VoodooGirl

What the hell. That isn't the obscenity laden message I posted!

That shot - one frame - took 13 minutes and 10 seconds.

So to render the whole Praetoria dissolving animation would have taken around 52 hours and forty minutes, approx.

Note to self: Stop saving stuff on your roommate's computer

Thank You

Using Arcanaville's method of pulling a 3D "printscreen" I was able to import into Blender 3D the *.obj files (textureless.) I used a combination of grabs from demorecords and while playing Live (I highly recommend pulling from demorecords...)

Once in Blender I imported the file and scaled it down - waaaaaay down. Then I began to merge scene elements into meshes (buildings, surrounding scenery, "actors", etc.) Then I'd remove the double vertices and used Blender's Subdivision Surface modifier to make some of the meshes a higher resolution - for appearance and for the particle system I would be using.

After that I keyframed the camera positions to get a feel of the movement of each shot and also when each dissolving particle systems should begin and end. After that I would place in force fields - wind, turbulence, and general force fields (either inwards force or outwards force) and keyframe their movements, if any.

Once all that was in place I would begin "baking" the particle systems for each group that would be dissolved (actors or scenery,) setting the particle count to 50,000 and keeping the simulation around 35 - 50 frames. Once all those were processed I'd render a few still images at key points to gauge how it would appear in the final animation.

After that it was a matter of setting materials, sky color, ambient occlusion, and video information. I had toyed with reflections and depth of field but it was taking about 6 minutes to render each frame with those settings and for a 120 frame animation that would take a full day.

The learning curve of Blender is something like 90 degrees.