Reply To: Collab 2020: Modeling Heavy Equipment (Backhoe)

I’m feeling HYPED right now, Dog Pound! Hope you don’t mind a little story time 🤓

A significant piece of this puzzle – an environment – has been looming over my head since January. While I was very happy with the way the DOG’s S&L had developed, 5-10 minutes per frame with no environment made me nervous about what a fully modeled interior would do to render times.

Most of this week I spent modeling a parking garage type environment. Once I blocked it out I tried rendering with a basic diffuse material on the whole environment: Simplest possible starting point. The DOG render times started chugging AND drastically increased in noisiness. Also the lighting changed drastically since everything prior was based on an HDRI which can’t contribute to an enclosed parking garage model. True rendering of the whole scene (DOG + environment) was never going to be an option.

So I did what any Blender 2.8+ user would do: Turn on Eevee. I needed Eevee to work.

As I block out some concrete and metal materials I see Eevee keeping up in near real time. Only issue was without global illumination everything was too dark. I fiddled with the indirect lighting settings and it worked brilliantly! Way better than expected. And I could get quick volumetrics that I wouldn’t even attempt with Cycles. I realized Eevee can do this. Hallelujah 🙌

So part 1 of the environment implementation was complete: Build and shade it. Now part 2: How do I composite my Cycles DOG with Eeevee Environment? That’s the question I struggled through today….

After some trial and errors, I’m SO HYPED to share with you that I figured out a decent workflow! I present to you a final-quality stills of the DOG assembly animation:

What do you think?

 I’m not quite ready to hit the big Render Animation on the whole thing yet but I’m really close. This weekend I’ll render the Eevee background sequence (only taking 30-40 seconds per frame). Then I’ll polish off some final animation / render tasks in preparation for rendering all 2800 frames of the Cycles Dog. I’m expecting 1-2 weeks of render wrangling but then it’s done.

One question I have: What do you think about the digger arm bucket material? I’m trying to decide if I should leave it the way it is (shinier) or use the loader bucket (dirtier / rustier) version. Give me some votes either way 🙏