Dynamic Water Pillar

Artwork Animations
#1

28 hours of rendering and this animation is finally done. I started a new youtube channel I hope fill with blender tuts. I only recently finally got a cuda core gpu so I’m now able to render much quicker. I have been learning cycles for the last month or so, so that is why my channel is pretty much empty of content atm.

Tell me what you think. I appreciate any advice or thoughts you have for me.

Blender 2.68 Cycles
i5 650
6gig mem
gtx 650 Ti
About 28 hours rendering (4.5mins/frame)
Dynamic Paint about 60k faces

#2

Nice start. Is the sphere a collision object and the rectangle a control object?

#3

Interesting demo. Would you be interested in writing a “Render Check List” (sort of like a pilot’s pre-flight check list) so people could avoid making the same mistake? My sympathies. :eek::eek::eek:

#4
  1. verify your resolution/frame rate/samples/light path settings (Cycles checklist) I set my light paths to “Full Global Illuminations” when doing final renders.
  2. Make sure you have set the amount of frames correctly. By default it is set to 250 frames starting at frame 1.
  3. do all your animation keyframing BEFORE you subdivide your mesh. This allows you to test your animations in near real time and make sure it is how you want it.
  4. when your animation is perfect then save the .blend. (you should save all other .blends after this to a separate file so if there are any problems you can always fall back to that file and not have to do all the hard work over again.
  5. I used dynamic paint to achieve the effect in the video, and my mesh froze toward the end because I extended my animation and forgot to clear the cache and rebake the full 400 frames. Don’t do that =)
    **Dynamic paint
  6. verify you are rendering to the desired format ie. jpg, png, avi. I always render video to png so that if the power goes out or blender crashes I don’t lose all my whole animation just the frame it was rendering at the time.

I’ve already posted this reply once and I think I probably did it better the first time, but here is a short list of checks.

#5

Really nice work! Too bad about the crash towards the end. Did you use any time saving tricks to smooth out cycles noise on the ground texture? It looks like a glossy shader and from personal experience, that smooth looking surface is a real hassle to get noise free :wink:

#6

Sure you’re getting everything right with the render time? I’ve calculated that the animation would have to run at 14 frames/s according to your specifications, which is obviously not the case.

#7

Did you plan to make a tutorial?