Aurora Mountain

I had an idea to use a Northern Lights time-lapse segment from a whole-sky camera as a moving background/sky – so cranked out this short video to try it out:

It seemed to work fine – and will probably show up in other work (after a bunch of tweaking). Since I have probably more images that could be made into timelapses than anyone else anywhere (probably between 15 and 20 million) this concept and its derivations could be handy…

For those Blender people out there, this was created by importing an “image as a plane” in Blender with a short AVI file for the media file, and then subdividing the plane a bunch of times and reshaping it into a dome.  Lighting and camera placement was a little tricky but that’s all part of the learning process.

Fluffy Bunny project is done!

Well, I added a pretty sad looking bush, turned up a few of the settings (samples and resolution mainly) and rendered out this image:

(click on the image to view full size)

So, now I’m on to the next section – a gothic castle of some sort – so buildings should be interesting!  I’m hoping we get more into texture mapping and things like that.

I’m actually starting to feel a bit “conversant” with this software – although I’m still only scratching the surface.  But I am having a great deal of fun doing this!  It’s a great way to spend the first part of my retirement and excited to see what I will be able to build with this new “toolkit”.