You Walked Down the Wrong Path

Thought I’d share a super quick camera motion test. The original purpose was to track some video footage and use the track data to just get a nice feeling camera - essentially turning my phone into a virtual camera with extra steps. As much as it was motion tracked, everything in the video is pure-Blender and the tracking-target was entirely removed.

I put a super rough building together (some walls are still a single plane, that’s how rough it was), slapped some textures on without caring too much; causing some areas to not line up as well as reverse letters :laughing:

I loved the lighting and volumetrics, and I was proud with how the moths turned out with how quickly I made them and how awful the animation looks up-close. I stretched the centre of the wings down, instead of rotating the whole wing, hoping it would make it look more skittish as well as blurring without blur. The intended effect was achieved but only at high fps and distance of course!

Unfortunately getting a high quality Cycles render would take over 100 hours so I’ve only rendered it at 2 samples, can you guess which is Eevee at over 300 samples and which is Cycles? :wink:

  • Also please note that there is a lighting error where it suddenly gets much brighter, this is me forgetting to parent an emission cube to the camera and once the camera gets inside of the cube it becomes much brighter. I fixed it after but I have spent too much time on this little test to allow myself to waste another 3-4 hours rendering something so small. How the lighting looks in the beginning is the intended effect!

Improvements if I were to do it over/spend more time on it:

  • Fix the architecture - both model and texture wraps
  • damage the architecture to make it feel more real
  • put more time into the moths
  • make the moths move more realistically
  • make the lights flicker - this place is clearly unloved so the lights would be pretty old and burnt
  • add graffiti, rubbish, stickers, etc to make it feel more real