I can't think of an interesting factoid to discuss with regards to this one. There's not much to say about it other than working on this quick project nearly drove me insane, for numerous reasons. Front and center would be a bug I encountered, concerning the scale of the scene causing the geometry memory use to skyrocket. The other reason is all the tinkering with settings and fiddly bits when working with "Fur" totally sucks.
First of all, this project fell prey to poor planning. Feeling pressured to put something up on here, I started modelling with no reference or goal, getting so far as to do the lanterns, posts, and terrain before I saw a random picture of a Taiwanese farm and set a solid direction.
Iteration 1
This first image was an attempt at that goal, and obviously it fell flat. I under-estimated the difficulty of modelling the crop itself (Pictured is just a placeholder bush), as well as the difficulties of making a good night time image at a large scale. I was trying to deal in too many things I've never tried before. There are still some pleasing aspects about the perspective and composition, but the aforementioned bug made it impossible to render any of it at an appropriate amount of detail. Eventually I scrapped it and moved on.
Iteration 2
I decided to try and go for a more atypical tropical image, taking the store house from the previous image as a base and re-purpose it as a boathouse of sorts. Without getting too technical, I ran into problems between the dirt/rock texture and the grass texture, which makes that unsightly seam between the two planes. This combined with my failure to identify the scale bug at this point made me get extremely frustrated, and I scrapped this one too.
Iteration 3
This next iteration compacted the previous one into something a little simpler. Firstly, I was working with flat terrain, which with the method I was using makes it a hell of a lot easier. The stratum you see is driven by a fairly complicated shader, using a gradient on the Y (Up) axis to mask between three materials. Secondly, I finally identified and squashed the bug that was causing render issues with my previous iterations, making the project actually manageable again.
The whole "Plucked from the earth" look is aesthetically pleasing, although I consider it sort of a cop out.
Taking it Back
My final iteration, I figured I had to get the night time aspect in there again. This is the only one I bothered to put any polish on, and even then it could use a re-render at higher settings. As far as the lighting goes:
- 3 lamps inside. They consist of semi-transparent geometry with point lights inside. The color of the lights are set with kelvins, a unit used to measure light temperature. Setting the color with kelvins ensures that is a real world light color.
- 1 very weak directional light, blue in color and acting as the moon.
- 2 very weak blue point lights by the trees, giving them a bit of cold highlighting meant to juxtapose against the warm cabin.
- 1 light inside the newly added fire-pit, set with kelvins.
Overall I'm pretty dissatisfied with the results and particularly the amount of time it took for me to get them. I cringe at the time wasted troubleshooting because of that goddamn bug, makes me want to hit things. But I suppose in the long run I learn more from my failures than my successes. I set my ambitions far too high for this one, and each iteration I had to scale it back to a manageable level.
Non Sequitur
Check out Curse Your Branches by David Bazan (Grooveshark) for the most atheist album ever made. It's not that great an album since multiple songs linger on nearly the same subject (Religious people are stoopid), but at the least it's entertaining how dogged it is about telling you to reject God. Despite that I really like the new direction he's taking his instrumentals.Star Wars: The Clone Wars: The Animated Series is not terrible. Not good either, but I can easily see that there are many talented people behind it. I would have really liked it when I was a bit younger.
I also just noticed that there is no pop-out when you click on the small left-right images. Is that an HTML feature?
Thanks for reading, and comments would be nice as always.
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