Late Afternoon [Tutorial Page 2]

[blenditall]

My latest finished project. I'm pretty happy with it, but I'll still accept criticism. Enjoy!
EDIT: The explanation is below...
New render:

Here's the node setup:

[free_ality]

wow, thats great. Nice subtle use of toon lines too, like some illustration. Perfect lighting. great modeling/texturing...

5 stars from me

[BlackBoe]

That's a delicious usage of technique you have, there. The fuzzy spray-brush lines around the crow bug me, though I know they're supposed to be feathers, they look too muzzy and undirected. But still, it's barely noticeable among the rest of this.

[iamthwee]

N I C E!

The mood you've created rocks. You gonna tell us how you did that. (tutorial perhaps). Four stars

[LarryPhillips]

Great work here imo. Looks like you put a lot of thought into this. Strong composition and lighting. I don't comment on other's work here very often but this is one of the few I've seen here that keeps me looking (as in looking into).

That poor bird looks like he's had a very rough day, but that's good -it adds a bit of mystery to the scene. Found myself looking for others and asking myself "what happened?". It's telling a story but leaves it mostly for one's imagination. You've done all this with a simple scene -and that is the mark of a talented artist imo.

The blurriness of the feathers etc. gives the impression of a watercolor so I like that too. Only problem I have with this is the square blotches in the dark clouds -looks like digital artifacts (optimization done that?). Not sure about the hard toon edge on the mill, but it does make the whole scene a bit more surreal, so I think I like it.

I hate asking artists to share their hard-earned techniques but a little general background paragraph on how you went about creating this is always welcome. I also like hearing how much time was put into it.
.

[blenditall]

free_ality: Wow, thanks! Getting that rating from you is pretty amazing; I really like the stuff you do.

BlackBoe: Yeah, I admit they look undirected. But I wanted to go for a very scraggly look here.

iamthwee: Thanks! I don't know if I'll be able to get around to doing a full tutorial, but I am willing to give you some background info. (see below)

LarryPhillips: Glad to here you're interested. Actually, this started out as a project with no thought put into it. It was just a model of a windmill. Once I decided to make it into a scene, I ended up doing quite a bit of thinking.
The artifact things in the clouds are sort of mystifying me as well.. any tips on how to eliminate those?
I'll give you some info on how I did this (see below).

One thing everybody is assuming though is that I'm using toon lines. I'm not. (In fact I don't really know why that line is there. I suspect it has something to do with the sky colour and/or alpha over node.)

As I said above, the scene started out as a simple model. I then added a few things and eventually developed it into a scene. Took me about I week in total. But it was really on and off work.

I rendered it first with the lighting in my old WIP: still sunset/evening, but different angle. I changed that.
Here's the lighting. Hope you can glean some information from this.


I originally had a very bad node setup, so I redid it. That's in the first post.

The grass is just a simple particle system.

The fence in the foreground is the same material as the windmill. It has it's own light, though, to make it look like it's catching the sun's rays. The rocks also have their own light, and a negative light to compensate for the ambient occlusion (lights up the rocks too much IMO).

The flowers were modeled manually. Nothing special there.

The crow is just a simple model with a few particles and two or three curve guides.

The sky is a photo I took (although it looks quite a bit different after compositing). I added the horizon in photoshop.

Although you can't really see it, the windows have a blend texture affecting colour to simulate reflecting the sun's light.

All in all, there are 229 objects, 209552 vertices, and 8 lamps.

About compositing:
Basically it is broken into four render layers:
1. Windmill and landscape, fence, flowers, rocks.
2. Sky. (image mapped to a plane)
3. Bird body with particles
4. Bird's beak.

