Comments on: Visualization of Pontcysyllte Aqueduct for the BBC Wales

By: Reaction

Reaction — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 08:39:54 +0000

That is a valuable example/promotion of Blender's internal renderer. I expect many users (like me) would expect that for broadcast-quality stuff a super-expensive external renderer would be used. This animation should give everyone even more confidence in Blender (as if any were needed!)

By: mzungu

mzungu — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 16:58:52 +0000

Excellent work, gentlemen! I agree with Reaction: this is my kind of animation! Well done! (and I think the trees worked great! They were not the focus of what was going on and they did an excellent job of making the scene look less cg/terragen or whatever! Nice!)

By: Phil Summers

Phil Summers — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 17:43:37 +0000

@Reaction.

The renderer was the blender internal and we used our in-house render farm to render the animation. If I remember correctly it took just a bit less than a day to render at 1080.

You may have seen our presentation at this years Blender Conference, we're opening up our render farm
to the Blender community and are aiming to be very competitively priced (ie cheap!). We will be conducting some live beta testing of the web interface to the farm very soon, so if you're interested in signing up for beta testing (which will get you some free rendering time) then feel free to visit http://www.blenderfabrik.com and fill in the beta-testers form.

@Jose

We're working on the trees….but render time goes up quite a bit.

By: Reaction

Reaction — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 13:02:32 +0000

Forget furry little animals, this is my type of animation!
What renderer was used? What facilities were used and how long did it take to render at 1080?

By: Jose Sanchez

Jose Sanchez — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 11:51:12 +0000

Could really use some nicer trees. Their quality doesn't match the rest of the work and they're the first thing one notices in the video.

By: TX_RX

TX_RX — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 10:33:44 +0000

Yep that's quite a nice wee visualisation alright :D

By: Dan Gray

Dan Gray — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 09:17:15 +0000

Thanks for the comments guys!

@Mr.KEWL – The vast majority of the animation was just keyframed, the only place the build modifier was used was in loading the bricks onto the cart. In a previous version of this animation we had used the build modifier a lot more, but decided we could ultimately get better results with keyframing.

By: Born

Born — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 20:24:26 +0000

Hopefully I can catch this on the BBC when its aired!

By: Mr.KEWL

Mr.KEWL — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 19:09:51 +0000

Nice work….For those piling up effects…is that the build modifier that has been used?

By: ZanQdo

ZanQdo — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 18:47:16 +0000

WOW thats a lot of work and great result