This will be the last of my reminiscence posts for a while, I am going to stick to current stuff for the immediate future. However I wanted you all to see what led me to my current personal project, and that was my intention to make a short movie using live miniature sets and animated characters. However getting everything to work was a nightmare. I built the one set shown in a weekend, and working on the character models to make them look like they belong in that environment did not work well at all. This was before the Blender had composition nodes, and working on personal time caused the project to stretch into forever, before eventually being shelved because I lost the original spark that drove me to the project in the first place. A couple of years later (now) I decided that the answer was building the characters and sets in real life then animating them in Blender. So I devised a laser scanner system that I could build at home for a couple of (dozen)bucks and a simple application that will clean the result, more on that in my next post, for now please enjoy another of my probably abandoned projects.
In the scene is a penny for size reference, for our non-American viewers that’s about a 2cm diameter coin. And yes that is a hand sculpted tree to the left…
I say probably abandoned because I may continue this project reusing some assets, so what you see is some of the cooler WIP images but definitely not close to the final polished product. Below you can see the three main characters, a girl, a boy, and a cyborg (who may or may not look a bit like Peter Weller from Robocop). After the jump there is a simple scene with all three characters, and getting a better render was out of the question because the boy’s mesh has weird normal flipping issues causing the raytracer to skip some faces, go figure…
