The first model I made in Blender 3d back in December of 2005 was the salt lake temple. This model has become my test bed. Each time I find something new that speeds up render time, I strip this model down and rebuild it. For the first video clip you will see, each frame took over 3 hours to render. The file itself was 580mb. The version of the model in the Salt Lake water test was 60mb and each frame took 3 minutes to render. The second clip here is the progress of the most recent version of the model, now at about 4mb. It takes 45 seconds per frame, but as you can see, I am just getting started. each version of this model, as you can see between these two clips, gets more detailed even though the file size becomes significantly smaller. Additionally, as you will see in the old video, there are many things I did not understand about animation that come through in the old video. There is a significant amount of "unintentional movement." Things that move or flicker that should not.
The level of detail in the new video is significant, though unfinished. the clip is short, but watch it in fullscreen to get a real feel for the details. Someday when school is not driving me ragged, I will have a chance to finish some of these projects. Maybe.
The original
The current
