This week I started working on the game trailer for #TurnItOn. #Blender is used as the main tool to create the needed shots. I have to learn a lot, as the movie is an undiscovered area for me.
After doing a few tests I had to reduce my expectations: going full HD would need a render farm too. The compromise is 720p at 30 fps. Believe or not, even the pros do it at 720p (hello @Digic_Pictures!). I use a slightly low sample rate as Blender's noise reducer does a nice job. Images are rendered with motion blur into 16bit multilayer EXR format. They carry passes like combined, Z, AO, shadow and direct glossy. I composite them in another Blender project (vignette, bloom, color correction, etc...) and put all those together in a 3rd one.
For all you Blender lovers out there here is a nice trick: In late 2017 there appeared the first posts about hybrid rendering in Blender where you can use the CPU and the GPU at the same time. The official build still doesn't have this feature but what if you still wanted to work with double horsepower? Easy: run two instances of Blender and render part of the frames on CPU, others using GPU. For me, a GTX1050 brings nearly the same speed as the Ryzen 1600x, that is I can do the job in half the time!
Meanwhile, Laci from @Strayboom started composing the audio track for the trailer/menu and a brand new one for in-game. They are superb, I'm sure you are going to love every beat! :)
