A bit of an introduction

[j...@efn.org]

This isn't really a question but an introduction. 

I'm Jim Craig and I'm the director of the James H. Lynn Planetarium at the Schiele Museum of Natural History in Gastonia, NC, USA. I've been here for nearly 18 years and have been doing computer graphics pretty much from the time I started.

Years ago, we purchased Spitz' Electric Sky system. It wasn't exactly what we were looking for but it served its purpose while it lasted. Unfortunately, CRT projectors and limited resolution showed their age pretty quickly.

A couple years ago, I had the good fortune to meet Ron and a lot of other folks at the Mediaglobe Users' Group conference when it was held at the Settlemyre Planetarium in York, SC. I'd been using Blender briefly at the time and learned a lot of techniques from Ron.

Now, we're about to do our first major upgrade in nearly 25 years with the installation of the Spitz SciDome XD Touch system. This is going to require me to focus more on production.

I'm currently working on a new camera rig for Blender. Ron's works very well for most scenes but I do a lot of character animation and have had problems with subsurface scattering (without which, characters tend to look a little plastic). If it works as I hope it will, I'll put together a tutorial (if anyone is interested).

Ad astra!

Jim

[Ron Proctor]

Hi Jim! Welcome!

If you haven't started getting comfortable with Cycles, now may be the time. Cycles has matured significantly in recent years, including support for SSS. Its native fisheye camera is much better than my old rig.

[j...@efn.org]

I'm OK with Cycles but I find it to be mind-numbingly slow without a GPU (and, because I'm running a Mac, I don't have that option) if I want to have enough samples to avoid all the sparkles. 

I've also set up a lot of my old animation files with Blender Internal so when it comes time to change those programs over to all-sky, it's easier for me to use this other camera rig than it would be to change each and every texture. There's also the problem of mapping a texture map to a sphere without all the hassle of UV mapping just to make it work... unless they've fixed that.

[j...@efn.org]

Uh... I just saw that they HAVE fixed the sphere mapping. 

So, I'm willing to admit that I may have been wrong. Let me give this a try and I'll report back.

Sheepishly,

Jim "Baaaaaaa" Craig

:)

[Ron Proctor]

It's come a long way recently. :)

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