MattWBradbury

It's also a nice touch to add a little bit of impurity to the reflective surfaces such as small bumps like this: Just use a material combiner (black and white for the two surfaces) and set the bump percentage and scale to the desired amount.

That would be sweet if you rendered all this in 3D. Looks like you've got one heck of a render farm going. 2 years seemed a little much, but a month is not too bad.

You're looking at a little under two years of continuous render time needed to do your minute clip. Do you need that many passes? I usually settle for about 16 passes though I've seen some people use 25 for stills.

How long is it taking you to render all of this? 1080p with 49 passes with things like AO and soft reflections could take several hours per frame.

It would be nice just to see a basic animation of this all put together (maybe just in 480x270 in shaded mode) so that we can see how the clips will work together instead of just looking at the graphics. That way it won't take a week to render out a few seconds. Your light choices look really good, though. Are you using Radisotity for these shots? If you are, I hope you have a giant render farm.

lol, that was pretty off the chain. You can do a lot with the sprites over their life like color, size, opacity. The material editor is a bit odd to work with at first, but it becomes easier the more you use it.

I messed around with some of the sprite properties, and found out what works to get that sort of look. I then opened up the smoke material off of the extra CD and modified it to make it have similar properties to my test. This is what I have come up with so far. It needs a little more tweaking, but I think it's looking good so far. HashsmokeEdited.zip

I think the smoke rising that quickly makes the car look like it has come in for a difficult landy rather than driving flat on the ground. You probably only want that smoke to rise only a little bit and have it increase in size as it gets older, say 1000% larger than when it was emitted and a lot more transparent.

Reminds me of all the retro broadcasts from the Incredibles.

I tried a different approach to clouds, but it doesn't look anywhere near as good as those clouds. I made little flashing lights behind the hill in the foreground. There was supposed to be music in the video, but for some strange reason, every time I tried to compress the video it made it sound like someone was running the song through a blender Rainy_Hills_VGA_Original.mov

It looks really detailed. Can we get a closeup on those thighs?

Interesting concept. How are you going to portray this kind of dynamic steering in a single image?

I'm not sure what Syd Mead would say if you turned in an entry of a space car wearing crocs.

No matter how they build those things, someone always figures out a way: It looks kind of like a vehicle to me. When you finish putting the three orbs together you start to model the underside which looks like a spherical wheel base. I'm thinking something like this: Furthermore, this variation is wearing Crocs:

Neat Are they falling through a resistant force?

You can get a cleaner look with radisoity if you turn up the final gathering. Set Samples to 100 or so and Jittering to 1000%. Play around with them until you get something really clean.

Can someone stop all the bagpipes in my head @_@

Awesome particle flame; I hadn't seen that before. Though if the flame needs to be reflective, the only particle that can be used are bubbles and fluid.

I don't know of any effects that would generate flames exactly like that. To get closest to that effect, I would suggest getting a looping flame animation and adding it to a layer. You can use the flame intensity to create a transparency map as well as a bump/normal map so that you get some curvature in your layer rather than it just being flat. The layer itself would be your silver reflective color, and the flame's animation would just be controlling the transparency and bumpiness.

That would be a dream come true.

It doesn't even look like you can buy single core Server CPUs anymore, and the vast majority of them on the market are quad-core. You can still find a few single core Desktop CPUs, but most are duel or quad-core. If you can handle having tons of computers in your house, it would be a great time to just buy a bunch of single core processor computers offline and use something like netrender to get the job done. Putting together a $2k single core computer form circa 2000 would probably only run you about $150; most of these single-core processors are running for less than $40.

Man, that image is looking really awesome. Have you considered rendering with Ambient Occlusion? I remember on the earlier tests of hair and ornate sprites that AO rendered them fabulously.

Very cool I'm glad to see that you're still using those EXR hyper white luminares. Did they ever implement Ambiance values greater than 100% into the surface properties? I think you could cut the render times down a bit by rendering fewer passes, or did you use that many to get rid of the aliased reflections?

So from what I understand, the netrender allows you to render many animations at once, by putting an instance of A:M on each processor? Or is this more like one single instance rendering on many processors at once?

How many frames are in the movie total?