Just looked it up but their markets looks appealing to me. Maybe can find some interesting stuff there
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I love art, so as mentioned, the Van Gogh museum is high in our list. My wife loves cafes and patisseries so we’re going to try and find a good one of those. Other than that- I love history, art, and culture. I’m not the biggest fan of touristy. Nothing brings me more joy than finding an old library or a small gallery somewhere off the beaten path that tourists don’t know about
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It’s been more than 20 years since I was last there :sigh:, so I can’t help much with delicious nibbles or anything recent. The Van Gogh Museum is awesome. Heck, I could spend the entire 12 hours around the Museumsplein, where also the Rijksmuseum (the national museum of the Netherlands, featuring Dutch arts and history), the Stedelijk Museum (modern and contemporary art and design), and the Concertgebow (one of the best concert halls in the world) are located. But I think one museum is probably enough for that time period, especially if you want to see other parts of Amsterdam.
Even though I’m also not into touristy things, a Canal tour on a sightseeing boat is actually a really good way to see interesting bits of Amsterdam if your time is this limited. I went on those even when I lived there.
I lived with friends in the Jordaan, which is an amazing neighbourhood next to central Amsterdam. I’d recommend just walking around there – narrow streets, lots of restored historical buildings, small galleries, intimate little courtyards with gardens, some of which have concerts on Sundays. It’s both very old and manages to still feel that way, and yet alive and vibrant. It used to be a working class neighbourhood but that changed in the 60s and it has been much gentrified since, but when I lived there it still had a lot of artists and students and elderly folk who knew their history. And you can probably still find some old-timey places like Café 't Smalle or Café De Tuin or De Kat in de Wijngaert which have been there forever. Or discover something newer on your own; the neighbourhood is chock full of little surprises around every corner.
I hope you and your wife have a marvelous time!
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Day 12- Why is this so hard???
Well, I did it. I did what I said I was going to do in my other sketchbook:
This horrible, mid-90s infomercial-esque graphical monstrosity took me almost an hour, and it’s still not a 1:1 to the reference:
Or the sketch:
Truth be told, I had to eventually admit I don’t know how to make it 1:1 to the reference 
I tried probably a few thousand focal-length and camera position combinations, and nothing worked perfectly. To be fair, it’s not bad, and I learned a lot from this, but I don’t understand what I’m doing wrong. To put my question clearly- how do you translate a 2D concept into 3D space with an identical perspective??? If I was just working from a drawing, my inability to get 1:1 perspective would make sense, but I was working from a photo. There has to be some combination of focal length and camera position that exactly matches the real-world camera in this case. Especially since I’m using real-world sizes for everything in this scene. I measured the pool and the pillar and everything.
I’m feeling frustrated if you can’t tell. I’ve tried this exercise many times and I’ve never once gotten 1:1 results. I just don’t understand what I’m missing. Everyone I see here on BA seems to be able to flawlessly execute a scene with good perspective, I can’t even do it working from a photo 
Music: no music, I needed some quiet time. Earlier this morning, I was listening to Bach’s organ works. Very good for the soul 
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It might just be me, but the objects in the distance look oddly huge to me. Maybe it’s “zooming in” too much, if you took the photo on a smartphone, those have wider views than cameras, typically. So tight spaces seem more spacious when taken with a phone. It’s weird, focal length is very hard to get I agree, and I don’t really understand it as well 
It’s mind-numbing trying to match rl persp. I’d imagine it being guess work like floating in space… Wondering off to a different world, not where you want to be but it seems right… Oh, no, it’s wayy off.
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It’s not just you 
Actually, now that you say this… I’m having a bit of an epiphany, you pointed something out that should have been obvious but somehow I neglected to remember. The highest focal length I tried was 100, but I ended up turning it down because in my head, that would be too high for a typical camera lens. I’m now realizing that 100 wasn’t high enough - I should have been thinking in entirely different sets of values. Wow. That is actually really helpful, thank you! Where were you half an hour ago? 
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Just came back from the center of a city… long day, anyway (or night).
I always had a weird feeling about phone/iPad cams. They were very “off”. No wonder my friends can fit everyone in a selfie when I can’t fit myself within the eyes of an EOS-M… (Pancake lens, if you know about it, it kinda had a wider field of view vs my zoom lenses) 
This is probably the wrong way to say it, it has a shorter focus point (18mm), so I could get close to things without them blurring out. Gave me the illusion of wide fov. I’m not as good as you at this visionary weird stuff.
So I was confused for the longest time, and since I thought at least having a mirror-less is wayy better than them annoying phones with “accessary cams” on them which are nothing more than a module with tinytiny sensors, I was more annoyed to find out 
Now that mirror-less cams are in pro-fashion, I’m not complaining. (Although I do miss my dream of owning one of those high-end SLRs)
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Glad to see you got closer to a solution already with @Minamookevlar’s able help, but yeah, I was wondering whether you were using a smartphone camera because of the strange (to me) viewing angle. I never use mine for reference photos because while it has a good camera for its time, it is too hard to adjust to what I really want (which isn’t what it does automatically); it’s made for quick point-and-shoot action, not for thoughtful composition.
