This is more smoke. It took about 47 minutes to render at 1440 x 1080. It is different from the other smoke. Honest. My spare computer has been rendering volumetric smoke in Cycles for literally days now.

Meanwhile, I’ve been cutting together a tutorial about using sound-driven animation in Blender.

I’m making it to enter the CGMasters Blender 2.70 tutorial competition. I don’t expect to win, partly because I just figured out you might need a Facebook account to even enter, but I do expect to have made and released a tutorial about something nobody else has made as thorough a tutorial about. So my expectations have been met.

It’s taken me a week and a half, hence the prolonged radio silence. It is a foul and all-consuming obsession. It is forty minutes long. I have quickly disovered this is too long for a first tutorial – the folly of inexperience, quite likely. Properly reviewing something of this size recorded in so many parts sucks. The narration becomes more unhinged and irritable the further it goes. 

I want to watch Ikiru. I want to get to sleep on time for once this week. I want to do something that isn’t this tutorial. But it calls to me with its siren song, baked to f-curves and slaved to the emission strength of a material in a robot’s eyes…

…so I’m starting the upload the second it’s finished rendering. It should autopost to Twitter once it’s ready to view on YouTube. NO REGRETS.