🏳️Ponder Studios

Website faviconponderstudios.com

Digital Artistry

[Skip to primary content](#content)

[Skip to secondary content](#secondary)

[](https://sites.google.com/ponderstudios.com/sprite-fright/)

Produced by Blender Studio. Made in Blender. Rated PG-13.

Character retopology work I did on Sprite Fright.  

Checkout the [showcase](https://sites.google.com/ponderstudios.com/sprite-fright/) !  

Share the post "Sprite Fright – Open Movie"

*   Share…

Exploring realistic facial shapes with Blender – WIP.  

Checkout out the [showcase](https://sites.google.com/ponderstudios.com/female-facial-shapes/home) !

[](https://sites.google.com/ponderstudios.com/female-facial-shapes/home)

Raw mesh, color map, facial compression shape in Blender.

[](https://sites.google.com/ponderstudios.com/female-facial-shapes/home)

Raw processed results using [R3DS Wrap](https://www.russian3dscanner.com/). Series of morph target expressions on mesh with respective 8k color maps.

[Blender](https://www.blender.org/) v2.83.2 LTS  

[R3DS Wrap](https://www.russian3dscanner.com/) 3.4.8  

[GIMP](https://www.gimp.org/) 2.10.20  

Bundle purchased from [3D Scan Store](https://www.3dscanstore.com/3d-head-models/3d-female-face-bundle/female-01-x38-expression-bundle)

Share the post "Female Facial Shapes with Blender 2.83"

*   Share…

Reduced render time by 50% and removed banding on background by using combination of Blender’s 2.79 new features:  

– denoising  

– preview rather than final sampling  

– limited rather than full global illumination  

– shadow catcher plate with composited background rather than usual studio floor setup, effectively not generating banding.

[Project Showcase](https://sites.google.com/ponderstudios.com/showcase-hugo-portrait)

Share the post "Pet Project: Hugo – Base Mesh Turnaround"

*   Share…

The purpose of this project is to explore the giclée printed medium.  

View full [showcase](https://sites.google.com/ponderstudios.com/showcase-hugo-portrait).

[](https://sites.google.com/ponderstudios.com/showcase-hugo-portrait)

ZBrush sculpt, screen capture – WIP.

Share the post "Pet project: Hugo, a Jack Russell Terrier – WIP"

*   Share…

Blenderella, Advanced Character Modeling, originally released in 2011 as a training DVD for Blender Institute.

**Get the complete tutorial at:**  

[Blender Cloud](https://cloud.blender.org/p/blenderella/)  

[Blender Store](https://store.blender.org/product/blenderella-download/)

**Attributions:**  

Blenderella, Advanced Character Modeling by [Blender Foundation](https://www.blender.org) ([CC-BY-3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/))  

Human Reference Photos from [3d.sk](https://www.3d.sk/) (used with permission)

Check out the [showcase](https://sites.google.com/ponderstudios.com/showcase-blenderella)!

Share the post "Blenderella, Advanced Character Modeling Workflow on YouTube!"

*   Share…

We finally moved our rendering pipeline over to cloud providers.

Here was the render setup:

==========================

*   240 frames at 1920Ă—1080 with cycles, split into 20 regions per frame.

*   Total machines: 49

*   Rendered files stored using Google Cloud Storage.

Render result summary:

======================

*   Total time: 5h 45m

*   Average per frame: 1m 26s

*   Average time per frame would be better if “aws” machines performed normally while using free tier instance. More details below.

VM instance provider summary:

=============================

bx – IBM Bluemix – 1 month trial ?!

*   Only provided a Kubernetes cluster with 1 worker node in their free trial.

*   Since we required access to many VM instances, integration to render pipeline was postponed for now.

aws – Amazon Web Services – free tier – EC2 instance 750 hours

*   15x t2.micro

*   1 core w/ 1Gb ram

*   Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2676 v3

*   Average time per pixel = 12.46 ms

*   @ 0:15 seconds, we can see the CPU taking 9-10 more time than all other providers.

az – Azure – 1 month trial – $250 CAD credit

*   16x Standard\_F1s

*   1 core w/ 2Gb ram

*   Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2673 v3

*   Average time per pixel = 1.76 ms

gcp – Google Cloud Platform – 1 year trial – $410.24 CAD credit ($300 USD)

*   16x Custom preemptive instance

*   1 core w/ 2Gb ram

*   Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU @ 2.30GHz

*   Average time per pixel = 1.38 ms

vgt – Vagrant (free) / Virtualbox (free) running on Windows 10 (not free) – internal cluster

*   2x Virtualbox VM

*   4 HT cores w/ 3Gb ram

*   Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz

*   Average time per pixel = 0.86 ms

Share the post "Monitoring blender cycles render"

*   Share…

Dragon Baby Scales, blanketed by his wings.  

Share the post "Dragon baby Scales silver pendant."

*   Share…

Sintel & Scales models created with Blender.

Share the post "Sintel & Scales 3D print"

*   Share…

Sad Sintel model created with Blender.  

Share the post "Sad Sintel 3D print"

*   Share…

Model created with  ZBrush and Blender  

Share the post "Seated Male Figure 3D print"

*   Share…