Something still looks wrong with the cone at the base....

Nice improvement with the city in the background! I must say though, I think being too precise about this one frame is kind of overkill. It's obviously going to be a shot to orient the audience in space and I'm guessing it will only be on the screen for maybe 4 or 5 seconds at the max? I personally don't think the odd shadowing on the cone is going to be that big of a deal. If it were a still image or something it would be important, but with something like this I don't think it's going to matter a whole lot. If it's going to be a pain to fix, is it really worth it? Just my 2 cents. Hope that helps out in some way.

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Well, I just got Maya.
Does anyone have a good source of beginner tutorials?

EDIT:
Zach, if you're using Blender, just go into Editmode, select the base cone and press CTRL+N. That will flip the normals and remove that wierd shading.

Last edited by ZP (April 7, 2012 (04:23pm))

I have gotten into CGI recently...
but I haven't been using it for brickfilms really.
I like having the ability to create anything I and then animating with it.

I really suck at rigging so far though.

by the was Zack FB, that looks cool! wish I could do something like that...

EDIT: I do have a question, does Blender usualy take forever to render a movie. I made a simple ball rolling around as a test, and it is taking Hours to render!:jaw: is their a way to speed things up without damaging the quality or anything?

Last edited by Coyote Creek Films (April 8, 2012 (04:18am))

Join the open renderfarm for Blender

Hi Coyote Creek Films,
The main reason you probably can't enable the render addons is because you are using a wrong version of blender.
My suggestion is to grab a build of blender that is already paired with the render engine you want here: Graphicall.

As for speed, probably the best quality/speed render engine is Yafaray. I'm gonna tell you now that LuxRender is SLOW. Mostly due to the fact that it is unbiased. Yafaray can be tricky to use though also. Really BI is just fine for simple stuff. If it is taking a really long time to render a frame then you probably turned up some settings that you didn't need to. Cycles might be worth a try also. What are you trying to render? I should also note that the lowest render time you are likely to get with any renderer and something more than the default cube is going to be 10-20 sec.

Last edited by AnW (April 12, 2012 (12:52pm))

Oh, well... uh... I wasn't actually trying to be formal or anything. Guess I just lapse into that sort of talking when I am explaining stuff.

Cycles is simply a new render engine they are developing for blender (it isn't built in technically, but it might as well be). It is bundled with blender now. You can switch to it in the render drop down menu at the top of the default window. Its big attraction points are:
1. GPU acceleration. This means it can use a video card (has to be a pretty good one though) to render pictures much faster.
2. Realtime rendering. If you have Cycles set as your renderer, you can change a 3d viewport to "Rendered" (in the mode menu that has "Wire", "Solid", etc). This will change the viewport to being a live updating, full rendered view, very helpful when setting up materials and lighting.
3. More physically correct. This means it is (a lot) easier to get pictures that look more "real" because it actually tries to simulate the way light works. It isn't completely unbiased though, like Luxrender, allowing you to still cut corners and stuff to get a faster render.
4. Nodes. Everything (materials especially, but lights and world also) is now set up using nodes. Hope you like spaghetti 'cause noodles are all you got! This is a really big one, as nodes allow you to do almost whatever you want.

It looks like that spray-on gold paint you find on China-made toys in party stores. Nice work.