A quick-ish Babylon 5 shot. In direct defiance of my experiments a few days ago, the many fighters on-screen were not instances (I would’ve had more if they were), but were loaded in from a very old scene and hand-arranged. The trouble is, each model contained multiple objects and lights, which as far as I know doesn’t play nicely with instancing. I could’ve created single-object versions of them specifically to be instanced into large squadrons, but who has that kind of time? Not me, not anymore.

Perhaps when this is all over I’ll try to settle on to a one-render-a-week schedule so I can remain fresh while still allowing myself time to do other 3D stuff that doesn’t go directly on the screen. Not to say I regret doing this, I’m really happy about having so much new output to look at and build on (I’ve probably already exceeded the previous five years combined).

There’s another interesting thing I don’t have time to investigate. I tried to create a dolly-zoom effect so there’d be a lot of radial motion blur to create a feeling of acceleration, but it didn’t come out with any visible blur at all. I’m not sure why, but it’s something to put a pin in and revisit later on.