A Round Tuit

I finally got a round Tuit! [click for big]

In case you need to get a round Tuit, feel free to use this one. It took me a while to arrange all the bits in the right order, but now that they are, you should find it easy to copy them.

Click the image above for the 1200×900 size (or here for the 1920×1020 HD size).

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I had a number of goals in mind with this little project. The end result is trivial, but the road to that end was important.

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Firstly, working with POV-Ray on my new laptop. Now I can use their 64-bit version, which renders much faster. I hadn’t updated in a while, so I’m using a slightly newer version of the product, too.

It does require a minor change to my source files when I render any older projects, but the transition is otherwise painless.

(Failing to make the change just results in the app nagging me to make the change, and then taking a lowest-common default, so it’s really no biggie.)

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Secondly, I’m also working with (the 64-bit version of) FFmpeg, which is the product I’ve been using to stitch thousands of rendered frames into a movie for YouTube.

The new install seems to have better docs for what I need (or I finally found the section I need) to figure out how to render high-quality movies.

I’ve been making movies for YouTube for a while now, but they’ve been really low quality. I haven’t been able to figure out what I’m doing wrong.

This time I found explanations of key settings (ffmpeg has a jillion very complicated settings; video and audio is extremely complex), so I’m finally beginning to figure out how to use the product.

For one thing, and this is so obvious I don’t know why I didn’t start here, the input images need to be big enough. Can’t get a 1080 HD movie without 1080 HD frames.

So obvious. Painfully so.

I guess I thought it upscaled. (You know how I’ve said everyone takes a stupid pill once in a while? There was one of mine.)

However, that means I need to generate 1920×1080 pixel frames, and rendering frames that size with textures and lighting has been prohibitive. (It may remain prohibitive except for smaller projects, but the 64-bit version is much faster.)

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Thirdly, I actually do have a note.

The teddy bear, my co-debugger, is from my 1950s toddler days!

Or a printout of an image, rather. At some point in my past I had access to a 3D tool (there have been various, who knows which one it was) where, probably as an exercise, I made a round Tuit (or a Toit, in that case).

The printout is of that model.

I’m not even sure I have the image file, let alone the model (let alone, most likely, any way to make use of said model).

But I’ve got that printout, years old, and I’ve always thought it would be a simple project to re-create it.

Because everyone sometimes needs to get a round Tuit.

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Since it was such a simple project (one I’d actually begun months ago and forgot to get back to), it was perfect for testing the new installs.

And to see if maybe, at last, I was able to make a decent quality YouTube video. I’ve been really bothered by how inept and awkward my efforts so far have looked. (Especially compared to what some authors are doing.)

I’d say I’m definitely getting closer:

It is, in fact, 1080p HD. (So watch full screen for full effect.)

It’s also a 260 meg MP4 file. (Compare that to the 1 meg MP4 for the video I did last September.)

Rendering for this involves 3000 frames (1920×1080), which amounts to 5.4 gigs of image files. It took about five hours to render the files.

But I consider that all within reasonable bounds, so I can at least make nice movies for simple things. (I know exactly what I’m going to work on next. A project in definite need of an update.)

(I also learned that when you upload a large HD video, it takes YT up to four hours to process it. After the upload, I watched the video it to make sure it worked, and YT would only show it in 320p, which freaked me out. But I found a FAQ that explained, and, sure enough, the next day it was what I’d expected.)

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Get a round Tuit, my friends!