Strange Object - Not Of This World

Artwork Works in Progress
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This is an entry for Challenge #1047 Not Of This World.

I drew this object in the 80’s. I think I saw it in a dream. In 2016 I modeled it in Hexagon. I only found a .obj file for it now.

I imported the .obj into Blender 3.51, separated the blocks into individual objects, and applied materials.

Rendered with cycles, 2002 samples, composited with a mist pass.

Version 1

NotOfThisWorld-v1
NotOfThisWorld-v12560×1384 355 KB

Version 2

NotOfThisWorld-v2
NotOfThisWorld-v22560×1384 356 KB

The buildings are the same ones I used in this video.
https://vimeo.com/650734665
Credit:
Urban/City Street models
By: Evolix777
https://www.blendswap.com/blend/24622
CC-BY

I had much trouble with crashes. My screen would instantly go blank, report “no signal”, and the computer was unresponsive. A hard power off was the only way to restore it. I suspected several potential causes:

  • Blender 3.6 had a bug or required a driver update or similar. The problem also happened in 3.5 so that wasn’t it.
  • Overheating CPU or GPU. Summer is hot where I live and the coolest I could manage in the room was about 92F. But they reported around 60C and would have throttled down rather than over heat. So not it.
  • A hardware problem. That is still a possibility.
  • Something wrong with the model that crashes the GPU’s. This was the problem. After much experimenting I found that I was not importing the .obj correctly. Checking separate by object and by group worked.

Update: It is overheating. Crashed with different older blend. I watched the temps with Afterburner during a render and one gpu went to 77C and throttled its speed down some. Then crashed. I cleaned everything and it runs pretty cool now. Still not doing Blender until cooler days.

2 Likes
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Playing with volumetric fog instead of using the mist pass. Send the noise node output through a color ramp to get fog details so it doesn’t look like a mist pass.

StrangeObjectVolumetric
StrangeObjectVolumetric2560×1090 235 KB

I want to remove the reflections of the sun light from the ball but keep its light on the objects and reflections of other things. Suggestions?

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That will likely require some compositing. In a light’s settings, you can deactivate the specular, but it will be deactivated for every object. You can get what you are looking for by doing a second render of just the object alone, with the specular deactivated, and layering that on top of the first render.

For that second render, put all the surroundings in collections set to “holdout”. This will make the surroundings invisible in the render, but visible to reflections and shadows. Then, you do that second render on a transparent background and composite the result on top of the first render you already have.

1 Like