Long Time No See

  • Roles Compositing, Lighting, Modeling, Shading
  • Software Blender, GIMP
  • Year 2024

Back in 2006 my 19 year old self made Fraka, a bird-looking character that rather quickly needed a home, so I built a scene around it.

Fraka's Dream, 2007
Fraka’s Dream, 2007

The Blender open movie Elephants Dream had just came out, so I called mine Frakas Dream.

You can barely tell, but that's the same mountain that later would appear in Caminandes 1. Gotta love the old floating panels.
Back in 2007 I already enjoyed modifyng Blender. That's why the spot light cone is colored with the color of the light. It was easier to do back then before light nodes became a thing. Oh and that Suzanne in the top-right corner.
This took me longer than I like to admit. Not sure why. First tried curves, then mesh, sometimes you just get fixated in the wrong workflow. Looking back I should have deleted it and started over, but that's a scary thing to do when young.
Probably my favourite bit.
What a terrible way to light, with normals! Oh boy, lighting is so much simpler and easier nowadays thanks to global illumination and Principled BSDF shaders.
The final (final) compositing was done in Multilayer EXRs. Total overkill but it was needed for my old single-core laptop to render in high res.
Screenshots from Blender 2.43 back in the day, 2007.

For the longest time I thought I had lost the original .blend files. So in 2023 I decided to remake it from scratch. Since I’ve learned a few new things since, and Blender has improved so much, I thought it’d be a fun project.

I called it “Long Time No See”.

Long Time No See. 2022-2024
Long Time No See. 2022-2024
👀
👀
Could use a drink on the way.
A long way to go, kiddo.
No wind at least.
Sometimes the simplest characters are the most fun to make.
Oh hai!