Goban Scene—Final Render

Here is my final render on the Goban scene, created in Blender 2.57, rendered in Luxrender 0.8. The render time was some 30 hours, and reached 1300 samples per pixel. There are some areas where there is a bit of what's called fireflies—areas of overly light pixels that don't get resolved by the renderer. However, I think it's probably OK as it is right now.

Goban

Earth and Moon

Here is my result of following Andrew Price's newest tutorial, Create a Realistic Earth. This tutorial mostly focuses around materials, textures, material nodes, and a bit of compositing. Good job again, Andrew!

The only thing missing is the spaceship, or perhaps a meteor...

Japanese Room with Goban

Here is a composition I created using my recent Goban scene and a picture by Abbey Hesser, which I found on flickr. The photo has been used by persmission. You can visit Abbey's web site here.

The composition is not nearly perfect, it's more of a practice file.

Goban scene in a real Japanese room.

Goban 2

Here is what I consider to be an (almost) final render for this scene. The white stones in the bowl were created using an in-development, beta version of Cheetah3D's bullet physics plugin, by Hiroto Tsubaki. I was forced to reduce both polygon count and output size, because I was getting a very low sample-per-pixel rate (something like 15 per hour!). I think I should call this piece "Goban by the window." If I do anything else to it, it would be working on the textures a bit (they need a bit of bumpmap,) the rice paper volume material, and modify the model of the fan a bit. I hope you like it.

Click to enlarge

Goban

Here is a scene I've been working on. I've had this idea for a while, I just could not put it together. With the newly released Luxrender 0.8, I finally decided it was time! Done in Blender 2.57. Enjoy!

Title Animation in Blender

I've been busy trying to finish a tutorial by Andrew Price on his blenderguru site. In this latest of his tutorials, he uses everything in blender but the kitchen sink: particles, smoke simulation, type, indirect illumination, sound effects, video editing, the use of different scenes, node compositing, you name it. I think it's one of his most ambitious tutorials to date. Great job! Here is the result. I did not follow the tutorial to the letter. I deviated a bit, introducing some morph keying for this lattice object. Great fun! Of course, I used my own blog name's for the lettering.

Subway Scene 6

Here is an update of my subway scene. Added the (almost) final modeling touches to it, like a stop light, a mirror (way at the end of the station), electric cables, an entryway to the station. I finally fixed some issues I had with the Curve modifier. Besides making sure that everything in the object is set to default (0 location, 0 rotation, 1 scale,) one needs to make sure that the curve has the appropriate tilt applied to it. I had a couple of  these that, for some reason, needed to be adjusted. The way to do this is by selecting the whole curve in Edit mode, hitting Control-T, and dragging with the cursor, or entering a value. Mine was rotated 90 degrees, which forced me to rotate the elements 90 degrees in Edit mode. Yikes! Not anymore.