Encounter

VIDEO DESCRIPTION:

Play, download and edit the free video Encounter.

If you encounter the unknown you are likely as strange and mysterious to it as it is to you.

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Blender 2.79 for modeling, materials. Blender 2.8 beta for materials and rendering with eevee. Keyframing the animation was mostly done in 2.79. HitFilm Express 12 for editing.

I chose eevee to render this. The dark scene, fog and simple textures or materials meant that photo realism and global illumination weren’t important. Test renders with cycles and eevee showed little difference in appearance so eevee’s speed was a deciding factor. Also, it was time for me to learn more about it.

Eevee has a bloom effect for glows and easily makes a light cone in the volumetric fog. Cycles used both of my video cards for gpu rendering. Eevee only used the one with the screen plugged in. Cycles cast light on the trees, ground, and into the fog from the light emitting material while eevee did not. I would like to have had that light in the video.

Eevee took 3.28 seconds per frame with the render window minimized (4.18 open) while cycles took 28 seconds per frame in Blender 2.8. Cycles would need many more samples to make light cones resulting in very long render times.

I learned that animating a movement is easier if you don’t consider timing or coordination with other animated items at first. Just make keyframes for the main things then move them in the dope sheet to time and coordinate the animation.

The animated glow material uses a noise node with the distortion factor keyframed between two values. The nodes are: noise - bright/contrast - multiply (color to value) – emission (value to strength) – material output. The bloom effect also gives a glow.

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Sound Effects

Logo sound is Stinger by RobboStar, CC BY 3.0 modified for length

Night close to a river, crickets and frogs, bird sometimes by Felix Blume, public domain
freesound.org/people/felix.blume/sounds/466955
Deep Cinematic Drone Loop by Alexander CC BY-NC 4.0
orangefreesounds.com/deep-cinematic-drone-loop

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Splode-O-Dyne

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