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The spark

The following scenes depicts Clarion, a dead planet on the far edge of the galaxy. Two light spirits comes and brings the spark of life that will make Clarion into, many million years later, a warm and life-crawling land.

These pictures are very poor, because they had been rendered in a afternoon dedicated to the study of the Blender software.

Today's comment : For these pics, I remember I tried to follow one of the tutorials written by Gene Ruffalo, aka The Iceman, who was some sort of the emblematic tutorial writer of these past days. These images seem to depict the journey of two light spirits, but in fact these are "only" different points of view of the very same scene. I'm proud of these images, because even if I wasn't able to find the Set Smooth button, I managed to find the OSA one (lol) and even get a grasp on the nor texture channel! Unfortunately, I still had difficulties what the Spec settings were about! Not so bad, I think, for a first real try!

A rainy day

The spark has definitely changed the feel of Clarion. Plants conquered the lands, and an atmosphere captured the moist which sustains life. And today is a rainy day on Clarion.

This picture is far better, but it's been rendered during the same learning period.

Today's comment : Even if it looks like I found the Material Index functionality, it is in fact wrong: I clearly remember separating the mesh manually! But what was really important is that I managed to use one of the first L-systems to produce the trees (L-Parser). Well, honestly I don't remember, perhaps my attempts were not convincing enough and that I finally used one of the defaults settings.

The Rainbow Machine

The world of Clarion is clearly surnatural, magical... To help weather establish itself and then undergo alone most of climatic phenomena, the light spirits placed at specific points some artefacts, enchanted engines, that enable Clarion to breath from its own life. Thus, the Rainbow Machine hides somewhere in a rural valley... Its status is placed under the care of the Overseers, whose mirrors are as numerous careful eyes.

The following animation was rendered for an animation challenge sponsored by The Iceman (Geno Ruffalo) in partnership with BlenderMania, a server fully dedicated to Blender and its ressources. I'm proud to say that my work won the first place ! The competitors had to use and mix the main animating tools of Blender into a stand-alone animation. Here are some pictures from the animation, and then, the animation itself.

Today's comment : It's really too bad that the animation is lost. It was nothing, really, but I'd like to look at it again... I tried to google for it, but its name, contest.mpg is far too generic to give any chance to find it again. I'll try to lurk in the web archives, but I'm not sure that videos could be retrieved. If someone has any hint, the original (and now, long dead) URL was: http://www.multimania.com/saraja/downloads/contest.mpg