Never Say Final - Coke and Cookies

On my last post, I used a forbidden word in production circles: final. Over the years, I've learned to avoid using it. It's meaningless. Nothing is final—except death, that is. I used it again, and again it exacted its revenge on me. It was supposed to be the final render—really-really final, or double-final, or final-final, or final-2. I've used them all over the years :)

After I had posted that render, the next morning I woke up and I noticed an incredible spike on this blog visitors' count. On a good day, I get somewhere between 50 and 150 visitors. At 8AM yesterday it was at 400 already. I checked the source of the traffic, and I discovered it was coming from BlenderNation, a Blender News web site. Apparently, this BlenderNation admin, Bart, liked my Coke and Cookies render, and put it up on their site. On top of that, blender.org, who usually mirror BlenderNation's news and posts, linked to that post as well. This incredible, two-pronged combination did the trick, I ended the day hitting the 2500 mark. I'm not complaining, I love the attention, and I like talking to people about Blender and Cycles and anything else 3D. Everything 3D.

Another interesting thing about what happened with my being featured in another site is that, all of a sudden, my artwork had become. It got away from me, and it started having an independent life all of its own. It got out into the world, and that was that. It's a funny feeling, but also a good feeling, and a wake-up call concerning the obsessive pursue of perfection. You want your work to be perfect, but in order to achieve it, you keep tweaking and futzing and fidgeting with things, but it does not necessarily get any better. It's just that you get all caught up in the creative process. Or maybe you're just an addict :) Sometimes it is better to leave the freshness of the first impulse as is and not worry about the imperfections. Some examples related to this idea come to mind: the Aeneid is not a finished poem, someone refused to burn it as Virgil demanded on his deathbed. One more: Paul Valéry's Le cimitière marin was published before he could 'finish it.' His over-eager publisher friend took it away from him and decided it was good enough. The hutzpah!

Anyway, for all these reasons, I wanna send a big thanks to BlenderNation, blender.org, and all the visitors to my blog. THANKS!

Oh, and here is the really-final render! I could not resist changing a few things around ;) If you liked the former version better, you know where to go :) Just click on final.

Also, I've decided to release the coke model as open-source file. It seems like there are many others trying to create soda bottles, so perhaps it can be helpful. Send me an email and I'll send you the file, minus the textures.

Render at about 3000 samples, with some
post-processing work done in Photoshop.

Dartboard Scene Part 3

Here is an update to the Dartboard Scene I've been working on. It's supposed to be the whole front and back cover for an upcoming book about epub. The image I show here is not a real Cycles render, but rather, three renders, composited in Photoshop. I don't think that Cycles can do motion (or vector) blur yet, so I added that in Photoshop—with the Motion Blur filter applied several times, offset and masked with a layer mask. Here is the result.

This is the (almost) final version, minus the copyright.

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