One of the more simpler scenes that I did was the scene with the Can going under the ice. I wanted it to be a scene that linked the underwater scenes to the glacier scene to emphasise the change in climate.
Procedural texture
Since my last project, I really started to understand and enjoy using procedural textures. I love how customisable they can be compared to textures that can be downloaded online. So I found a tutorial online by Ryan King Art on YouTube.
Using a mixture of a Voronoi Texture and a Musgrave texture is what achieves this look, alond with a Colour Ramp with controls the size of the cracks in the ice.
From there, I wanted to scene to be quite simple, just a sheet of ice with the can visibly floating underneath.
I applied the texture to a very large plane. I played around with some of the layout by adding a large cube directly underneath the plane and applied a volume to represent the water underneath the sheet of ice. In the end I change my mind and thought the volume underneath wasn’t necessary.
Below is what the nodes and the scene looked like in Blender.
Then I animated the can going from left to right underneath the ice.
I then added a sun light to the scene in a warm orange light.
Issues
Once I put the scene together, I began to do some test renders in the uni render farm.
The scene should have looked like this…
but looked like this…
It obviously looked completely different when rendered from the render farm. For ages I couldn’t work out why the textures were looking completely different. I used Blender 3.51 to create the scene which was the same version the university computers were using. I knew over the summer that render farm had been updated.
The university techs couldn’t answer why this was happening. I went on the internet and after days of research I found a forum where someone else had the same problem. Someone had suggested that it was because the render farm was using a different version of Blender that was incompatible with the newer version.
So on a whim, I happened to still have an older version of Blender on my computer at home, so I opened the file with the old version and it looked like the bad render. And some of the nodes in the shader editor where not working.
In the newest update of Blender, the nodes in the shader editor have updated, some don’t exist or names have changed slightly, so when an new file version of Blender is opened in a old version, the nodes are displayed as “Undefined”. And those undefined nodes are broken which in turn effect the texture.
So my theory was, like the forum said, if the render farm hadn’t updated properly and was still functioning as an older version of Blender, it was taking my files, which were new versions and breaking the nodes like in the picture above. So I ended up, after opening the file in the older version of Blender (3.00), replacing the nodes with ones still in Blender 3.00, and then making sure I didn’t open them in a newer version as they would automatically switch the file and break everything again.
I tested this updated Blender 3.00 in the render farm and it FINALLY came out normally. It was incredibly frustrating though as all my files were done in Blender 3.51 and I also had addons and rigs that were not compatible with 3.00. It also meant that once the shader nodes were fixed, I could not open that file again on the uni computers as I would be back to square one as it converted the files back. So basically I think the render farm was not up-to-date, but never got an answer in the end. So it meant I had to change every file which took a long time.