Monthly Archives: March 2014

[HDRI] Golden Gate

Download Free HDRI - golden_gateDownload Free HDRI - golden_gate

Download Free HDRI (2048×1024 - 4.6 MB)
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Turns out pretty scenery does actually make for nice image-based-lighting ;)

I went on holiday with my family last weekend to the Golden Gate Highlands National Park, just North of Lesotho and down the road from Bethlehem (not that one).

I took a crapload of photos that I’ll upload sometime, surprisingly even more than I did when I went to see Rex in Scotland for three weeks (which I suppose I never mentioned here), but that’s probably because many of them were sets of different exposures as well as two (HDR) timelapses and two of these HDR panos (yes, another one coming in a few days alas, that second one failed :/ I accidentally twisted the lens to a higher focal length and thus there was not enough overlap to stitch with)

 

And Then There Was Cake (WIP)

conciliate_02_HR

 

conciliate_02_screenshot

Last weekend’s challenge on BA was themed Conciliate – which is basically the root word for reconcile – and means to stop someone being angry, or make them a friend.

I had something a bit more ambitious in mind, but I worked all day Saturday and Sunday and could only get this far. So, I’ll continue this later when I have some more time!

This is actually the second time I’ve modeled a Companion Cube… no idea what happened to the other one, but it probably had crap topology anyway :P I’ll upload this one (and the cake) to blendswap sometime soon.

World Volume Tests

Most of you have probably downloaded the 2.70 RC by now and probably started playing around with volumetrics in cycles. Immediately you probably noticed how slow it renders, although that was probably expected. Here are the results of a little test I did to find out exactly how to speed up volume rendering for the world up so that it’s actually usable.

The very first and foremost thing you need to know about volumetrics is the difference between Homogeneous and Heterogeneous volumes. Basically, a volume where the density is driven by some texture is a heterogeneous one, and a volume with consistent density is a homogeneous one. The difference in render time and quality is… well, quite drastic:

Homogeneous vs Heterogeneous

Homogeneous (2m 40s, 512 samples) vs Heterogeneous (1h 4m 55s, 128 samples)

Yep, you read that right. Under 3 minutes for homogeneous volume and over an hour for a quarter of the samples in the heterogeneous volume. The heterogeneous render seems to have a less dense volume, and I guess it does since it was driven by a noise texture where I couldn’t easily control the density and honestly couldn’t be bothered to wait long enough to give it a decent try. Continue Reading…