So, today’s progress went a bit better, I feel, despite the fact that I still technically didn’t accomplish much.
Today was rendering day, as it turns out. Last night was supposed to be a video day, but I forgot until it was too late, so instead I decided to go animated. And since I’m diving deeper into Blender, I decided that my original spinning Runic Alchemy Focus wasn’t going to be quite good enough, so I souped it up a bit for the Day 35 Vlog post.
Unfortunately something about my changes has caused the render times to shoot through the roof, so most of my Blender learning session today revolved around trying to get that under control. Fortunately, today just happened to be the day I was going to be going through the CGCookie Rendering class anyway, so that was a nice coincidence.
The class was informative, but neither it nor a fairly exhaustive internet search on ways to speed up cycles rendering seems to be able to get the render times for this video under 19 hours, so I’m going to have to come up with a different solution. I have no idea what it will be yet, but it looks like Day 35 is going to be delayed for a while at least. At least Day 30 is finally up, I’ve been neglecting it a bit. That’s the downside of doing the video editing in Blender as well, it’s hard to practice modeling when your 3d application is busy rendering a youtube video. Ah well, it will all get there eventually.
On the plus side, even if I am sans video at least I am not 100% empty handed today. I started working on this sculpted character. I know I’m jumping ahead, since I haven’t watched the tutorials for the techniques or anything, but self practice can’t hurt.
He’s not finished yet, I’m sure I can get a few more levels of detail on there, especially since his facial hair is hardly recognizable as such. In his current state I thought he looked a bit like an Oz Munchkin mixed with Ego the Living Planet, so I decided to go with that theme for rendering out the progress so far.