It seems all that I’m currently working on is my Apartment in Blender, which is only half true, there are or were other projects which will all become their spotlight here as well, but slowly adding more details to my living room and making it look more and more real is so much fun.
The next step will be to find a way on how to add all those bottles and glasses to the bar without adding a ton of new objects and faces which could really make rendering those images a loooooong process. Maybe some array modifiers combined with clever inclusion of images might do the trick.
I added more details to my living room, especially in the TV area, and played around with lighting a lot more. I realized that instead of using faces for lighting with the emission shader, I should start using the light objects properly, this really decreased the noise in the images with far fewer render cycles.
In April I had this idea to create my whole apartment in Blender, and render it in miniature form. But, I will add enough details to the objects so that I can render close up shots as well any maybe use my digitized apartment in some form for movies.
For quite some time I tried to create that lamp I’m having above my bar and today I finally figured out how to model it. I’m quite happy with the result so I created this moody shot of my bar.
I made a new render with better light bulbs, much better this way.
I thought it would be nice to make a recap once again (mentioned this in yesterday’s blog post, this was written mainly before that one), the last one I did was in December 2018 I think. But since I did so much in the last month I thought I’d go through it again, you know, just so that I can see everything I’ve accomplished. By the way, the photograph has no correlation to today’s post, I just thought Grissu looks kinda sweet.
SoaPatrickSeven
I know I’ve released SP7 in march but so many additional features were added during the first part of April, in fact, there is nothing left for me to work on which feels really nice. It finally gave me time to focus on other stuff. A complete list of changes can, of course, be found in the log.
There are still sometimes ideas in my head to keep adding new stuff or making a complete overhall of the website, but frankly, I’m thankful my mind is focused on other stuff, finally!
Blender
Who knew this special situation would lead me to start working with Blender again. I know that initially, I thought my mac wouldn’t be able to handle it but it turns out I had to understand Blender a bit better again and realized what I have to tweak to make it work. It still takes a lot of time to render images and even longer to render animations, but there is a plan in place to change that in the future.
I’ve started with simple shapes, like my office then went on to create, or start, my whole apartment in miniature form. From that, I went on to more complex ones like glass and pepperoni (or pepper or whatever people call it), created a goody for a side project, and ended up doing my own version of Bender in 3D. I also started to play around with camera tracking and adding models into real live footage and animate them there. This is where the render time blew up and where I can’t wait for a proper Blender machine.
camera tracking and Blender object included
I’m so invested in Blender it’s crazy, I keep being glued to the monitor and always try to improve my images and learn new stuff, hopefully, this keeps going. But the coolest thing is mixin real live footage with animation or making complete animations, so many possibilities to make cool stuff.
Shooting Movies
I didn’t really finish anything here but started quite a few projects. I’m not sure if all of them will ever see the light of day but it was important for me to pick up the camera again, play around with it and see what’s possible. But I realized once again that being behind the camera, choosing angles and compositions is the thing I love, and being in front of the camera and ‘acting’, prevents me from successfully doing that in an efficient way. (with Race I was able to do that and I loved it)
But nontheless, there are some clever ideas lingering in my head and some stuff was already shot (some needs to be reshot) but I didn’t want to rush anything, so I will take my time and finish them when I feel like they are ready to move forward.
So….
My goal beginning in April (or was it the end of March?) was to get into a routine and actually use this free time and do stuff. I mean I could just lean back and watch TV all the time but I wanted to do stuff with all my free time and I think looking back at the last 30 days, I really did that. Now I look forward to the next 30 days and what funky stuff I will produce in that time frame.
Ok, that wasn’t actually planned, there’s a draft somewhere for a blog post about everything that happened in April, but I never really got to finish it because this beast here kept me busy for the last 3 days.
What started as a test with certain Blender techniques, turned into this huge project with animation and camera moves (even different ones) and too many render minutes.
Once everything was rendered, I started After Effects where I added the slight camera shakes, sound effects, some grain, and the overall edit. Maybe I will go into more detail on how everything came together with some images of the different stages of the whole scene in Blender. But now my eyes hurt and I need to see and hear something else besides car rushing past me.
Instagram Feed
If you have the time and feel like it, why don’t you follow me on Instagram?
