Short Intro of myself

For the past couple months while working with the College of Arts and Sciences I have been doing 3D animation and some 2D artwork.  This blog will be specifically discussing my 3D endeavors in Blender.

Onto the 3D

To start, I will be using a 3D text model I made for an A&S Wired background. What you see in the picture is an optimized representation of the object and its material for easy editing purposes. That means, when the scene is rendered its appearance will be drastically different. My case and point. You will notice that its just an outline and this is because of its material and lack of light. In short, material means its shine, color, transparency, mirror, etc. will be shown when rendered. In this case, my object is emitting a glow around its contour and is transparent. With no light source, you will only see its glowing contour when rendered. If I were to simply add a light source that would be rather boring, so I want to fiddle around with particle effects to make the text appear in a more interesting way.

One way blender handles particles is by emitting them from the faces of a mesh or a 3D object (a plane in this scenario). Leaving it as the default particles means they will appear as fireflys that are visible even without light and give off their own light. I do not want the particles to be seen floating from bottom to the top of the screen so I will be deviating from the default settings. Instead, I replace the normal halo (fire flys) particles with light source objects. I do this because they do not have a structure that is directly seen but still give off light that will affect the Wired text.

With everything in place, I now start rendering or the “magic” whereby the computer can take long periods of time ray tracing each frame at 24 frames per second over an 8 second period.  At such a low resolution (and other settings) I was able to get the render time down to 1 minute for this test render. (First Animation)

It’s way too fast, after a few more test renders and modifications to speed I was able to get this render which took about 10 minutes to render at the same resolution but to 16 seconds. (Final animation)

This result was closer to my liking. Perhaps too slow in the first few seconds but rendering can try your patience. Despite the loading, the outcome is worth the wait. See ya next time!

Note: I was having trouble getting my images to appear and so I apologize for having them hyperlinked.