What I've been doing this December

If you regularly keep up with my blog, then you've probably noticed that I haven't updated very much this December. Well, how's this for an explanation?

Yep. It may be hard to believe, but that is my own completely* original creation. I used reference images from the internet and modeled it by hand, just like I did with the Warrior of Light. "Why make such a complex model?" you might ask. Well, I made it for a relative who loves cars. I asked him what the best car was, and he told me that the Pagani Zonda was his personal favorite. So this was a Christmas present for him. Unfortunately, I am still trying to explain to him that I made it, and it's not from Gran Turismo 5 or some such racing simulator. Anyway, I feel really great about this project. It obviously turned out spectacularly. I did not think I would achieve this level of awesomeness in Blender so quickly. Oh, and it was rendered by Blender's internal renderer. No Yafaray or Luxrender here. I tried them, but they were too grainy and they rendered too slowly. The render time for this Full-HD image was 4 hours and 30 minutes. Oh yeah, and the scene contains roughly 1 million vertices.

I'll be getting back to Axis Mundi after my break. After working on this up until the last minute, I definitely need one. Merry Christmas!

*I got the tire rims from a generous fellow who posted them for download. It was the last thing I had to do, and I really didn't feel like doing any more modeling.

Tweaking Animation

It's been a while since my last post because I've had a lot going on with Thanksgiving and various other family activities, but I have been able to successfully import my WOL animations into RCT3. The weight painting worked well in blender and transferred to RCT3 fairly seamlessly. At the moment there are still a few bugs to be ironed out, and there are also my other assets that I am still modeling, so I'm not quite ready to start filming yet. I am also not going to show any character animations because I don't want to spoil how it looks. I'd rather you see the characters in action for the first time in the film. However, since I am confident that the character animation thing will work out, I have decided to make this little teaser:

As always, once I make more progress, I'll post here about it. Sorry if it seems like this project is dragging a lot, but sometimes you just have to wait so that the technology can catch up with your artistic vision. Hopefully after all of this research and development, I can produce something amazing.