Two different versions, one B&W with ambient Occlusion lighting, and another with materials from the Precious Metals materials pack from http://www.freewebs.com/blendermats/.
I am not happy with the “spinner”, I think I am getting “z-fighting” effects where there are overlapping planes in the array modifier I am using to create it. I have tried some other things, but still not getting what I am after. I am thinking I may use discrete “tick marks” and animate them with layers like I did the numbers. I shall have to experiment further. (I am currently working on a “tick mark” version.)
AO version - took something like six hours to render 301 frames.
Metallic version - maybe two hours, was considerably faster than the AO version.
No script. I just typed out the numbers 0-9, then separated them so each was it’s own object, duplicated the “1”, did Center New, then, in object mode, stacked them all on top of each other on a single layer (the number “10” was a single object made with the “0” and the duplicate “1”), then I used Layer keyframes to make them appear and disappear at the correct time. I.e. at frame one, the number 10 is on layer one at frame 1 and is there until frame 30, then at frame 31, it is moved back to the layer with all the numbers and the number 9 is moved to layer one for 30 frames, and so on.
I like what you did, and it definitely would be faster…but what if you want to shoot from different camera angles or use a lighting setup other than AO? Can you still composite things, or would it not work right with the shadows?
The more complex the animation, the more hard is to compose it from separate layers
Anyway, using the Sequense editor and Node editor where possible is faster, than rendering the whole animation scene.
