Bible Animations

- Particle distribution
   Quite a topic to say the least! Particles are extremely useful for increasing scene size (and memory consumption), while keeping render times as low as possible. In fact, it makes scenes that were impossible on a single PC possible! I learned about this during the Esther 6 project, when GOD lead me to use particles to add details to the buildings, just because it was faster and on another project, where I had to make a city. On the other project, where there was a city, I literally tried manually placing the buildings. It looked amazing, but took forever and the project quickly slowed down. Okay, so I retried using the shift+D method, which links objects. Got further, but again, got slower. Only when I used particles, could I add a whole lot more than just the buildings and it went a lot faster putting it together.
   In most of these cases, using Random was the most efficient distribution method, but it is not so in all cases. Most cases, yes, but not all. For example, in the city there were a few cemeteries. These cannot be randomly placed and have random rotation - no, you would use grid.
   So as GOD lead me through all these issues, I finally got a great result and it has resulted in Susa for Esther 6 as well as the goats, trees and buildings for Exodus 7-12, KJV so far! :D
   I strongly encourage you, if you have anything that repeats a lot, use particles - it's a lot faster!

- Low poly
   The lily pads were not very high poly to begin with last week (previous post), but they did pose a threat for later on if I did not reduce their poly-count. As I did a little digging on lily pads and references, I found that mine could be radically improved to fit the style more so I really felt lead to use a texture on a plane instead of the physically modeled one and it turned out better than I expected!! GOD is so good!! I did add a little detail to add some depth and shadow, but it's still about half the poly count! :D

- Goats
   I was so happy to get to some of the finer details of the outside scene! I was hoping to get both sheep and goats as well as a servant or two walking around done, but sadly, that was a little overreaching, haha. I'm still so thankful for the goat being done and that the rig works too. I still need to learn a few things about rigging something with two joints, but I know GOD will get me the right video in the right time. In fact, I believe HE's showing me right now which one it is:

Outlines
   Because the goats are so many and the scene has so much geometry, Freestyle has to be very limited, to say the least. That meant that I had to keyframe it so that it only came on after the goats were out of the shot (those visibility computations - wow...). That's not freestyle's fault, it's just because of how it works. Large scenes just don't work well with it.
  I'm thankful GOD did not even let me fiddle with Freestyle trying to make it work. I almost immediately went for the edge tool as soon as HE reminded me of Esther 6's crowd:
- Environment
   A massive undertaking and I kinda avoided it, because of it's size, but I didn't take super long, and GOD's leading in the texturing process, really gave me a result I'm very happy with and would, if lead to, like to see if it can be improved for my PC. One of the biggest things that bothered me for this process was scale. The palace seemed soooooooo small compared to everything, so it was one of the first things that needed to be scaled up, yet remained until almost last. Thankfully, it fits and it works where it sits. There just needs to be more white Egyptian buildings (white and palatial in nature), surrounding it, so it doesn't look so out of place, for lack of a better term. Some more palm trees wouldn't hurt either, haha.
   Of course, I still need to make sheep, crocodiles, boats, servants and the Israelites along the Nile, etc. Still a lot to do, but really really liking the result!!

Flooding
The Nile used to flood on an annual basis, going up and down very gradually. This meant that large areas of Egypt, especially the Nile valley, was under water, except for a few high points, or islands (Wikipedia). This was a surprise to me when I wanted to make the stairs to the river. I went for the article's medium flooding height, which was a little over 11m and made the stair accordingly. Super thankful for any accuracy that can be incorporated. I want the place to feel like Egypt and respond like it too! GOD is so awesome for sending me this info! I don't even know how I came to know about the flooding!

Textures
   I like to go procedural on really big objects, as it keeps a uniformity, while adding variation to the surface. In this case, everything is procedural and I mean everything, except the palm tree leaves and the lily pads. I don't recall anything else being hand painted. Not even the pyramids or the sky - both of which will need to be adjusted. The previous sky was better. This one kinda pulls around the horizon, like a vacuum. The pyramids look too blotchy and tall (in relation to size).
   The blotchiness in the texture should be an easy fix - thank GOD! :D

- Clipping distance
   And finally, I spoke about this quite long, for me, in the video, so I don't want to camp here. I just want to repeat what I said in the video: Keep your camera's overall clipping distance as short as possible. It will increase render times and it will keep your objects from whacking out like mine did! hahaha.

Biggest thanx to GOD for helping me with this. Without HIM, none of this would be possible! :D

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