One day, we discussed reflections in 3D rendering.
Those days, for some reason, car commercials with shiny cars driving though streets full of reflection glass panes and mirrors were quite popular on TV.
Then some CD was issued full of chill-out tunes, and this number was played over and over on the radio: Spiegel im Spiegel (mirror in mirror), a New Age composition by Arvo Pärt (Estonia).
This made the click, and inspired me to combine all of those in one short. Some frames were so calculation-intense that they required one full day each, and I had 6000 of them (4 minutes @ 25 frames a second). So I started with a chamfered block representing a car to ge everything else right. And modeled a car while rendering on this one. It took about 4 weeks (50 versions) to get the car right: there were no library versions of the Smart available then, and this car has no single straight line at all.
This is the lowres version using Smarts.
Resolution: low, smarts
Music: Arvo Pärt (1965)
Objects & Animation: me
Created: 2003
Toolkit: Cinema4D v6 on rendernetwork of 4 (single threat, 1.8GHz, 512Mb RAM) PC’s.
Time to build: 2 months
Time to render: 3 weeks 24/7