Hi,
you may remember Elisabeth Warfield, the first created character of my Flying Circus project. Elisabeth could be the daughter of Amelia Earhart and Indiana Jones !
Elisabeth is a pilot. She is a flight instructor at the "Red Geese Flying Circus" set in Canada, and a specialist in aerial photography. So, when she is not doing aerobatics with her favorite airplane named "Red goose" she is sometimes hired as an aerial photographer by the department of archaeology of the Blenderian Museum.
Archaeology is one of her hobbies, and she likes to travel around the world. So she is pleased to do this kind of works for professor Octanius !
This time, she has accepted to convey to the archeological site in Sahara some precious scientific instruments, but as the airplane she had rented can't land in desert, she has to finish the travel by car. Unfortunately, things don't always go as expected...
As they are telling a story, I will try to uplad the images in inverse number order, on several posts. Proof screens containing rendering informations will be posted separately with same numbers as images.
All the images have been rendered in 2560x1440, and reduced to 1280x720 to reduce both weight an fireflies. Everything modelled and textured by me. All textures are hand made or procedural. No photo textures used, except the clouds in background behind the airplane on the last image. This texture is made from a photo that I took myself, andis mapped on a half transparent and emissive plane, bringing some light in the scene, allowing to adjust the color of ambient light, and also allowing the physical sky of the environment lighting to pass through a bit as well.
No post-production at all. The only tasks done with Photoshop have been format reduction from 2560x1440 to 1280x720, and adding signature.
Smoke and propeller motion blur effect are textured on transparent planes. The Smoke has been created in Particle illusion and saved as a Png image. This image has been mapped on a plane placed in the scene at the location of the smoke cartridge, and rendered like any other object, thanks to the transparent alpha, allowing the smoke to cast a smooth shadow.
The view through binoculars has been taken through a rectangular plane with cutout holes, placed in the scene itself (only high aperture value and camera placed close to the mask - no external treatment), as shown on the proof screens. Except the car and the body of Elisabeth that I had made before, everything has been modelled in Blender from scratch for the competition. Elisabeth has a brand new head with facial animation.
Most scenes have between 3.5 to 5.3 millions of triangles and have been rendered in average in 2 hours. Some at 16000spx with less light have required 4 hours.
I had constantly to remove and add objects from the scenes to save memory, and also I often decreased the level of subsurfacing for objects seen from distance.
Doing that, I often had to setup again many materials lost and I wasted a lot of time ! I tried to save materials in ocm files, but never achieved to reload them. I got an error message that I don't remember, so I will have to investigate more when I'll have more time.
Finally (but too late) I discovered a trick that I can share with you : Just create some small faces hidden under the ground and supporting materials samples that you don't want to delete from the scene. This way, you can delete as many objects as you need and add them later again to the scene, and the ocs file will keep memory of your materials settings !
French Blender user - CPU : intel Quad QX9650 at 3GHz - 8GB of RAM - Windows 7 Pro 64 bits. Display GPU : GeForce GTX 480 (2 Samsung 2443BW-1920x1600 monitors). External GPUs : two EVGA GTX 580 3GB in a Cubix GPU-Xpander Pro 2. NVidia Driver : 368.22.