Another Blender adventure as I try to make a low poly model from cubes and spheres.
The idea here was to simplify my approach to what I wanted to create with Blender. Further, since I spent so much time trying to make the Burning Monkey Head and then the spinning sheep, I figured I’d continue to push through with some more work in Blender. This animation is similar to the sheep project but differs in that the camera doesn’t pivot. Instead, I’m using keyframes to move the car from one side of the screen to the other.
The problem, as you see in the video, is that I didn’t create a whole world for the car to live in so it looks rather plain. I’m fine with that for now since I couldn’t figure out how to change the World settings in the version of Blender I’m using (2.80). And this has been a bit of problem throughout using Blender: every time the version changes, the placements of functions change and that makes newer tutorials hard to follow along. Even if you understand the concepts, if you don’t know how to find the tool to use the program can get frustrating to use.
Anyway, I included a few versions of the animation:
- a fully rendered version using Cycles (Blender’s render engine) played forwards and backwards,
- a screen recording of me trying to set up the camera
- a low res version of the animation
I accidentally overwrote the rendered output so I had to re-render the whole thing. The reason for this is because Blender will automatically overwrite files unless you specify not to. I’m assuming this is to save space. So that delayed things by a little.
Blender rendered out a series of PNG files which I then copied and marked “FINAL” so I could keep the render output settings the same in the program, but still have a copy of the final output. I also did this with a viewport output and the low res output. I exported 72 frames at 24fps. Here’s a shot of my render settings:
From there, these images were imported into FCX and crushed down to 1 frame each (FCX’s default duration for a photo is 5 seconds). I sped up the screen recording. Exported at 1080p, 23.98fps.
So that will do it for this animation. The more I work with Blender the easier some things get but it’s still a difficult program to use overall. It would be best to sit down and go through a bunch of tutorials with just one version of Blender rather than trying to find a tutorial for one version but then using another completely different version.
One thing I have just seen released is a newer version of Blender’s render engine, Cycles, which seems to have been spun off from the original program. This seems like a good idea and may make both run faster. I haven’t tried it yet but, if it is any better than the version that’s included in 2.80, then I’m thinking my issue with render times might be no longer valid.
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