Playing With Blender

The weekend was spent playing with Blender.  I'm justifying it by saying that I will probably eventually need to stage proper background and camera angles for dialog and cut scenes, but mostly I'm just having fun. :)

Ship in nebula:

The majority of the time was probably spent doing the cockpit controls (visible at the beginning of the video).  Working with Blender's Cycles render engine is pretty nice.  Being able to set up materials and shaders in a sensible manner is good, especially being able to set up proper emissive materials and textures.

Also, after looking at several pictures of fighter jets, I realized that that the visibility from my ship was horrible, so I totally reworked the cockpit canopy to give better rear and side visibility.  This also resulted in putting in a proper seat, and then a second seat (which didn't really have any story purpose, but hey why not), and then a test character for size, and a few other details.

Because Blender is doing proper caustics, I ran into some problems with the whole volume of the canopy essentially being considered one big slab of glass and distorting the light, so I had to give it some thickness.  That's just totally unnecessary for game-side, but, whatever, it's really low poly and most of it will just get backface culled anyway.

I'm almost tempted to bring the whole thing into the game to see what will explode.  :)

And then I delved back into Blender's animation system and decided to render the whole thing at 1080p, and there you have my weekend.  Rendering at 1080p takes forever, fortunately the middle parts end up being mostly sky and go pretty quick.