There's not an official logo yet (right?) but I decided to try and mobilize what is out there already, and put some movement on what was basically the source file of the logo in 3D. I love what kondiomir did, but I just made a slightly sleeker version of the source file logo. To be honest I just wanted an excuse to be able to use C4D again . I plan to improve the breakdown part and make it more dramatic (and improve everything in general), but I'd just like to post what I have so far. Got home and added the video, but I don't want to wait to upload it to YouTube or anything. I'll try make some changes before the 18th. Spoiler: Pictures Spoiler: Video https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1-Jxb9xAg--Rl9iOGVkWXpUVzg/view?usp=sharing (Remember to set video to 1080p) It's pretty basic right now but I'll see what I can do with it. Spoiler: Nerdy Stuff -Used Cinema 4D R16 -Rendered solely with VrayBridge -Video is 250 Frames, 30FPS (Approx.) 40 seconds. -Cubic-filtered Geometry based Antialiasing And uhhhh A LOT of Vray settings. Haven't optimised them yet, will update when I can! I used the Image below to test my materials. I know, it's just a mess (structurally). My materials are okay but I'm working on getting a more 'smooth' reflectiveness if that makes any sense. The pictures didn't take long, but the video I'll need to improve quite a bit. Don't know why you clicked on a spoiler labeled 'Nerdy Stuff' but thanks I guess. I'll update this as I update my efforts though.
Nice start. Look forward to seeing how it matures. I was hoping to do some animated logos before the launch but I am working 7 days a week days and nights. Not much time for much of anything right now. But I hope to show something one day soon. Donny
Unfortunately, I'm having many of the same struggles, and I'm a student. I'd envisioned a bit, but I'll see how much of it I can actually get done in this time period.
I did these today and though they're part a video, I'm not quite ready to render it out yet. I definitely need a new desktop - just these single frames took about five minutes each to render. They're over 1 MB so I put them on Imgur. http://imgur.com/a/TsOaT
What software are you using and what are your settings? "Well there's your problem." To start with, try rendering at a smaller resolution. I know, 1080HD looks great, but only if it actually exists. Try taking it down to 480P with no AA and render some test previews, just to get an idea of what the end result will look like. I can give more suggestions with some more information. [edit]The Imgur files are 92KB Jpg files, and I was able to save a 600KB .png version on my desktop. Are you saving those as raw .bmp files? A compressed format(I suggest .jpg in this case) won't make it render any faster, but it'll save you on precious disk space. If you can't pick your output file format and are using Windows, there's a really fantastic image conversion program called XnView that I use all the time. It can even do some minor alterations.
I use Cinema 4D and I change my settings based on what I'm rendering out. I do previews at much lower resolutions - plus usually only render at about half the FPS and if I'm not optimizing material settings I'll turn off things like reflections and refractions, etc. I exported the files as PNG and used AME to make them JPG. That cut off a significant portion, but still wasn't under 1MB. Not sure why the ones off Imgur are smaller. I use an external hard drive for all my final, rendered projects.
OK, so you do know what you're doing at least as well as I did back in 2000. What are your system specs? Are you able to tune reflection depth?
These are my system specs on what I have to work with right now. Unforntunaetely I can't afford to drop $2,000 on a more capable machine, but I know I would love to. If you're refering to things like dispersion, I generally won't tweak the overall reflections settings but I do what I can on a material by material basis.
HP, good manufacturer. The A10 7570M looks like a reasonable processor. You definitely don't need to drop $2k to upgrade to a better rendering machine, especially if you get a tower instead of a laptop. A base-level Intel i7 4000 or 5000 series will set you in good stead there. I spent $650 on my machine at Woot, it has an i7-4790 and 12GB of memory. I think at this point anything I could suggest for software settings is probably something you could figure out for yourself, but I would go through your global render settings and look at each parameter. If you don't know what it does, find out. There are often features that increase render time a lot without improving the overall appearance(radiosity, multi-bounce reflections, photon mapping... photon mapping is a big one.). nVidia's iRay has a global illumination feature that's turned on by default in some cases that actually makes the seen look worse if you didn't account for it in lighting(nothing ruins your dark, moody scene like suddenly having a noonday sun light everything up), and when I found out I could turn it off, my render times went from >15 minutes to <1 minute. Make sure GPU rendering for Vray is turned on. Even a low-end GPU can solve graphical calculations faster than a high-end CPU.
Put this together today. I know it isn't 3D, but I did what I could provided my schedule. It's more of an opener (5 seconds of film) to a video than anything else, but if you'd like to edit it I'll provide the project file. Spoiler: Video https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1-Jxb9xAg--RHN4bmE5OGRjV1E/view?usp=sharing Spoiler: Project File https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1-Jxb9xAg--SVZsaXhYWkpYM28/view?usp=sharing You'll need After Effects if you want to be able to do anything with this file I still plan on working on more, but for now this is what I can do.