Dronefish

He's a tiny spying device for the Navy. He works so hard. Dronefish spent weeks swimming and spying collecting all the information! He's so proud and happy. Now he's tired and old and all he wants to finally have a nice sleep :(

Solar World W.I.P

Decided on the easy route, irradiance map/light cache and moving objects rendered in separate layers.
Few stills from the current work:

Solar World (GI VS BAKING)

A quick test of render speeds between very low GI settings and a high quality baked version turns up interesting results. In both cases each test video took less than 3 minutes to render, at a guess of a full 5 minutes film render time being about 12 hours this is more than acceptable compared to the previous estimate of 500 hours!

The shocking quality of the GI render almost suits the scene as a dusty dirty eastern land. Clean moving objects could perhaps be composited in post.

On the other hand, baking requires a lot of effort and seems to be throwing up a mixture of results. Obviously more time needs to be spent learning the techniques but the fact that moving objects become a nightmare with baked scenes is wavering me towards low end GI. Perhaps a composite of the two effects could be the way forward.


Naff GI test:

Solar World

I'm slowly planning a video depicting a foreign world with a culture based entirely on Solar Power. Due to the immense number of frames and highly detailed environment careful planning is needed so this project doesn't take years to complete. It's also given me an excuse to use texture baking for the first time in an attempt to speed up render time.

Replicating this image of Therme Vals in 3D

 

Royal Theatre Finished!