| |  |
Starting monstrously over-ambitious projects is time-honoured approach to learning CGI. Three of mine are worth a mention. Two I have outright abandoned; one I still hold out a sliver of hope I may resurrect it in some fashion. A word to CGI newbies - should you find yourself biting off more than you can chew, it doesn't matter. I learend a hell of a lot making these, so I don't consider it time wasted by any means. I've also added the size comparison charts. As these will continue to evolve - hopefully for years to come - it seems appropriate to call them ongoing projects rather than unfinished. Ongoing Projects 
| Arecibo Observatory My home for two and a half years, modelling it was more or less inevitable. In this case the modelling was prompted by a mania of my boss to have a laser-etched glass miniature telescope. There are of course umpteen uses for a virtual Arecibo, even I don't work there any more. See the current Arecibo abuse page here. | 
| Xeelee My efforts to render the ships described in Stephen Baxters uber-epic Xeelee sequence, which features a mostly complete panorama and no less than two short movies (of the Xeelee Nightfighter and the three-mile long Mayflower II). The main gallery can be viewed here. This one could be completed fairly easily if I had the luxury of stability and fewer ideas. | 
| Size Comparison Chart I decided it might be fun to see how some of my models compared with each other, size-wise. And I was right, it was. This is a fairly random selection of models. At first I was going to restrict myself to spaceships, but that was boring, so I didn't. I'll probably update this randomly and without warning as I remember long-forgotten projects from the last 10 years. I'm also going to make a colour version. For now, a zoomable silhouette be found here. | Unfinished Works 
| Deep Space Force An evolution of Project Orion. Currently 4min 45 seconds long it shows a battle between fleets of enormous armed and amoured Orion-drive spacecraft. In fact all it really shows at the moment is the predlude to such a battle. I stopped once the first missiles were fired due to a tripple whammy of problems : I started my PhD, Medieval 2 Total War was released, and the missile swarms were difficult to animate. Someday I'd like to renew this, making it shorter and more focused. View the gallery here. The unfinished, 4:45 movie can now be seen on YouTube. | 
| Suicidal Adventure Land A quite derranged project derived from other much less derranged projects. Started as a perfeclty innocent way to test then-new render features, ending up as a massive... umm... thing. There aren’t many appropriate adjectives to describe huge stone structures with very dangerous playgrounds on top. The project was derailed on having to rescale quite a bit of it due to a mistake, which meant it would mean hugely more work to complete it. Gallery here. | 
| 2001 : A Short Odyssey A hoplessly ambitious project to render every space scene in the novel “2001” that wasn't featured in the film, as well as some scenes that were for continuity. I started this way back in March 2003, so keep in mind that Blender didn't even have raytracing then (and my computer had 128MB RAM !). View the gallery here and the animation here. | |
|
| | | | rhysy.net
|
feedback@rhysy.net |
|
|
|
