Depth of field, Asset Manager, Camera

Here is a short animation using the demo objects from the asset manager demo from blender.  You can get the demo here.

 

I downloaded the asset manager demo from the blender website and was able to make a small scene quickly.    

If you have very good objects, the asset manager makes placing them in your scene very easy.  I was able to make a wall with molding and drag out the Photo pictures onto the wall.  I still have to figure out how to start adding in all the objects I have.  After reading how the asset browser saves, I think you mark the assets in your scene and save the file.  Then in the preferences, file paths/asset libraries you add a path.  I have a folder with lots of blend files that have objects, and they are all not marked as assets.  I'm not sure if I have to go back to all my files and mark all the objects I want in the library.  That might be tedious. Kit bash files though you select all and select mark as asset.  Then save the file in the folder you put the path to in the preferences

This Tutorial went through the basics of how to use the Manager.

 

I used the add camera rig, and that has a feature to add a dof empty, I was able to use that to add some focus to the animation with the dof.  I thought using real world fstops was a thing, but blender uses .1 to 1 not 5.6.   Why?  I've seen a camera add on that does just that.  I think it was named real camera.

Here was the first quick animation I did.  To make this scene with the demo file provided by blender took about 15 min.  Of course, there are some know how to make the scene look good.   The lighting was using an hdri, and the sky shader with a mix shader.  Also, I have several lights in the scene, a main light on the right.  I added a camera using the add camera rig.   Animating the camera was simple, adding several key frames.  Also added keyframes for the focal length. (zoom) I also used the camera shakify add on.  I did a review on this plugin here.  

What made playing with this new feature easier than previous versions of blender was the new render Settings and the denoiser.   In the render settings, you can set the noise threshold from .001 to 1, (1 being less render intensive) and then the samples down to 10 and render your animation to get a very good estimate of the motion quickly.  At 25%, I was able to see a 400-frame animation render in a few minutes.   Then you can set those settings back to .01 and 128, or 256, depending on the quality for the final renders.

Overall I think this little animation shows where Blender is heading.  So if you have your library, and default scene setup (File/defaults/save startup file)  An animation like this could be very fast to create.

 

Next I tried to double the length of the animation.  I went to the dope sheet selected all the keyframes, and scaled them to fit the new length.  But some things didn't translate well.  So fussing with keyframes was a little tedious.  Might have been faster to redo the camera motion with the new animation length.  I think the snappiness of the first one was better, but the below lingers on the artwork (I put in art pictures I did in blender :) ) a little longer.   My brother suggested to add some sound effects to the logo, and some music and ambiance sounds.   I found a few websites with free sounds like:

https://freesound.org/

https://www.zapsplat.com/

https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/

I got some royalty free sound effects and music, and had my animation just play in a windows media window.   I then listened to several music selections simultaneously.   When I found one I liked I used blenders video editor to add my image sequence to the timeline and added the sound files.  I tweaked the sounds to start and stop for effect, and fade when needed.  You can layer sounds as well as images.

My brother did the same thing In Resolve by black magic.  Resolve has more controls and is more professional software for editing.  He was able to use Resolve to add in similar sounds and music.  He was able to Make the levels of the sounds louder, something that Blender seemed to only allow me one value between 0 to 1. I tried larger numbers like 2 and 3, and the sound level remained at the 1 level.  This is why my brother likes Resolve.  So, in my animation I wasn't able to make the sound effects louder yet. 

Which sound design in the Animation do you like better?