3000 Freedom Balloons

Here are 3,000 freedom balloons! Ok, technically you can't see all 3,000 of the balloons for composition reasons, but I used 3,000 balloons. This is for my #weekly3d and given the holiday, it seemed like a fun idea. Looking at it rendered, I probably should have used bigger balloons instead of so many small balloons, but that's ok. In doing this, I also created a custom "expanded balloon" material, so now I have that in my inventory in case I need balloons in future scenes.

Speaking of rendering... my computer/software did not like the idea of rendering even 1000 balloons at the same time. I waited about 12 minutes and it never got past 0% after the render passes. So, in order to remedy this, I divided the balloons into segments of 500, rendered out 6 images, and brought those into Photoshop where I layered them up, added the "depth of field," and the background.