Thank-goodness I followed this tutorial. What the tutorial told me I should do when rendering, is to render each individual frame of the animation (so lots of .png images) and then compile them later. WHEN RENDERING DO INDIVIDUAL IMAGES! It may seem a pain, but when doing a bit render, you can then leave it and go back to it later.

Cycles takes a long time to render. After about 125 frames, it has taken 55 minutes!!! And that is only halfway!!! So I have stopped the render to go back to it later, which is really useful.

tutorial: http://www.blenderguru.com/videos/rendering-animations

Finally entered the competition on www.blenderguru.com on the topic ‘saying goodbye’

Here’s my entry for all you to see!

This is my next update of my ‘saying goodbye’ model and render. It now has the hand in it, and I gave that a quick armature to the hand with automatic weights so that I could move the hand to the position I wanted. I used a reference image found online of a hand to get the proportions about right and modeled around it. The meshes all need to be modified with subdivision subsurf and then smoothed, as you can see each individual face.

After browsing blenderguru.com I found that they did competitions to make an image with blender relating to the the topic, and it had some pretty good prizes. So I looked at the topic which was “saying goodbye” and decided I should give it a go and enter. I came to the conclusion that my image should be in space in a spacecraft and somebody looking back at the earth ‘saying goodbye’. I am yet to make the hand of the person against the window, and the cockpit model needs more editing. The world was made through following the blenderguru tutorial on making a realistic looking world. After following the tutorial, I had a pretty amazing world model. So I appended (which basically means imported a model) the cockpit into the scene and positioned the camera as appropriate. Giving a glass texture was all it took to finish off. A final render is what you see above!

So I’ve finished the tutorial, and here are the final images. The first is without the sky and the other is with the sky (as you can clearly see). I have added some indoor lighting and from using my own expertise and knowledge, added the sky to my own accord. I am very happy with my model and I suggest you look up this guy at www.blenderguru.com if you are trying to get used to blender. You need to know basics for tutorial but otherwise, it’s great!

What I found out in this tutorial: Lighting and detail of the model makes ALL the difference to the finished render. The top of the building which was more detailed and had more textures looked much better than the bottom bit which was just a cube, modified. You need bounce lighting, so a lamp shining up and some other lamps just to light up the building a bit more and of course, one main light is needed (as the sun).

The same progress as last post, just zoomed in to avoid the bad bottom bit and to focus more on the realism of the high rise. Some shadows etc need some correcting, but that should be solved soon!

I have reached the second part of the tutorial, and it is showing me how to light my scene in a realistic and effective way. If you look at the top part of the render, you’ll see it has a great realism to it and looks really superb. The bottom bit needs a bit of work, as it doesn’t look too good, but the model’s really coming along! I hope to complete it!

I was looking around for tutorials, and found an amazing guy who made really cool tutorials. His site is www.blenderguru.com and on his site you’ll find loadsa tutorials varying from nature to architecture. I looked at the ‘high rise’ tutorial to make a tower block type model using arrays and mirrors. I still have to finish the tutorial and add materials etc, but I have learnt loads through this tutorial. Keep an eye out for the finished tower!