Learning the 3D animation process is beset with enormous obstacles, and the latest I’ve encountered is putting clouds in the background of an animation, and getting them to render in a way that looks even a little bit like clouds. The Noob to Pro resource is the best source of help I found Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Making Fire – Wikibooks, collection of open-content textbooks but there is still a lot of experimentation – read random knob twiddling – to do.
The easiest result to get is an amorphous white blob, but even that isn’t like falling of a log. It’s the hardest thing I’ve tried to do in Blender so far.
Just getting this glob of white goo to spread out a little bit and look a tiny bit like a cloudy sky was so, so hard. And I wouldn’t call the results I’ve achieved so far exactly photorealistic.
Every slider you move and every button you clip seems to have an enormous and unpredictable effect on the particles system. I’m even considering giving up on the particle system and just sticking clumps of white spheres in the sky with subsurface scattering. Of course I’ll let all my devoted readers know how I get on. One day this is going to be a cool 3D animation, even if it drives my battier than I am now.
I’ve been reading the manual I downloaded in my last post, and even though it is a text version without illustrations it’s surprisingly easy to read, almost enjoyable. I’m already on chapter three the day after downloading it and I’ve learned some stuff I didn’t already know.
» Vega Strike 3D spaceship model for redesign decided
» Tips for making a professional spaceship mesh for games gratefully received
