Upset Tentacle

Had the urge to experiment with Lightwave's IK Boost and what better place to start experimenting than with a tentacle. I created a simple sub-patched tube, shaped sort of like a tentacle, brought it over to Layout, textured a bit and set up a simple animation. The first results were fun, but I quickly realized I needed to animate the camera as well. Once the camera movement was thrown in, it was starting to look like something. I rendered, but over a black background with just two lights, it was a bit dark and nothing too dramatic. So, I investigated Image Based Lighting.

I found my way to HDR-Labs, home of lots of cool HDRI examples, Image Based Lighting techniques and software. Now under the smart-IBL section of HDR-Labs, I downloaded the ultra-cool Smart Image Based Lighting plug-in and image manipulation software. I read through all the tuts for setting up your own s-IBL file set, but I couldn't resist the s-IBL file of the month from Bob Groothuis's blog. The s-IBL Lightwave plug-in sets up your scene with a 360° dome holding the hi-res backdrop, and even sets up your basic render settings with Global Illumination (GI). With the dome in place, the already animated camera had a reference background to move against.

Now GI is slow to render, plus I had 8 passes of motion blur. My four second clip took several days to finish, but I wanted to get a good baseline from which I could compare other rendering techniques. So, for now, here's my "Upset Tentacle," if I have any luck with faster rendering techniques, I'll be posting.