High poly in the foreground???
cheers,
So the better alternative is to swap out the mid-poly models as early as possible in the sequence- maybe even entirely. The cars fall so fast
I do think you can get away using lower poly for the drop, as long as you incorporate motion blur.
Buying more RAM would solve the immediate problem (I only have 3 GB’s, so there is a lot of room for workspace improvement)
Ram is pretty cheap these days James, I would think you should definitely should bump that up considerably if possible.
