Special Event Animation - Blender Scene File (Patreon)

This week I've spent some time christening my new RTX 3090 card that  spontaneously arrived on Monday, with this little animation you see  here. The new card is replacing one of my perfectly working RTX 2080's,  which in turn may henceforth replace the RTX 3060 in my streaming  computer. It was a nice test to see how much render power the new card  adds to my production pipeline.

I did this in Blender from regular  text objects, then spent some time debating how to add simple materials  to the letters. Nothing is ever "simple" in Blender of course, so I  ended up properly UV unwrapping them so that I could apply some  Substance Materials. A simple gold shader should have sufficed, but did I  find one? Of course not! Thankfully proper UV mapping gave me more  options to test out other materials (I've decided against them as you  can see, and stuck with the "less is more" approach).

Julia's  idea was to animate the lights, which I thought worked well. It's a  subtle effect that I achieved with empty helper objects to which the  spotlights are pointing. Blender does this with a Damped Track effect  (-Z option if I remember correctly). There are three lights in total,  plus a HDRI to bring out the reflections.

The last thing I did was to add the particles, which I've imported from the scene file I've shared in 2020. I've actually downloaded it from that Patreon post, because I had no idea where that project ended up on my super organised file system. I'm sure I have it backed up somewhere...

I've  animated all three cameras separately over the same timeline, then  rendered out the 500 frames with two of my machines. The 3060 took about  45 seconds to render a frame, while my 2080/3090 rig could do it in  about 12 seconds! This was at 1920x1080 resolution with 100 samples.

Feel free to download and dissect the Blender Scene File to see all the settings. Who knows, maybe I'll need it myself for another project soon.

As you may have guessed, this animation will be used as the holding loop for the Daz Special Event that's scheduled for Wednesday.  I've been working on so much stuff I couldn't share with you to date,  but the wait will be over come Wednesday. I'm sure you're going to like  what Daz have been working on for so many months.

Enjoy!