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It had been a long time since I’d been to the beach, so I was excited to get down there as early as possible on the first morning. St Lucia is a place with huge empty beaches, just next to an estuary where hippos, crocodiles and sharks roam the river by day and the small town streets by night. Continue Reading…
Now before you shout me down with your “Blender can do that!” patriotism, let me first explain how you would do it in Blender: So that works, sure, but if you’re looking for something really quick and easy that gives you a huge amount of optional control over the output file, give our friend FFmpeg a try! Continue Reading…
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Went on another holiday recently, this time to the small town of St Lucia in KwaZulu Natal. A long drive there, but turned out to be a really nice, simple place.
This pano is of the interior of the room we stayed in for a few days. I figured the opposing sources of cold natural light and warm man-made light was rather nice.
Several great beaches there as well, but you’ll see more of that in the next pano ;)
Also, I’m surprised this one turned out so well, it’s quite a small space with lots of straight lines nearby, I was expecting my lack of a pano head to be a real issue when stitching.
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Turns out pretty scenery does actually make for nice image-based-lighting ;)
I went on holiday with my family last weekend to the Golden Gate Highlands National Park, just North of Lesotho and down the road from Bethlehem (not that one).
I took a crapload of photos that I’ll upload sometime, surprisingly even more than I did when I went to see Rex in Scotland for three weeks (which I suppose I never mentioned here), but that’s probably because many of them were sets of different exposures as well as two (HDR) timelapses and two of these HDR panos (yes, another one coming in a few days alas, that second one failed :/ I accidentally twisted the lens to a higher focal length and thus there was not enough overlap to stitch with)
Last weekend’s challenge on BA was themed Conciliate – which is basically the root word for reconcile – and means to stop someone being angry, or make them a friend.
I had something a bit more ambitious in mind, but I worked all day Saturday and Sunday and could only get this far. So, I’ll continue this later when I have some more time!
This is actually the second time I’ve modeled a Companion Cube… no idea what happened to the other one, but it probably had crap topology anyway :P I’ll upload this one (and the cake) to blendswap sometime soon.
Most of you have probably downloaded the 2.70 RC by now and probably started playing around with volumetrics in cycles. Immediately you probably noticed how slow it renders, although that was probably expected. Here are the results of a little test I did to find out exactly how to speed up volume rendering for the world up so that it’s actually usable.
The very first and foremost thing you need to know about volumetrics is the difference between Homogeneous and Heterogeneous volumes. Basically, a volume where the density is driven by some texture is a heterogeneous one, and a volume with consistent density is a homogeneous one. The difference in render time and quality is… well, quite drastic:
Homogeneous (2m 40s, 512 samples) vs Heterogeneous (1h 4m 55s, 128 samples)
Yep, you read that right. Under 3 minutes for homogeneous volume and over an hour for a quarter of the samples in the heterogeneous volume. The heterogeneous render seems to have a less dense volume, and I guess it does since it was driven by a noise texture where I couldn’t easily control the density and honestly couldn’t be bothered to wait long enough to give it a decent try. Continue Reading…