Blender and Pov-Ray Animations

Some of my finest animations created with
Pov-Ray and (more recently) Blender

This is my first attempt at putting together a Demo Reel. I'm not a professional and I just did this for fun. It's about 3.5 Megs and lasts just over one minute. I assembled the whole thing within Blender's sequence editor. You will need to install the DivX codec to view it. If you are having problems with the format, let me know and I will post another version in MPEG format (It will be about 5 Megs). Please send me any comments, suggestions, or criticisms. I want to improve it and add some sort of music. Any ideas?

To the right is a ray-traced animation of that famous puzzle from the 1980's known as Rubik's Cube. Watch the cube solve itself as it floats in outer space. This is an old animation that I did in 1996, it used to be a 6MB FLC, but now it is mpeg compressed and is around 700KB. It has a total of 480 frames and was encoded with cmpeg. Read the mpeg statistics for this animation. This was rendered with Pov-Ray.

Here is a 326KB test animation of a water fountain created with Blender 1.80 (you will need to install the DivX codec to view it). This is a perfect example of how efficient Blender's memory use is. Blender can create this water fountain using blobs at the location of each particle. This effect can also be created in Strata 3D, which is also freeware. However, I can use more than 1000 particles in Blender and still have memory to spare. Strata 3D runs out of memory with only 100 particles. In fact, I'll bet that just loading Strata 3D uses more memory than Blender with all 1000 blob objects loaded!

Here is a ray-traced animation of my favorite scene. You can get a good look at each puzzle as the view rotates a full 360 degrees (that's why it is known as a 360° turn table test). This one has a total of 400 frames and—because of all the reflection and soft shadows—took 5 hours and 30 minutes on a 450 MHz Pentium II. It was compressed with mpeg2encode 1.2 and is around 2MB. Read the mpeg statistics for this animation. This was rendered with Pov-Ray.

Here is a 360° turn table test of my cornell golf scene. Note how the specular highlights reflect off the dimples as the scene rotates. I exported my radiosity solution to a wrl file (20MB), then imported into Max4 (it took 10 minutes to import!). I added one point light near the ceiling, and set it to not affect the diffuse component, just the specular component. This was a very important and necessary step in order to not disturb the radiosity solution. Two formats available: DivX 1.7MB or Mpeg 2.1MB. Quality is more or less the same in both versions. There's also a standard cornell box scene (no golfballs) here: DivX 2.1MB.