Large Hadron Collider - v02 W.I.P. - Larger and More Post Productions

OK, well never content to leave well enough alone, here's another render that I made, spending the better part of yesterday rendering. It's at 1920x1200 (the resolution of my monitor) in case anybody wants to use it for a desktop image. It's still a work in progress, but I think it's cool.

Notice the darker look (I accidentally rendered out in "linear" space for you color geeks out there), and a slight film grain to dirty it up a bit. Also some very slight chromatic abberation, because lord knows how easy it is to go overboard with that sort of thing.

I've been meaning to show my process more, so I think posting unfinished stuff is a good start. Enjoy!

Click to see the full size image.

Hadron Particle Accelerator - W.I.P. Test

Here's a little something I wanted to test out today. Using my new 780 GTX graphics card, I was playing around with making the particle accelerator from the famous image HERE.

I'm going for a procedural approach this time, trying to get the modelling to be as editable as possible using multiple modifiers. The metal poles are just a bezier curve and the metal octagonal rings are spun instances using Blender Cookie's awesome technique with the array modifier. The stairs are also multiple instances, and the crappy material on the pipes is Cycles procedural brick material. I plan on making it much more elaborate and detailed in the future. This was just my original inspiration for today.

I think the noise is not too shabby, after rendering only about 1000 samples in 7 and a half minutes. The image is based on a sci-fi script I wrote a couple of years ago. Who know, maybe it'll be resurrected someday... :)

Skip Frame Interpolation Test (a.k.a. How to Only Render Half As Many Frames In Cycles)

Hey guys - just tried an experiment with a dry scene in Blender Cycles. I wanted to know if it was possible to save time by rendering at 12 frames per second, and then "create" the in-between frames later using After Effects.

Turns out, it works pretty well! Here's a quick video demonstrating the method. I know as the scene gets more complex, it probably won't work as well. But for fairly simple scenes with a slow to medium speed camera, it looks pretty solid and has a minimal amount of "streaking" (that trail-like effect you see on older consumer video cameras).

The only trick is, when you're in After Effects, make sure to use the TIMEWARP effect plugin and set the "Error Threshold" to "0" so there's no weird chunky blocks. I set it to 50% speed which then equals 24 frames per second.