Endless Possibilities causes Endless Confusion.
by akrid
This Week I went back and refined some older work that I had left for dead. I created this image of a Japanese convenient store probably a few months ago. The objective was basically to layer on and get familiar with as many effects as possible. Stupidly no reference used, as always. I tried creating an interior for the store, but I figured that's kind of a whole other can of worms that I'm not...
This Week
I went back and refined some older work that I had left for dead.
I created this image of a Japanese convenient store probably a few months ago. The objective was basically to layer on and get familiar with as many effects as possible. Stupidly no reference used, as always. I tried creating an interior for the store, but I figured that's kind of a whole other can of worms that I'm not entirely prepared to deal with.
Polygonal rain test. You can't really see it, Higher res is in my profile.
I created the rain in photoshop. I made some attempts at creating the rain in 3D, with real polygonal refractive drops and copious motion blur. Ultimately I ended up with something that was really not worth the render time and could be perfectly duplicated in photoshop with a fraction of the difficulty. It was a good experiment though, It's always good to firmly know the boundaries of 3D. That's not to say it's impossible to make good rain in 3D, but my program of choice lacks the tools that would elevate it beyond what you can get out of photoshop. And anyway, by the end of this project I concluded that the characteristics of rain are less derived from actually observing rain streaks but more so from the effect it has on an object.
Obviously. this image isn't particularly compelling; It's just all around too dark and there are some weird things going on... After much searching on ways to improve it, I eventually sort of gave up on it.
But Now I'm Back on the Case!
When all else fails, I find changing the camera angle often has a dramatically positive effect, so I changed the aspect ratio to a square format and pulled the camera way out. I then temporarily overwrote all my shaders (Except the ones that have an effect on the light. I.E, glass.) in order to get a better understanding of how my lights were affecting the scene.
I then determine whats lacking. I made a choice at this point to break from pure realism and make it a little more vivid and fever-dream. In order to really boost the color up, I tripled the sign light intensity. Then, I add several lights around the sign approximating the direction that the light from the sign would naturally bounce to. This gives me direct control over the intensity of the indirect lighting. It's inaccurate, but effective. I also do a few tweaks, like further recessing the flood light and shifting around the interior lights. Oh, and I also added a second apartment.
I then turn my shaders back on. The texture on the wall was too obviously repetitive, so I created another shader and mixed it with the first based on a mask. I also did much tweaking on the cobblestone shader, although I plan to re-render this to make it more reflective and wet looking. There are plenty of things that actually remain completely untextured, but I figure it doesn't matter too much if I'm making a fairly non-realistic image. I also add an insane amount of light bloom.
Bloom
100, 85, 75, 50, 25, 0% Bloom Threshold in that order.
Bloom is an effect that comes from a deficiency in cameras. This is not a phenomenon that the eye ever observes. Wikipedia tells me this is caused by a lens convolving the image with an airy disc... But the important part is, dark pixels next to bright pixels = bloom. In practical application, the bloom threshold parameter informs me what value of pixel will be subject to blooming. Then there's bloom radius, which determines the length a pixel can bloom to. For my render up there it's at 30% threshold, 8% radius. I imagine bloom has a stigma attached to it at this point, but if it's handled delicately it can work.
Post
If anyone has some real high-res Japanese banner ads of about those sizes for some reason, hit me up.
You didn't think that was it did you? That was a mere preamble! Well alright, I won't bore you with the details. Suffice it to say, most of my time was spent in photoshop trying to arrive at something I like. I'm still not sure I do. It's hard to find the right balance, as it can quickly become just way too crazy. I can't even tell if this is an improvement over the raw render above.
The problem with photoshop is it's too easy. When I painstakingly model, light, and texture something I have a forlorn sense of loss when it all turns out for naught. With photoshop, I can just do it again. And again. And again... It takes such a short time to go in all these completely different directions, I can never tell when to stop. I could add ten lens flares to the image, but wouldn't that be passé? I could add some fog, but wouldn't that just obscure even more of the image? It's really difficult for me to decide at what point does it all become too "busy".
I'd like your opinions/criticisms on this one. In fact, I forgot to mention I always want your opinions/criticisms. You don't have to know anything about anything to tell me whether you like it or not. It's easy, is it pleasing to look at or do you want to claw your eyes out?
Thanks for reading.