Kostka is one of the failed projects.
Usually I show these only in Instagram Stories, if at all, but this one looks good enough that I decided to publish it.
It was supposed to be a looping animation of a glass cube/transformer based on a random doodle I drew when thinking about something else. The image above is what I managed to salvage from this idea.
I love the way the light and the glass look in this shot.
Before I decided to abandon it, this is was a long and painful project full of unforeseen difficulties. I can’t find the energy to describe all of the problems but they revolved mostly around glitches in lighting and bevelling (finely rounded edges are crucial to the whole aesthetic, trust me). To achieve the realistic glass I’ve finally upgraded to Blender 2.8 and used the LuxCore rendering engine, known for its impressive caustics. Unfortunately, I encountered issues that I haven’t been able to understand or work around. The renderer seems hypersensitive to changes in geometry. Even the smallest change in the model can result in a big change in lighting, which makes the video flicker unbearably. Of course this might be a consequence of the way I’m using this engine, but as I’ve said, I don’t know what the cause is and I wasn’t able to get help.
At this point in my 3D adventures I should probably “just learn Houdini” instead of coding these things from scratch and relying on non-commercial tools, but I keep saying to myself that I indulge in this hobby too infrequently to justify the time commitment involved in learning a new piece of software…
Anyway, the glass looks good. Some of the “happy little accidents” along the way were cool too. We’ll see what the future brings.
