{"id":142,"date":"2005-02-27T01:00:00","date_gmt":"2005-02-27T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.peakepro.com\/?p=142"},"modified":"2015-06-25T21:59:06","modified_gmt":"2015-06-25T20:59:06","slug":"first-blender-animation-still-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.robertpeake.com\/archives\/142-first-blender-animation-still-life.html","title":{"rendered":"First Blender Animation: Still Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

My first ever attempt at a 3D animation using Blender<\/a> came out pretty well. I decided I wanted to do a simple still life, and wanted to explore the power of Blender’s recent integration with Yafray<\/a>. I had tried my hand at a raytracing program for Mac at least a decade ago, and had always been fascinated by this particular juncture between art and technology.<\/p>\n

Details of my adventure follow:
\n
\nMy first attempt at mesh modelling an apple, before I discovered Catmull-Clark subsurfs and smoothing, looked pretty bad:<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

But thanks to innumerable quality tutorials and the Blender 2.3 Guide<\/u>, I soon got the hang of basic mesh modelling and lighting:<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

From here, I started exploring the possibilities of lighting effects, looking at nighttime lighting:<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

And daylight:<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Finally settling on a kind of dawn\/morning effect:<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Next I modelled a lamp:<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

And played with lamp lights and spotlights as well as material translucency to acheive a more believable effect:<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Finally, I added a variety of image maps to the various models in my scene to give them the illusion of realistic texture and color, including this page in the book:<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

I rendered the animation in three segments totalling about 18 hours of render time on my Powerbook G4 with a 1.25GHz PowerPC processor. Only later did I discover I probably could have acheived a similar effect using the very fast internal Blender rendering engine using environment maps for the mirror effect. Still, the end result is a decent first attempt at a simple fly-through animation.<\/p>\n

Technical note: I rendered the second and third phases long after the first phase, and somehow didn’t get the lights just right. So, rather than re-render the first 300 frames I decided to render the last 30 of those frames in that set, then use a “dissolve” effect in iMovie to seamlessly fade into the second half of the animation. Most people probably wouldn’t have noticed the lighting change at frame 301, as it’s fairly subtle, but I wanted to try my hand at a little post-processing, so I added fade-in and fade-out as well.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My first ever attempt at a 3D animation using Blender came out pretty well. I decided I wanted to do a simple still life, and wanted to explore the power of Blender’s recent integration with Yafray. I had tried my hand at a raytracing program for Mac at least a decade ago, and had always …<\/p>\n

First Blender Animation: Still Life<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5604,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17,1268],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robertpeake.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robertpeake.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robertpeake.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robertpeake.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robertpeake.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robertpeake.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robertpeake.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robertpeake.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robertpeake.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robertpeake.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}