I tried this a year ago and abandoned it when I got stuck. I tried it again (now that I know a little more) and this is how it came out:
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.
My 1st Blender Animation
I hit the mid-point of my Blender course so thought I’d take a step back and press some of my “knowledge” into action. To that end, I drafted out a one-page diagram of what I wanted to do and set out to do it – finish a model “just good enough”, build a basic low-poly landscape (with a mountain and a road), and animate the model and camera. The 180 frame render took about 2.5 hours to finish; I then imported the frames into Vegas and rendered out the animation. Here’s the result…