4 to 10 September 2016, your time has come…
This week, the day job struck hard – I pulled a 16 ½ hour day on Wednesday and the second half of the week wasn’t much good for anything except catching up on sleep. That should be the last of it for a while though.
Moviewise, I’ve been doing more tinkering. The beginning of the movie feels flat and it takes too long to give the audience what they need to know. So I’m looking for a way to set up the premise which is quicker and funnier and more engaging than what I’ve already got. It’s rough ideas and thumbnails for now. And I’m about to narrate the pitchamatic for the rock sequence shortly after I post this.
Meanwhile, Blender 2.78 is coming out soon (release candidates are available) and there’s two new features that I’m really looking forward to having in a stable version: bendy bones (already being used for Pointy’s eyebrow) and microdisplacement. Jason Schleifer at Nimble Collective has done a walkthrough of setting up bendy bones and Midge Sinnaeve posted a video of the microdisplacement workflow. (Grease Pencil v2 is going to be another killer feature for 2.78 – Daniel Martinez Lara is doing mini-tutorials about it.)
I’ve been looking at using microdisplacement for the desert pavement. This week’s images are example renders: the first image (Pointy going ooh!) uses microdisplacement and the bottom image uses displacement via a bump map (Pointy scowling). In the microdisplaced version, the edge of the shadow is broken up. This is what you’d expect to see if a shadow was falling across rough ground. In the bump mapped version, Pointy’s shadow is straight at the edges instead of broken up and so the ground registers as a patterned flat surface. Not what I want at all.
So hooray for microdisplacement, thanks again for stopping by and I’ll see you next week! 🙂
