Research and Inspiration
I focused on rendering this week so I found inspiration and guidance from several Blender tutorials on the best way to render a quality animation. In the end the videos/links I found to be the most helpful are listed below:
How to Render Animations in Blender
FCPX: Creating a video from an image sequence
Importing Image Sequences in FCPX
Process and Progress
In my final week I was able to finish my 3D animation and begin the rendering process, which obviously took a lot longer than I expected. I also had several hiccups along the way and the first 8 or so hours of rendering were completely pointless as it wasn’t rendering the proper layers or actions. I even had it running on a few computers in an attempt to get the render done quicker. What a waste 🙁
It took me a while to figure it out but I was able to find the issue, which revolved around loading the file onto a more powerful computer and making sure to reload it as a trusted file before starting any rendering. I ended up using one of the Mac Pros in Sturm 211 and being able to use the GPU compute cut down on my render time drastically from close to 2 minutes a frame to about 35 seconds a frame. It still around 22 hours to render the whole animation.
I also wanted to get some better pictures of my work so I invested in some background material and LED lights to take photos of each of the physical pieces. They came out a lot better than I expected and much better than any of the previous shots I’ve shared on my blog. Definitely going to be adding this process to all my future documentation. I enjoyed using this setup and now I just need to get better at setting it up (specifically the lighting).
Reflection
At the beginning of this project I had minimal experience in 3D printing, 3D modeling, 3D animation and image sonification. Now that we are at the end I feel comfortable with the fact that I have built a decent foundation in each of these areas of discipline; areas which I plan on developing even more. Again, it has only opened my eyes to what is possible in Blender and I’m tasking myself over the summer with improving my skills 10x with respect to modeling, animation, and material creation.
I think that this project is still very critical of the issue it is discussing, which can be a good thing and a bad thing. It allowed me to vent frustration about this topic in a few different ways and to explore different areas of making. Some people may like it but some people may think it’s childish. On the other hand, it doesn’t present a way to move forward which is something that I want to strive for in my pieces moving forward. There is something about being able to assess a situation or issue, address it and then take the higher road and present a solution. While writing it is easy I know that this is a very difficult thing to achieve and I hope that I’m able to convey that in my work soon.
Creating a few different pieces also allowed me to have several different items in the conversation, which is something I have not done a lot of in my previous work. I think that this is a wonderful way to allow different items to talk to different people in different ways but have them all have a conversation on one central topic.
In the end I think I need to up my level of concept/context, but again that is something I need help on.