You can probably find the technical data for your phone camera on one of those sites that collect that sort of info. And there are sites where you can calculate anything about your camera’s aperture, focal length, f-stop. But while doing that can lead to better understanding how those numbers relate to each other, there’s a much easier way to match Blender’s camera to a photo, and model things from that view.
I use fSpy (free for Linux, Mac, Windows), which comes in the form of a stand-alone app and an add-on for importing the resulting camera settings into Blender: https://fspy.io/
There is also a commercial add-on which is more convenient and more user-friendly, but I haven’t tried it: https://blendermarket.com/products/perspective-plotter. fSpy is good enough for my purposes.
This is what your image looks like in fSpy, with perspective lines drawn:
It’s a little iffy because it helps to have long, straight lines towards the vanishing points in different areas of the photo, but I got it to mostly fit. You can see what data fSpy calculated on the right.
And here it is in Blender, with the brick post and pool modeled over top of the reference. It’s maybe slightly off, but probably good enough for this sort of thing.
I use this for modeling old furniture for which I only have a single reference photo and no dimensions, but when I’ll do archviz it’ll come in handy for modeling both exterior and interior for which I have no blueprints but only a photo.
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It’s truly incredible how much I’m learning from the replies on this thread. Thank you, this is extremely useful information maybe one of these days I’m I’ll think to ask for input and help before I jump in and try to figure it out myself
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Day 13 - I’m back!
As you all know, I have a lot of grand ambitions artistically, but I’m realizing more and more every day how much of the fundamentals I’m lacking. Thus, today was all about perspective practice. @piranha4D , you’ll be delighted to know that I downloaded fSpy and used it on my reference image:
It’s not finished, obviously, because I am not good or fast at sculpting, but there’s really no better way to get good-looking rocks than sculpting. Maybe someday I’ll be good at sculpting. Higher on my list- get good at lighting, get good at scene composition, get good at character modeling, get good at rigging, get good at character animation, get good at painting, get good at drawing, get good at perspective… and so forth. Sigh.
It’s quite frustrating seeing where I want to be and where I actually am, I have to keep reminding myself that I’ve only been making art for three years. It’s true, I picked up Blender in April of 2019 and I can’t say I did much of anything artistically before that. For three years of work, I have a lot under my belt, but again, the fundamentals have been sadly neglected. You can expect to see more perspective studies in this sketchbook 
The “why” of why I push myself so much artistically- my ultimate end goal- I don’t really like to talk about publically, as I’m fairly sensitive about it and I get discouraged easily, and I already have plenty of people telling me my dreams are pointless and impossible. If you’d like to learn more, you’re welcome to DM me. Just please be nice, I’m normally quite thick-skinned but not about this
Anyway, I’m rambling, long story short- it’s good to be back in Blender
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Nice sculpting! (I assume)
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Yep all sculpted, mostly the Blob brush and the Clay Strips brush. I started with a low poly blockout
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Oh, were you gone? :evil grin:
Looks really good! Including the rock sculpt. That’s a nice scene. (Who knows what lies in yonder darkness!)
Glad to hear fSpy was useful!
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FSpy is useful! Although, I ran into a strange issue - most likely my fault in order to get the scene to match the imported camera, I had to use extremely large units. This scene is something like 60 meters square, which is far too much. I do not claim to understand this,but it’s not super consequential I suppose
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Hey, you’re back!
Scrape Brush might prove to be a good friend when it comes to rocks - to get a little blob/plane variety in silhouettes.
Though whether it’s useful in realistic styles, I’ve no idea…
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That’s a good suggestion, thank you! Given my distaste for realism, I’ll probably re-use the rock shader from my painterly Rocky River animation in my portfolio for the rocks and then chuck a bunch of painterly moss on there, but I’ll still try the scrape brush
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You probably didn’t do anything wrong. Judging from the photo, that looks like quite a wide angle lens. Though… hm. The longer I look at it the odder it looks. That always happens to me though.
Edit: yeah, I get a large scene as well. And fSpy says the lens is 12.4mm. That’s pretty extreme wide angle, but with a low enough fstop that could still work without distortion. In any case, it doesn’t really matter, but if something’s wrong we both did it.
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That’s actually very reassuring
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If we could figure out the size of those planks between the rails then guesstimate how many planks there are going into the distance, perhaps the actual scene really is about 100 to 200 feet?
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Yeah, the distance between the ties is what made me think the very long distance to the tunnel entrance I got might not be right. But it’s impossible to guesstimate without knowing when and how those rails were laid because while the gauges were already standardized to some degree, the spacing of the ties varied quite a bit in the old days, and this looks old (1888 as it turns out). And one can’t really count them for very far either.
I did find out where this is – Helensburgh, NSW, Australia. Apparently there are glow worms in yonder darkness.
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