Potpourri March 2018 challenge WIP

[Finis]

A fountain for the Potpourri challenge. Water sprays onto a curved glass wall and fills a pool with stones in it.

A picture like this will probably be my entry. I'll try to make an animation but the fluid simulation and render time might be too long.

All blender 2.79. I made six rocks like this. Then I used the rocks to make particles but stopped them before they fell to the pool, made them real (not instances or duplicates), and applied rigid body physics. Physics settled them into the pool. That procedure was needed because the particles don't interact with each other so they won't stack and push each other. The water is from the fluid simulation.

The wall uses Spacekdet's Haven Hill texture.

Rendered with cycles using filmic, denoising, 400x400 tiles, sampling: branched path tracing with square samples, light path: limited global illumination preset. 21 seconds to render at 1280x720.

Still need to make a fixture for the water to spray from.

[Finis]

Plants are from the sapling add-on presets. Render time should be under three hours for a fifteen second animation so I'll do it. The fluid simulation took about an hour. I should add some of the rocks to the interact with the water.

[Finis]

Preview of the animation. I set the frame rate to 30 for animation but when I do this opengl render it is at 24fps. I use this quick render to test the speed and look. When the frame rate is not the same then opengl is not good for that test.

Any Blender users know how to change the frame rate for opengl render?

The plants move some for wind. Sapling is good for that but hard to use. I might look for ways to get the trees to react to force fields with Sapling's armature but not its animation.

The finished animation will take a bit over four hours to render all the frame images with cycles. Hitfilm Express to put it together.

For curiosity I compared a cpu render vs a gpu render. Gpu 3x faster. (GTX1060 vs AMD FX8320)

The glass wall is not present in the preview since it is opaque in solid view. There are two places that appear to have constant obstacles but there is nothing there. It isn't obvious in full renders. Hopefully it won't be in the finished movie.

[Finis]

There it is.

[Draise]

Me gusta mucho. I think this is one of your better renders you've done. And it's nice you're getting more into animation, and simulations.

[Draise]

Any Blender users know how to change the frame rate for opengl render?

Under Render Dimensions (in the Properties view>Render tab) you can set the FPS. The OpenGl renderer should output in the same FPS as your final render.

Added note: Depending on your system that previews the file sequence, specially if it's an image sequence, will influence the FPS. For example DJV Viewer will play the FPS to whatever you want. Unless you're rendering into an Mp4, then you'll have to define the playback fps of the playback client.

[Finis]

@Draise Thanks!

Yeah, for the finished video I computed the number of frames needed and had blender make that many images. Then HitFilm could have used them at any fps.

For the opengl render (render menu->opengl render animation) to an mp4 it did 24 fps even though the properties->render tab said 29.xx. I found on the web that setting the fps in user preferences->system->screencast was the solution for opengl to a movie file. I set that to 30 and then the mp4 played at the speed from the render tab. Looks like that setting is the fastest an opengl animation will go.

I used simpler render settings than above. Just low samples and changed denoise to less smoothed settings. Still 21 to 29 seconds per frame. Still Filmic. Might do a high samples render and put it here.

[Finis]

With hdri.

[Finis]

How to fix shadow catcher? There is a shadow catcher plane just beyond the wall. It gives the trees shadows on the hdri background. The plane appears white through the glass. Solutions?

[Draise]

Render fountain on another layer.

Only render shadows of fountain on background objects but essentially make it invisible in one layer. Shadow catcher will work. Then render the fountain with no shadow catcher. Composite them both. Fountain with alpha over background rendered correctly without fountain (only it's shadows).