I did more video and more Blender (surprise!) I’ll start with blender. I’m not quite sure what prompted the fur/hair thing but here we are. So I followed a tutorial on how to use all of the values and options for the hair engine. I’ve used the particle engine before many times with varying degrees of success, but I had merely fucked with the hair engine in the past. There are so. Many. OPTIONS! I mean there should be. This is supposed to cover all kinds of strand based usage cases. I had no idea. So I get to work on one of the typical furry ball things that everyone does. I’m not going over any of the actual options that I changed to get here because honestly, I hardly know what I did.. The values are so cryptic and asinine, I wished there was an easy mode for hover over tool tips. Really you should be playing with the values and see what they do, but a little direction would have been nice.

Anyway… So I made this fuz ball and after you add so many particles, blender as a whole slows down almost to a stop. So making changes so the parameters is really tricky when it takes 8 seconds to rebuild the mesh every fucking time. And forget 8 seconds if you have one of the viewports set to rendered view. 20 seconds before I could even see the change on some of the bigger ones. This sucks because sometimes you want to see before and after. With 20 seconds in between, it was almost impossible to see what change happened. This can be kind of fixed with reducing the amount of viewport particles, but this can’t give you an accurate representation, only a ball park. After I got something that looked coolish, I did a render annnnnnd….CRASH. Good thing I saved. So I open and go to render again, sometimes blender sometimes crashes on first render for some reason. This is why we save. But on the second render, another fucking crash. So I start looking into it and I notice that my gpus ramp up while blender builds the mesh and when it starts to dump into gpu memory, the gpu runs out. Looks like floof balls are just too much for 6 fucking gigabytes of VRAM……….. So we’re back to rendering on the CPU...great.

Next I worked on the material. This was particularly fun because I could only find real hair looking node setups. So I had to modify them a LOT to get a fur look or whatever I have going on here. After I had those renders done, Jake and I were noticing that we don’t really know what kind of scene they need. I tried a few but I didn’t really try that hard. So on Saturday I decided to make some environments. I only ended up making one, but the one that I did make is pretty cool.

Ended up going with a warehouse looking thing. First the building, then the trusses, then the I-beam supports which I moved around so many times. Then the windows, and other things. I'll keep adding detail over the next few weeks until it's something cool. Challenges include, how to make motherfucking windows, how to even array, and how that array system sucks. I’ve known this but it’s the quickest way to a warehouse. Lots of repeat objects. When you modify one you modify them all which is nice when working on buildings and such. After I was more or less happy, obviously I put the floof ball in the room and turned up the volumetrics to 11 and hit render. Naturally it crashed the first time round which was my overnight render so I had to knock it out Sunday afternoon. But after the first bit finished, I decided on some dust particles so that means more particle engine! I whipped one out real quick and got a translucent material and made them super small. This is cool because I thought of it and just did it. I didn’t have to look anything up, I didn’t have to ask anyone. I just did it and it worked! This is kind of a big moment for me. All of this time in the program and I got the result I was looking for. I really wanted the particles to reflect the brighter part where the light comes through the window but I can figure that out later. The fact is that my idea worked. I think with some proper post it could look super dope but I will do that this week. I barely got the render off anyway.

Let me know what you think!

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B5gRarvHyXZSbXkyTDEteVRMT2c&usp=sharing