I spent a week and half working on this and rendering it on my laptop during Austin Film Festival week.
It was all done in Blender 2.49b. I've been trying to transition to Maya, but I think Blender 2.55 beta is my next step since it's interface is closer to that of Maya and usually considered a stepping stone from Maya to Blender, but I'll be using it the other way around.
Here is my video for match moving. I love how simple the process is and how great it can look. Now only if there was more time. Hopefully Blender starts picking up something like this soon.
Here is a piece of the video that I was working on. It is done in Blender and had to be done quickly due to time and rendering costs.
In Blender particles are usually points, but can be set to be objects as well. I was able to use three items and set those items to be the particles. One was a subdivided plane with fractal cuts, that were pulled at random spots to give the illusion of crumpled paper. I didn't subsurface this to keep it from looking like cloth.
Then I created a simple 3 cylinder item with 3 plane leaves. All textures here were "wood" textures, and only the colors were changed.
The other item was a elongated cube that had fractal cuts on the last face. Points were chosen at random to give it the splintered look.
Then three particle generators were parented to a vortex wind and tied to each of the objects with random start seeds and random velocity settings. The generation was started at -100 frames and the "hurricane" was moved from the left to the right of the screen.
All the particles were interacting with the hard bodied servers and floor to make sure that nothing would pass through.
So for this project I did two directional lights for the first render, a three-point lighting setup for the second render, and a weird lighting from the inside for the third render.
I went inside the render options and tweaked some settings to produce the highest quality render I could come up with using the terms that I was familiar with. I was afraid on touching too much since there were so many options that I wasn't to sure on.
I liked the three-point setup for a contained scene, but the directional lights would work great in more outdoor, landscape scenes. The light from inside I really liked since it gave the spaceship a different aura to it. I like how Maya seems to be smarter about rendering textures that Blender, but I still like the Modo rendering engine since it comes loaded with great and tweakable presets.
