In an effort to avoid some of the problems Jason Saville (SKPjason) has been having getting his 30 minute Blender opus “The Last Outpost” out where it can be seen, I have posted it to the newsgroup ALT.BINARIES.MULTIMEDIA.SCI-FI.
It’s a RAR file in 35 parts of a 202 Meg DivX AVI with ten PAR files available if needed.
Blender was used of course… I had originally decided to use Poser for characters and integrate… but the tools in blender were sifficient enough that I was able to import human models and use blender (tho thats probably why some of them don’t move too much…
All rendering was done on a p3 600 mhz dell tower with 128 megs of ram, all video and sound editing was done on a p4 2.6 ghz 1 gig ram machine.
Tho I had worked this for quite a while… the version that I ended up putting together was done in about 7 weeks… tho I had quite some time before that for the modeling and designwork…
I used a lot of cheats in order to save time… such as re-using background plates by “flipping” them or re-sizing them… I rendered in layers so that I could composite them in varying orders for different effects and shots, and for other scenes I merely rendered a single image and “animated” it to cut down on the time it would take if I rendered each and every frame individually…
For the music I used a variety of programs… DSS on the Amiga platform, Acid and fruityloops on PC.
For the initial video edits I used Premiere. For the inital sound design I used protools (tho I ended up mixing the final soundtrack on a friends recording studio equipment)
I’d hardly call them ‘cheats.’ ‘Techniques’ would be more apt. Or, perhaps, ‘good planning.’
A computer only has so much processing time. If it’s more efficient and produces the same result to render a single frame and then use it as a backdrop to a camera move instead of rerendering the scene 50 or so times, what’s “cheating” about that?