Render layer 1 is blurred and mixed with the original after its hue/saturation/value has been edited. Then it layered over the sky, using the alpha over node. (Before this, the sky had 1. a sobel filter that was added to the original and 2. hue/sat/val adjustment and 3. RGB curves adjustment.)
Then I used a cloud texture that was converted to black and white to affect the saturation of the image. From there, I blurred the image and mixed it with the original. Then I layered the bird's body over the image, using alpha over. (The layers other than #1 do not render with sky, to prevent outlining) (First, The bird's hue/saturation/value was adjusted and it was blurred 1X1 pixel.)
Then the beak was "alpha'd over", because I didn't want it blurred. I wanted it to be very sharp against the sky.

And that's it.

To get the border, I simply did a border render and the blur nodes in the network automatically created the border you see in the image. I don't believe this technique has been used... but if it has, do tell me.

If you want to know anything else, I'd be glad to post it.

EDIT: The reason the bird looks so scraggly is because I nailed it to the post. At first I thought he was "just restin' or pinin' for the fjords." But he was dead, so I had to use nails. I pounded the extra ones into the fence post.

EDIT: And no, I'm not using an optimized build... that's why I wonder about the artifacts.

EDIT AGAIN: Oh, and render time was about 3 minutes.

[charliemcf]

really awesome.

it makes me think of a sketched colou drawing and really is realistic to the arty look.

great job

[filsd]

Great scene. Beautifully done. It looks like a scenario of a animated movie... an "anime".
Thanks for the explanation as well.

[blenditall]

Thanks totalexodus and filsd. It does sort of look like an illustration... never thought of it that way.

[AndyD]

Very nice. A different approach to Blender art.

However, when I first viewed it, I felt a need to try and refocus. I could perceive a "shadow" against the sky down the left side of the windmill making the object look blurry. It's very subtle and looks like an optical illusion but a check in Photoshop showed that it really is there. I assume one of the blur nodes is causing this.

From an "artistic" point of view, the peak of the rock shouldn't "touch" the edge of the distant hill (as a general rule). Either move the rock down or up (up would be better).

I also think that if you could get some purply-blue into the shadow sides of the objects, intead of black, it would really lift the whole piece and provide a good complement to the warm sky.

As for the edges, you have a few alpha nodes that don't have "premul" turned on. Chances are that's where the edges are coming from.

I'd like to see this with a little less desaturation but it's looking good as it is.

As for the bird, I generally find Super Glue is less messy

[blenditall]

Thanks.

I think I know what you mean by the 'shadow'... but I might be wrong. How exactly did you check in photoshop?

You're absolutely right. I knew something was bugging me. I'll fix that rock ASAP!

I'm not immediately sure how to go about changing the shadows... but I might mess around a bit with that.

Actually, some of them aren't turned on. But I rendered again with all of the premul buttons on... and the edge remains.

The desaturation..... Personally I think it unifies the image more.

About the bird, I didn't have any superglue on hand

[BlackBoe]

I like the desaturation. Gives it a nice, soft, washed out feel.

[blenditall]

Well, that's what I was going for.

Here's an update, with the horizon not touching the rock.

[BlackBoe]

...Do you know what would ROCK? If this was animated.

[trak wrecka]

true true......it dont think it would be that hard anyways...just rotate the mill...animating the bird would be harder..

[BlackBoe]

The grass'd be easy too, if you're using curve guides to control it.

[blenditall]

Actually, it is sort of animated! (Great minds think alike, BlackBoe) All this image is is frame 3. The camera moves and the blades turn. I'd have to rig the bird... and the grass isn't using curve guides at the moment. I could put some in though.

Hmmm... I'm liking this idea. What if it started off with the bird pecking at the fence a bit, then flying off.... and there was a lens flare when the camera panned... it would be pretty sweet, I must admit..

It would be a whole new project though.

[BlackBoe]

Yeah, don't mind me, I'm just getting ahead of myself. :P

[blenditall]

lol :P. I like coming up with ideas like this though. Maybe I should do this

[TheANIMAL]

Really great render, i shall mark this down because i have an issue with crows and i am slightly drunk, 4 stars.