This is my first attempt at CG effects using blender.
I just started learning blender a little less than a month ago, and just found out today about “Shadow Only” and whatnot.
The rendering is 640x480, took about 25 min. to render (2 raytraced area lights) on my computer here at work. (computer intended for “office” duties, not rendering!)
(click for microsoft avi… divx broke )
Sorry about the codec… I did render this on a windows box, and rendering in divx just gives a green screen for some reason… (I guess I should look that up, eh steve?)
Let me know what I can do to make it more realistic. I’m bringing the .blend stuff home so I can use my machine to mess with it. I’d like to end up with a 30 second clip of the monkey being tossed on the table so I can learn a bit more about motion blur, paths, and overall CG.
Great job. Is this your first WIP thread on elysiun? Because that is very good. The softness of the shadow looks very nice. One suggestion I have is to double check and see if your main light source is coming from the same area where the lighting enters through the window in the real background. Also, you might want to add more textures to the monkey to make it look a bit more real. You might want to lower the energy level of your area lamps to soften the monkey shadow up just a bit. I like the video a lot, it doesn’t look like a first attempt at all. Keep up the good work!
Thanks for the compliments, and also for the tips.
I’ve still got tons to learn, as you can see. I think when I positioned the lights, I was trying to copy the stapler’s shadow, but I didn’t take into consideration the back end of the stapler was tapered, making the shadow appear to go in a different direction.
My only other question is: if I had a very shiny monkey, and I reproduced a 3d model of the stapler and the table with appropriate textures, could I make the monkey move around the table and go next to the stapler and show reflections as though it really were next to the stapler? I would definitely want to stick with using the real stapler, and not the 3d one, but just use the 3d one to cast light onto suzanne.
And yes, the shadow is horrible, and no, I haven’t had the chance to play with yafray yet. The only thing I rendered was a textured monkey head (how original!) that was shiny. Rendering with blender showed the texture and shinyness, but yafray just came out flat grey. I guess I should read up on how to use it before I click render…
I haven’t figured out how to get yafray to render surfaces set as “shadow only”, not to mention surfaces with video or image content as a background… kind of weird… I’ve got to be missing something.
But I finally installed it properly and was able to crank out the simplest of tests:
I must say I enjoy yafray more now that I know a little about how it works! Now if I could only learn to composite with it!
maybe one of the problems is that yafray doesn’t support PNG images as textures/background images…
My sailboat has a few textures that are images, and they’re either jpeg or targas…
www.goeland86.ath.cx/project/sailboat/photo/sailboat-yafray0091.png
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