The Droid-ship Invades a Landing Bay

Mission accomplished. I wanted to knock out a full-fledged, original 3D scene before the year was over, and make a print [see bottom of post]. I’m planning more scenes with this droid, and I already shared a test scene, but here I created the landing bay, posed the droid with its arms and fastening disc out, and tweaked out the lighting and camera settings.

I really got persnickety with the details of the composition, camera angel, the pose, and the lighting. I used 6 lights: 2 point lights, and 4 spot lights (also the ceiling light emissions]. This process can get really involved, as you can move each light on 3 axis, and rotate them on 3 axis, as well as change the intensity of the light, the radius, the blend, and the specularity. You can change the focal length, aperture, and depth of field of the camera.

After a while I realized I was painting with Blender. You can easily look at this an an abstract composition. Making this art is using a lot of my traditional art training, even my photography classes of decades ago come into play.

In the detail above, you can clearly see the depth of field, with the extreme foreground and background blurred.

You may have noticed how big that detail is compared to the full image. Ah. I made a great discovery. There is something called a “rendering farm”. Rending images and videos is very heavy work for the computer, and a laptop like mine — even though I got a gaming laptop and hot-rodded the RAM and graphics card — will run at peak heat for the duration of the render. So, I don’t like doing large renders. Well, now you can upload your file to a rendering service, and their super-computers will do the process for you for a pittance. This render, which is a whopping 9,734×6,000 pixels (22×32″ @ 300 dpi] cost me 13 cents. 300 dpi is magazine cover quality, but you can make prints at half that because you’ll have to stand back from them to see the whole thing. So, this could print out beautifully at 3.6 x 5.3 feet. This service also makes it possible for me to render animations that would melt my laptop.

Above, each arm ends in a tool, but it also has extendible joints beyond that so it can walk on them, and the tip has a weapon [here aimed directly into the landing bay].

Below, this leg ending in pliers is about to crush a lamp. Note the retracted extra digits, and that you can control the bloom effect on the lights.

Below, the saw is going to work on the pipe. I made every detail from scratch, including the blade.

Next are the eyes at actual resolution.

Finally, here’s a screen shot at full resolution (of course it won’t all fit on the monitor].

Next up I’m going to attempt a short animation.

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Prints!

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Or you can make a one time donation to help me keep on making art and blogging (and restore my faith in humanity simultaneously).