Presenting Outcomes 3

First, I created the virtual space for the gallery. This consisted of a square block for the floor and walls set up to form a path through the virtual space. After creating the base of the gallery, I set up a simple path object looping through the gallery. This was the track my camera would follow. I set the keyframe track from 0-3600 frames and linked the camera to the path with a linear easing style. I used the graph editor to add a subtle noise modifier for the camera object's rotation. This added a slight shake to create the impression of it being handheld. With the camera set, I moved onto creating the curtain for the entrance. This was a simple cloth simulation using an object with collisions enabled moving through it to simulate somebody pushing the curtain apart.

I moved on to texture the gallery. The floor and walls were both simple free wood and concrete textures. I set up screens to hold the pieces; these were planes to which I attached the gif using an add-on that allowed me to insert videos as textures. Though this made the scene significantly more slow and processing-heavy, it was vital for this piece as Exhibition Hub's purpose was to bring 'artwork to life'. I ordered the pieces in the way I created them: to tell a short story about a small dinosaur's life. I set up some benches in the centre of the gallery next to the more relaxing images of the season changing and the waterfall. I wanted the death of the dinosaur to be a sudden shock to the viewer, so I positioned those screens behind a sharp turn. This resulted in a menacing approach to a bright orange hallway which I thought was very effective.

Rendering the piece was the most tedious part. Blender has 2 main engines: Eevee and Cycles. Eevee is an online rendering engine that provides less realistic images but quicker and in real time. Cycles however, is an offline engine that calculates 3D data to create hyper realistic scenes. Throughout my course I have been consistently using Eevee, as Cycles simply takes too much time and and is too resource intensive to run on certain machines such as those at school. However, for this gallery, I was aiming to make it as realistic as possible. So I exported the Blender file to my home computer and start rendering on Cycles. The render was 3600 frames and with each frame, Blender had to calculate how every single light ray would interact with the environment - this is called ray-tracing. Due to this the piece ended up needing 28 hours to fully render.