My entry to the Atmosphobic RACHAL is a little film trailer and not just a still. As I saw the torch i took the chance to play with the Blender particle system. While playing around I realized that I should make a little movie cause the flames look much better that way.

While creating the scenes for the movie I have used only parts and shapes which are included in the model. I have modified the geometry to get better rendering results regarding image quality and rendering time.

I started by importing the LDraw files into Blender and optimizing them. First I have removed all inner parts of all bricks. Afterwards all bricks (with the right geometry) where beveled so they look smoother. The minifigs hair additionally was subdivided and afterwards modified by a subsurface operation to get is really smooth.

The background (ground, snowdrifts and forest) was created by using the base plates, snowdrifts and trees together with the 'duplivert' function from Blender. This function duplicates a given object/geometry (tree or base plate) on each vertex position of its own geometry. The geometry for each background component varies from scene to scene, depending on the position or path of the camera. The forest trees where not optimized (beveled) and additionally truncated at the top to keep the vertex and face count low. The treetops are not visible in the rendering and could therefore be removed. This halves the rendering time for each of the dolly ride frames.

The animation setup is quite easy. The objects which build the minifig where reorganized to an animation friendly hierarchy. The dolly ride and the basic movement of the minifig is done by a simple path following setup using constrains. To animate parts of the minifig I imported an existing armature and made it the parent of the minifig and bound the bones to the corresponding objects (i.e. ArmL.Bone -> ArmL.Object).

The flame was built of a particle emitter which is a copy of the corresponding LDraw part and a point light which moves along an almost circular path inside the emitter. The original geometry was textured with a simple animated noise texture. The animation encloses only the texture coordinates to create a moving flame effect. The snow consist of small 1x1 bricks which are emitted as particles from a plane above.

The global lightning consist of 2 main lights, a sun (for the moon) and a 'hemisphere' for the ambient lightning and 2 secondary lights, a moving flame (see above) and a headlight (spot) which is constrained to the camera (location and rotation).

1. The Arrival - The minifig enters the scene. Camera is static and follows the path of the figure.
2. Frontal I - Minifig looking around. Camera is static.
3. Frontal II - Minifig static, camera static only the flame and the snow moves.
4. The Run - The camera moves through the forest. No minifig is seen.
5. The Approach - The camera moves through the forest. It encounters the minifig from the left.
6. Vade retro - The minifig swings the torch to scare away the camera. The camera retreats and encounters from another side.
7. Retreat - Camera moves back, facing the minifig. The minifig .... see the movie ;)
8. The Whole - Simple cover scene to render the whole movie scene by scene - separated by an empty frame to a single movie file.

Nothing special here. I have used a simple vector blur composition which renders much faster than motion blur. Output Format: 720 x 576 25fps PAL-DV quicktime movie.

The complete movie consists of 1167 frames rendered in about 18 hours on a MacBookPro.

To finally cut the movie and to add some tiles and credits I imported the rendered scenes into iMovie. The results was exported to a 720 x 576 25fps PAL-DV quicktime movie.

The sound was added with GarageBand. I imported the result from my iMovie export and added some loops and sound effects. Finaly the result was exported to a 720 x 567 25fps H.264 movie.