For future reference, this site is great for finding royalty free/cc images for your work: http://search.creativecommons.org
That’s very helpful too, thanks!
Played with some shadows for 20 mins, couldn’t find a good balance. I have one light overhead that’s messing up all the shadows, going to have to switch to a 3 point system but I don’t want to.
Your wood looks much better.
Thanks, set me back a week XD I’ll fix the shadows later today, but besides that any suggestions? I don’t particularly like the gabions (left) but they would be the highest poly object in the whole scene because of the wicker weave they should have. What do you think of them?
anyone know anything about clouds or should I open yet another help thread
de[emdes what you want them for, if its just the sky you can composite an image into the background, if you want actual smog and smoke clouds, you can composite an image in. or you can use particle volumetrics to create smokey clouds that interact with your scene, theres plenty of tuts around for using the smoke sim, theres no need to go through everything here.
Of course the ground needs a texture and the snow needs to be smoothed with a spec/bump map applied, but this is really shaping up. yeah the sky is not really a big deal. I’d just put an HDRI or something in and call it good.
Ok, I’ll add an HDRI. I was thinking of a particle system cloud, since the clouds matter a lot in this movie and I can’t simply put in a skybox. I don’t want to spend too much render time on a particle system, not sure how I’ll render the whole thing for that matter.
Actually, the HDR doubled my rendertime, I can’t add it. Main problem is, if I render this myself, within my poly budget and low effects, I can render 6 seconds a day with my computer running on full. That’s not even worth it. Should I just rent a render farm?
Not making much progress, as I have about an hour a day. Today I did the unwrapping of 2 grenades, still going to have to tweak the settings to make them look real but here it is:
some cigs in the background, and some bullets. Looks real at a 10% zoom!
Any suggestions?
posting a quick 5 minute photoshop paint to try and add some atmosphere. mood, and depth into it. i hope it helps.
How long is the whole thing. Are you using Blender Render or Cycles?
Mgolden - looks great, how could I do this in the compositing?
Brent - Blender Render, and ideally I wanted to make a 15 minute movie.
blender render is soooooo slow. I was going to offer to help you render, but I doubt very srsly that my computer would do any better than yours. I’m sure though if you prepare all your settings for your final render and then save a new .blend and post that here myself and other would be more than happy to render you a few frames. and put em in our drop boxes for you to later download and compile. Sounds complex, but its really no different than you rendering 27000 images yourself. they’d all be numbered the exact same as if you did them. At least I think they would. Maybe someone will comment after me who has done something like that before with a clear answer. But then you just download em all and run em through the final video pass to make em H.246 or w/e.
Blender render is slow? what is the alternative? And of course, I’d have this scene looking real if I was able to render with a NASA computer. It sucks having to limit your visuals so much.
Cycles ofc(of course) with GPU enabled. Unless you are using GPU enabled blender render. I think they just implemented that actually. Do you happen to have an nvidia gfx card? If so you could be rendering many, many times faster. I doubt the scene above would take me more than 2mins to render. Depending on polycount and such ofc. I don’t have any badass system myself. Just an upgraded Dell i5 650. Upgraded with new case, 650watt psu, and a cheap gtx 650ti gpu. But still it is 100x faster to render in cycles than before I added the nvidia card. So worth it. I just wish I had gotten the gtx 650ti Boost instead.
Scene above was a min and 25 for full screen. I had an Nvidea but got rid of it.
Well that doesn’t sound bad, but I imagine then that the scene would render in a few seconds in cycles. Depends on number of samples. You can never tell with the shitty quality of forum pics but it looks like your render would be little more than 200 samples which is what I typically test with. My final renders are at least 1000 samples. What card did you throw out? What did you replace it with. Next upgrade go back to nvidia. I’m glad I did even though on the benchmarks it looked like my gtx 650ti had little more than my ati 5570. I have noticed a pretty good bump in system performance and ofc blender is WAY faster now.
I threw out a gt520 (complete trash) in exchange for a radeon hd 7770.
This scene in 1/4 size is:
26 seconds for internal
5 minutes, 25 seconds with no textures for cycles.
This explains two things, why I’ve been having so much trouble with realistic lighting (its internal lol) and why I chose internal. Help?