We were rejected from every film festival out there for being exactly the wrong length (too long for a short, too short for a feature), so now we release it to you, the internet!
Say it in a loud, booming voice: THE IIINNNTERNET!
That’s you. Don’t you feel proud?
The atmosphere was probably the trickiest part, followed closely by that darned specular highlight on the ocean.
For those of you Lightwave users, here are the scene/object/texture files if you would like to use this either directly or as a starting point for your own Earth or other planet.
Awhile back, some yutz flagged my Flickr account because of (I’m guessing) one of the five pictures of naked people I have (out of over 400 photographs). Instead of investigating to make sure I wasn’t just posting pornography, Flickr immediately marked my account as “moderated”.
What this means is this: You can’t see my photos on Flickr unless you have a Flickr account and altered your default moderation setting away from “safe”.
No e-mails, no warning, just a sudden shut-off of my photos to the vast majority of the internet. I was paying Flickr for a pro account and they just up and metaphorically slapped me in the face.
So I’m voting with my wallet. I have finally transferred all of my pictures to my shiny new SmugMug account and have deleted my Flickr account. Now everyone can gaze upon… uh… well, a bunch of pictures I took, I guess.
Q: Where did this rock come from?
A: I chipped it off the big boulder, at the center of the village.
Q: Where did the boulder come from?
A: It probably rolled off the huge mountain that towers over our village.
Q: Where did the mountain come from?
A: The same place as all stone: it is the bones of Ymir, the primordial giant.
Q: Where did the primordial giant, Ymir, come from?
A: From the great abyss, Ginnungagap.
Q: Where did the great abyss, Ginnungagap, come from?
A: Never ask that question.
(From Semantic Stopsigns at LessWrong.com)
Renderer: Lightwave 9.6
Render time: 6 minutes
Lighting: 3-bounce radiosity
Object source: Vue 8
WTF: Trunk/Branches suck. Must determine best method to fix this.
Nifty: Custom translucency material for the leaves turned out nicely.
My initial attempts at creating this scene resulted in week-long render times. Once I got my settings tweaked correctly, this image only took 24 minutes to render. Woo! Yay!
Edit: This program is far too much fun.
Edit 2: I have re-rendered the above image with radiosity (51 hours, 21 minutes), resulting in much better lighting/shading in the shadowed areas:
After fighting through zillions of little buttons and settings, I finally got yer basic landscape generated and rendered using Vue 8. Hooray!
Finally, it is complete! My first subdivision model:
This represents roughly 8-9 hours worth of work (both modeling and texturing, spread out over two weeks thanks to some long hours keeping me at my day job). The shape itself is simple enough, but I went through several iterations, figuring out what worked and what didn’t. Neither did I have any kind of design plan, so building it was rather like jogging through an obstacle course at night while blindfolded and drunk.
This is also a good demonstration of just how much a difference materials, displacement maps, and lighting make, as seen in the final render:
What does any good geek do when learning subdivision modeling? Build a spaceship, of course.
Part 1 I call the Engine Block. The rest of the ship will eventually be crafted around this center core.
Lightwave 9.6, 100% procedural, heavy use of the IFW2 Node Plug-in Library.
(continue reading for images of the node layouts used to create the above image)
