Alien Homage

This is something I modelled in 3d Coat but lit, rendered (and later animated) in Blender. There’s fairly minimal Post work, just some adjustments and extra smoke (but there’s still a fair bit of smoke coming form Blender itself via a smoke simulation). The scene was around 9 million faces and really pushed Blender/Eevee to its limits. I had to disable the undo shortcut because an undo took up to a minute!

Here’s a quick animation of the scene in which I did a bit of post in After Effects but then exported the frames with sound from Blender. I tried to get it to render as lossless via H.264 but it still lost a bit of quality, especially for the actual animation. So I need to look into that…

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You can read more about this work on BlenderNation:

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You’re on the #featured row! :+1:

oh nice, awesome :slight_smile:

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Very nice! i really like the athmosphere!

Great work, but not a very good showcase for EEVEE if it took 8-10 hours to render 240 frames. An offline Raytracer could match that. Can you go into a little more detail on how you set EEVEE up for render? :+1:

The only thing I can think of is the 4 smoke simulations and the motion blur? A single image still only took a few seconds at around 5k pixels. Was just the animation that was slow.

Thanks. I didn’t realise you rendered at 5K. That would go towards explaining it all right. EEVEE still has a long way to go performance wise, it seems.

The thing is though is that it’s a ‘real-time’ engine so technically should run at least 24fps. I certainly wouldn’t expect this, but what sort of speeds did you get without the sims and at 1080p?

Sorry, I haven’t really used EEVEE much and my point of ref is UE4. When I think sims I think real-time sprite-based sims rather than full physical sims.

yeah the performance is unforgivable at times. Like I’ve said previously, a single undo took around 30 seconds. Now, the viewport is just the viewport in terms of real-time render. The 5k is when I click ‘render’ and it outputs a separate finished render window. If you look at the video above, it’s sped up but it shows me moving around the viewport. I think it’s sped up double time.
Oh but the animation was at 1080p, and I’m not sure of fps as I don’t know where it says that.

Right, so your 5K renders were still images and your animations were 1080p? Yes, the VP is the VP, but in terms of a true real-time render engine the VP and the render are essentially the same thing(think game engine)

EEVEE is something I definitely have to study for rendering animations as you did. Thanks for the info.

If you go into prefs>viewport>display>playback fps This will show you the VP fps in realtime as you play an animation in the VP.

It’s obviously your physical simulations that ballooned your render time. This is the difference between a real-time sim render(2D sprites/cards/imposters) and an actual full offline simulation.

8-10 hours for 240 frames is insanely high for a 1080p ‘real-time’ render. Any modern GPU raytracer could rip this rendertime to shreds.

This is the kind of homage to the legendary alien franchise that command respect! You nailed the atmosphere perfectly!

Thanks bud!

I would hire you on the spot for any upcoming Alien movies!: :ok_hand:

ha thanks. Well a games company recently announced an opening for a concept artist for the next Alien game, I applied and they never replied. But… that was before I did this :stuck_out_tongue:

Well i wish you all the luck and i am certain that one day it will happen with the talent you have!

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Although I’m not a big Alien Fan This is good work. Just glad I’m not the guy standing there lol.