My last post was a very small resolution video of my first blender project (a black hole with a vinyl record for the accretion disk) that looked good but definitely had room for improvement. After some helpful comments I spent the next couple weeks adding movement to the background stars and the tonearm by giving the camera a slow orbit and the tonearm model a little bounce. next came the problem of excess light rays bouncing off the tonearm. as the light from the emission passed through the lens it was condensing and creating a tv static like reflection on the tonearm. I learned about view layers and created a separate layer for the tonearm and some hidden tilted copies of the disk for the reflections. finally I did some research on improving my render times (mainly figuring out how to actually render from my gpu) and cut the time from 7min to 1min per frame (thank god!). stitched the final video together to make it loop and here we are. my next goal is to render a higher resolution higher framerate version to use as a background. again if you have any tips or suggestion I would love to hear them! I'm super proud of the result and hope you guys like it!
TLDR: I learned more stuff. I made my render better. look at it. wow.