Random blurb - Car paint / Volume Caustics
Now that I have some newer PC's here, I wanted to run some animation tests to 'break them in' if you will. I started things off simple with a car paint animation. The Audi model was provided by someone else (thanks).
(click image to enlarge)
Animation:
/images/stories/JeffPatton/Blog/Audi_IM.mov
I suppose the primary point of interest here (other than the obvious homage to Iron Man) is that there is absolutely no lighting in this scene. There's no GI, FG, or even light sources for that matter. Well, there's a skylight that's turned off to ensure all lighting is disabled...So why didn't I get a black render?
If you think about it, practically everything is reflective to some extent. All materials in this scene are also reflective and when I place them into a HDR environment, they simply reflect that illumination data.
Render times? Not too bad, about 2.5 minutes per frame at 840x480 resolution. Of course it's a fairly simple scene without a 3d environment or direct/indirect illumination, but there's a TON of glossy/non-glossy reflections to calculate here.
Up next, volume caustics test:
(click image to enlarge)
Animation:
/images/stories/JeffPatton/Blog/Vol_caustic.mov
Mmmmm, liquid jello...
This material isn't terribly complex, but volume effects like this can be cumbersome to dial in. I used a dielectric surface shader, dielectric photon shader, parti-volume photon & parti volume...volume shaders. For what it's worth, volumetric effects work better with the updated photometric lights in 2009.
