BLUNDERING. (14/12/15)

Yesterday was exceptional, freezing cold, windless and sunny. We had a good three hour walk and then decided to have a few hours 3D modelling or blundering about in Blender. I thought of a way to get particles out of just the points on the star and not the centre vertices as well but then decided to use light instead. 

I modelled the star like this then cut the tips off. I can't get a clean cut as you can see but I then decided to experiment with a sphere as that would be easier to model. I'll have another go at the star later on. I have almost decided not to use the tree but to pop the text under a revolving star and have it flashing colours. I found by accident that if I have an emitter animate it and put a sine wave into the graph editor and raise it's amplitude above 1 then it lights up at values over 1, easy and controllable. I would rather have a square wave and will look into the matter.

This is what it looks like using a sphere,  a bit like a disco ball.

I can have an infinite number of effects but render times are horrendous about 1.5 minutes a frame at 1280x720 and 100% resolution with 100 samples. These stills are 500 sample renders and take over ten minutes. I'll have to work something out or just leave the final scene rendering all day.

This is a ten sample render and very noisy as a consequence. I would like to have made it a GIFF file but I can't get the size down under 27MB which is far too large for the web. It also skips a bit as I can't key frame it revolving 360° as the blasted computer thinks it hasn't moved I have to use 359.5°. I will try and take the first few frame reverse them and stick them on the end, that may help but won't reduce the GIFF file size.

I am getting quite fast at this job but still don't really understand what does what in Blender, I don't understand what half the terms mean so just have to alter values and see what happens. I am enjoying myself so that is all that really matters.
Have a good week.