Pim de Groot

Rollei B35 & Portra 400 (2024)

every time you open blender and ditch the cube, you pollute a beach.
Do you ever think about that???

Wrong part of the Netherlands, the default cubes are all sent back to the Blender headquarters in Amsterdam.

They had to move from a nice old building near the zoo, to a bigger more modern facility to be able to upgrade the default cube destruction machine. The old one was housed in one of those IKEA metal cabinets, which was a nice hack.

There was an attempt to make a deal with the big dredging companies in NL to use them for coastal defense like this, but tests concluded that the edges were too sharp and the cubes tended to slip away. There were also reports of people getting weird vibes around them because they were "a bit too perfect" and "feeling like they don't belong in the real world".

Another thing in blender, this time I did some modelling and made a lantern with a rather weird light source.

An earlier Blender thing I made and finally converted to webp. I wanted to play with glossy materials and things escalated with a physics simulation.

With the weather here being rain, rain and more rain, I didn't have a chance to go out and make some more photos. But I still wanted to do something, so I went back to an even older hobby and dusted off Blender. I wanted to experiment a bit with lighting, without having to buy and setup a lot of gear.

I grabbed the Ellie pose library from https://www.blender.org/download/demo-files/ , which had most of the hard work like modeling, materials and textures, and animation already done.

I made a lighting setup that I vaguely remembered, with a key light on the left, a bit of fill on the right and another light to fill out the background. For the camera I shifted the focal length to 85mm, turned on DOF with an F1.4 equivalent aperture and rigged up focus pulling to slightly shift focus around during the animation.

That all turned out to be looking nice. Sadly the render times were more than 10 minutes per frame, even with a GPU. With some tweaking I got that down to about 2 minutes and let the entire thing run overnight.

Last but not least I got FFMPEG to turn a folder of PNGs into a webp that was small enough to post on cohost.

So, I learned some useful things I can expand on later.