Ferret Williams

I know I said that if there’s no comic before 1:00 AM CST, there’s no comic, but this isn’t exactly a comic anyway(it’s close enough to 1:00 AM).

I’ve been working on compiling an animation demo reel recently and I have some really nice video to put in there. Then I got to the Ook Island model. Wow. I did not realize how much better my stuff looks today compared to what I worked on in 2011 and 2012. Looking at it up close, 3D cartoons from 1994 looked better than that, although mostly because I didn’t know how to use textures properly yet and they simply couldn’t use textures enough to misuse them. They also didn’t have pesky shadows.

I had tried Blender’s new render engine(Cycles) once before on this model, but at that time it didn’t have full support for all the lights yet(mostly, things were over-lit) and it was still new to everybody. Blender, Cycles, and my 3D skills have gotten much better since that first try a year ago and they keep on improving.

I’ll have a 1080p video of a full 360 view of the island later today or tomorrow(and the full demo reel soon after), but for now, you can click here to see the island at 4x the size: 

UPDATE: The blog post with the video is here!