Polyfjord®

'Has anyone seen my Walkman?'

Added 2021-09-02 13:41:48 +0000 UTC

Hey Material Viewers!

This is a big one!

Volumetrics! Textured lighting! Two animated cameras! 15 000 dust particles with a turbulence force field! A detailed Walkman model (CC0) from Poly Haven! Crisp PBR pool texture (CC0) from ambientCG! Your GPU will never feel the same after this.

The caustics spot light texture setup in this scene is very similar to the one in the Marble Bust post. It has some evolution animation and some subtle X (and Z) axis animation to emulate gusts of wind on the surface of the pool.

I was struggling for a long time to make it look like the Walkman and the cables was floating in the pool, and not just static 3D objects. Turns out it needed a significant amount of movement. Very interesting! The problem was solved by using empty objects as hooks for the mesh, and then using weight paint to create a falloff. Never tried it before, but will definitely start using it more to add life to static objects.

The scene was made in Blender v2.93.3, and it renders really slowly. The 458 frames of animation required 11h 47m of render time with 3x GTX 1080Ti. That was after I reduced all kinds of extra light bounce, caustics and refractions I could think of, as well as making the particle system only visible to the camera (not casting shadows). Perhaps you know even more tricks to reduce the render times of this massive scene? Maybe Cycles X could work for this? Please let me know!

Download the final project file here: Caustics_Walkman_v2.93.3.blend

Download the rendered video file here: Caustics_Walkman.mp4

Hope everyone is getting ready for a great weekend! Looking forward to see what you'll create. Thanks for the support!

- Asbjørn