HOME | DD

Description
This is my first animation that's good enough to be posted. It showcases some of the potential of Blender's fur/hair system. Each and every simulated hair exists in 3D space as any other geometry and can be freely viewed at any angle. While in still images similar look can be achieved with post-processing or some tricks with textures, these methods are less suited for animations - and this is where the power of the fur system really shows.

This animation is actually quite simple. Especially the shading has been simplified to keep the rendering times as low as possible (these were still quite high due to the large amounts of simulated fur). Many advanced techniques available in Blender haven't been used here as they would cause the rendering times to explode. Some examples are: accurate "per hair" real-time shading, fur physics simulation, ambient occlusion (special kind of shading that simulates light diffused/absorbed in the environment), higher level of anti-aliasing. I will need at least an eight-threaded processor to properly run all of these...

Some tech stats:
- Length: 6 seconds, 150 frames at 25 fps.
- Rendering: roughly 8 hours, 3 minutes per frame. Processor: Pentium Dual Core 2.5 GHz. Rendered on a frame-by-frame basis (not whole animation at once), using the times when the PC is being left idle for a while, or uses only part of its processing power, such as surfing the Web.
- Geometry: 140320 polys, 1207998 hair strands.
- Software used: Blender3D v2.49b and Pazera Free Video to Flash Converter v1.1.

All contents are my original work.

Description
This is my first animation that's good enough to be posted. It showcases some of the potential of Blender's fur/hair system. Each and every simulated hair exists in 3D space as any other geometry and can be freely viewed at any angle. While in still images similar look can be achieved with post-processing or some tricks with textures, these methods are less suited for animations - and this is where the power of the fur system really shows.

This animation is actually quite simple. Especially the shading has been simplified to keep the rendering times as low as possible (these were still quite high due to the large amounts of simulated fur). Many advanced techniques available in Blender haven't been used here as they would cause the rendering times to explode. Some examples are: accurate "per hair" real-time shading, fur physics simulation, ambient occlusion (special kind of shading that simulates light diffused/absorbed in the environment), higher level of anti-aliasing. I will need at least an eight-threaded processor to properly run all of these...

Some tech stats:
- Length: 6 seconds, 150 frames at 25 fps.
- Rendering: roughly 8 hours, 3 minutes per frame. Processor: Pentium Dual Core 2.5 GHz. Rendered on a frame-by-frame basis (not whole animation at once), using the times when the PC is being left idle for a while, or uses only part of its processing power, such as surfing the Web.
- Geometry: 140320 polys, 1207998 hair strands.
- Software used: Blender3D v2.49b and Pazera Free Video to Flash Converter v1.1.

All contents are my original work.