Challenge #342 Voting CLOSED

Contests Weekend Challenge
1

This week’s theme: Science Fiction

Pure Entries

2

I woke up this morning and realised i’d forgotten to title my piece… it was:

You gotta have house!

3

Had to vote for RobertT this time. Not sure what the inspiration was, but definitely reminds me of “Fountains of Paradise”. Which I almost had a go at my self.

Bogey

ps, Last time I thought it might be coincidence, but It did it again. I seem to get 2 votes.

4

I think Robert has gnomes blending for him or something, he always comes out with these epic renders on such short notice.

5

Nice entries, everyone!

My entry was inspired by the concept of terraforming (making other worlds habitable).

Since the geometry was very basic in this image (aside from the mostly obscured rims encircling the planet and the mesh radial energy waves), I used around four of the six hours spent on this project working on textures, lighting, nodes, and test renders.

The planet texture is all procedural, making use of stencils and color ramps.

Using the latest Blender 2.49a+SVN, this project renders in less than 40 seconds (on an 8 core system). No ray-tracing was used to minimize render times. I tend to prefer shadow-buffered lamps anyway :slight_smile:

Whenever I get the chance and the inspiration, I would like to revisit this project some day (along with many others) and give it some more attention. I also plan to set up a “Re-rendered” area at my website where such revisited works could be seen before and after.

There’s always room for improvement :wink:

Thanks for the votes, and enjoy the rest of your week!

RobertT

6

ahhhh you have one of those octacore macs…I have been dreaming of those. unfortunately I spent all my money on musical equipment, so it will be awhile before I can afford such a beast.

7

Hi, Modron! Music is always an excellent investment.

I’m actually Blending on a PC (Xeon-based) system. Macs seem very nice, but the workstations are still quite pricey :slight_smile:

Quad-cores seem to have come down quite a bit in price. 8-core systems should come down more as well, as newer / faster / more-cores-per-chip systems become available.

I do find Blender internal render has always been dependably fast even on my laptop, and with each new version of Blender it feels a little faster.

This project was particularly expedited through the use of render layers - three of them: foreground (internal view of control room), planet being converted, and then a separate layer for energy glow.

Without the render nodes, this would have taken much longer to render.

Wherever possible, I try to take any render time saved from that kind of workflow and reinvest it in the “tweaking” phase, which in this case lasted nearly four hours :slight_smile:

One thing in particular I enjoy about the weekend challenges is that the time constraints compel us to come up with very short-term solutions and to make somewhat snappy decisions.

In many ways that general approach has helped keep a good part of my Blender works (and not just in the wc) more spontaneous and less prone to over-editing.

I’ve ruined more than a few projects by spending too much time on them long after I should have moved onto something else, but there are still projects, such as this one, I wouldn’t mind returning to in order to develop further some areas where corners had to be cut to stay within deadlines.

With Blender, the paint never dries and the clay never hardens, so we can always go back and make something worse better or vice versa :wink:

RobertT

8

i’m pretty much toast

9

hey isn’t the voting supposed to be closed by now? Shouldn’t the next challenge be announced!? I’m very excited to participate in one of these. I have been refreshing my page every 5 minutes for the new topic to come out! cool entries guys. RobertT your still is awesome.

10

That was me first time! Late afters on Friday before it started, last week was Saturday.

11

awe! totally lame! I don’t think I can do a project in 2 days. I was already planning on working on it 10 hours a day as it is.

12

It just depends. Sometimes it starts on thursday, sometimes on friday.

13

Winner: RobertT with 52% of the votes

Congrats!

Martin

14

In tribute i’m going to get around to playing with some nodes… fan-dabby-double-dozey, rock on!

15

Thanks, everyone.

I sent Theeth the topic, so you should hear it soon :wink:

RobertT

16

Congratulations RobertT. Love the way the more you look at it the more you see.
Great effort rarebit, but I guess Im a bit biased. Thats it.

17

hmmm, maybe the mystery vota… merci

i’m enjoying it so much that i’m going to fill out one of the clubs for this weeks project… (not started yet so…), but I also need to get down to some characters, so maybe i’m already about to change my mind… yep, have done! lol