Create a Spinning Top Animation

[@BlenderBrit]

Hi guys, I hope you enjoy this tutorial as much as I did making it. I would love to hear any feedback, tutorial requests or general comments.

[@BlenderBrit]

+Diego Ledezma Thanks and you're welcome. As for lightining, BlenderGuru uploaded a presentation on lighting the other day, it has a short promo for his latest addon at the end but before that there is a good 40 minutes of lighting principles and explanations, it's a good watch.

[@MauroC74]

Just finished this tutorial about a hour ago and I want to thank you. I had no problem with modeling but that was the easiest part, nodes and realistic materials so so, compositing was the hardest (and boring) part because I never used it before so I didn't know much about it but animation was very interesting. I panicked when you didn't turn on the screencast keys and were clicking around in the windows :) but it worked nicely anyway and now I am rendering the final animation. Those "oh it doesn't work, why, let's try this and that" were quite confusing but you told it was your first tutorial so great job!

[@BlenderBrit]

+Mauro Castaldi (kastaldi) Yeah, in retrospect, it was a poor choice for a first tutorial but I'm glad you found it useful. If you have issues with compositing I have released a really easy to use tool available on my website, along with a short video on its usage. Thanks for watching. Oh, and I'd love to see the result of your animation :)

[@MauroC74]

+BlenderBrit Is it possible to render the "plain" blend file and add post processing effects later so I don't have to render the entire animation if I want to tweak them?

[@BlenderBrit]

+Mauro Castaldi (kastaldi) Yes, infact it's how I tend to do most animations. If you set the file output to multilayer exr it will preserve all the render layers and passes, render them off with no compositing then import them as an image sequence. Once you have done that you can bring the sequence into the compositor and use it just as you would the normal render layer. Hope that helps, I'm sure there will be some tutorials already about on the subject if you run into any issues.

[@MauroC74]

+BlenderBrit thanks, I didn't know if it was possible because I did it before with another rendering but it was only a single frame with an alpha channel and a background image. I'll google for that.

[@Hashirama_Sinju]

Just beauliful...reminds me Inception... Keep going

[@warwicklambert33]

A great job. It is an interesting idea that covers lots of ground. A worthy first attempt. I wish you had explained the animation rendering. Do I just hit render as usual or do I add a file output node in the compositor and render from there? I am trying the latter and will see what happens.

[@EliSpizzichino]

you got the nomal map setup wrong for the floor. You have to use non color data for the texture and remove the bump node. Or you use the bump node with displacement or you use the normal map in the normal vector input not both. There is an exception to this rule if you want to make cycle avoid computing normal on hiden faces look here for an example kzbin.info/www/bejne/bJjbpHiLaaySrsk

[@BlenderBrit]

+Eli Spizzichino Thanks for the link. I'll take a look into this and run some comparison test as I've seen some conflicting information. Will update with annotations as needed.

[@BlenderBrit]

+Eli Spizzichino Just wanted to update on this. Having done a little research I've confirmed it is indeed a perfectly normal process to use normal maps along with bump maps, not only in Cycles but saw plenty of references to it being used in other engines as well. I will say though, until recently I had never heard of the method either. You're of course correct about the non-colour data though, it's frustrating how often I forget that one :)

[@onesandzeroes]

Very useful tutorial, but making a "specular" map by inputting the texture into the colour input of glossy shaders? Weird.