Week 4, Day 4

It is done!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hRqCDC2HU8

The rendering took about 38 hours, as expected. It also didn’t crash even once, which is great too (my pc would be to blame, not Blender).

Week 4, Day 2

I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but I just discovered render performance (and using Cycles for the viewport) is much faster if you actually enable your GPU in the Blender options. Couldn’t they have turned this on by default, or at least notified me somewhere? Oh well, the more you know… :P

I’ve set up my keyframes to move the camera, and did a test render with Eevee, which isn’t as pretty, but very fast. Took about 30 minutes for 2000 frames. I put everything together in Sony Vegas and I’m happy with the result.

Now it’s time to do the real render. It should take about 38 hours to finish with the settings I’m using. That is if my pc doesn’t crash halfway through, which it probably will at least a few times. Luckily it goes frame by frame, so I can resume anywhere anytime. I guess I’ll look about upgrading this rig soon. It was about time anyway :)

Week 3, Day 5

I made the hills, edited a bunch of materials, chose a final camera position, and finally took some time to make a decent lighting setup.

I’ll make Mario himself this weekend. I wasn’t going to include him at first, but I’m good on time anyway, so that’s a nice bonus. I have an 8bit Mario amiibo, so should be done pretty quickly by just copying that.

Week 3, Day 2

Had my first crash while rendering an animation to test some settings. Probably not Blender’s fault since I get the same while rendering videos in Sony Vegas now and then. My pc doesn’t like 100% cpu load or something. Anyway, it turns out I didn’t save all evening yesterday, and all my background bushes were gone. Thank god for Blender’s autosave files which got me right back to where I was. I’ll be sure to save more regularly from now on.

End of Week 2

I made a Goomba and a Koopa. They’re not going to win any awards, but I guess they’re passable enough. Maybe I’ll tweak them a little bit if I have some time left in the coming weeks.

I find myself mostly resorting to square shapes. It’s partly because that’s how SMB1 looks, but also because it’s easier than learning more difficult shapes. That said, I did try making a more aesthetically pleasing Goomba, but I couldn’t fit the 2D shape onto a 3D mesh without mangling it a lot more than I wanted to at the time.

I also improved the castle and the pipes, made some clouds, and watched some more tutorials on shaders and lights. I’m starting to feel a bit more comfortable around these thousands of buttons and sliders around me.

I only need to build the background bushes and hills now and then I’ll have all my assets complete. I can still improve them a lot with materials and shaders, but I feel like I’m doing good on time.

Week 2, Day 3

Made the ground block and the castle. Well, first drafts anyway. The ground block looks a bit weird to me, partly because I had to improvise the top surface. The castle has way too many merlons (That’s what the stone slabs are called, right? Blame google if that’s wrong :P). Will definitely improve the castle. Ground blocks are probably good enough for now. Maybe when I have time left in the end.

Week 2, Day 1

Made the hard block and flag pole. Also replaced the ground with something more placeholdery to gain some of my viewport speed back. Not sure if it helped much, but at least it’s easy to see which parts still need to be built.

End of Week 1

I made more progress than I thought I would. Got through the fundamentals tutorials, and even made a few blocks and a pipe already.

Had a busy weekend so the last few days I just did some things I didn’t have to think too much about, like using the blocks I have to create the layout of the level. Using so many blocks seems to have made everything a bit sluggish, so I’ll have to find a way to counter this. I have some ideas for this, but not sure what works and what doesn’t, so I’ll have to experiment a bit.

Next week I’m going to build the rest of the blocks I need, and maybe get started on the Goomba and/or Koopa.

Week 1, Day 4

Got through all of the Blender Fundamentals 2.8 videos. Had a lot of fun trying out different things while building along. Rushed a bit through the later videos because it was about rigging/bones/keyframes and stuff, and I’m only planning on doing static stuff for now. I’ll get back to it when the time is right.

I think I got most of the information I was looking for, but I’m sure I’ll run into things when I get to building the more complex stuff. The Koopas and Goombas are probably going to be a challenge.

I couldn’t find a picture of SMB1 level 1-1 with a grid, but luckily photoshop can do a grid of guidelines pretty easily, so that part’s covered.

The First Block

I started building the first actual block today. I figured the brick block would be one of the easiest to build, but it still took a pretty long time seeing as I had to start improvising techniques to make something specific instead of making random shapes for testing.

The single block looks fine. Really happy how it turned out. Had to alter it a little bit because the 2D shape doesn’t work 100% in 3D.

This has some room for improvement. There are “stretched” bricks because of how I strayed from the original design. There’s also holes in the middle. I’ll probably make a separate left, middle and right block for the bigger patches of bricks.

Going well so far, and having a lot of fun. I thought learning Blender would take months/years, but so far it’s really doable. :)