Aoide - Architectural piece

Ah, it’s me again. After four months of working on this, I can now “present” a new piece.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v252/DarkMyke/Aoide_pre.jpg
Aoide (click Image for full resolution)

I have written a lot about this work on deviantArt, if you’re interested please do take a look at the description to leanr how this thing started and what inspired me to do it.Here just for a few technical things:

With this piece I have discovered how cool Normal Maps actually are! They seem to give far more accurate results than simple Bump maps and it was a real “pleasure” to work with them.
On the other hand, it was not very funny to work with several huge textures (like 4000x4000 and 3000x3000) since my computer ran out of RAM all the time. I had to split the image into 6 parts to be able to render it at a resolution of 4500x3000. But the quality of the results is worth it, in my opinion.
Same goes for the UV unwrapping - to get the results desired I had to use maximum precision and that is only possible with unwrapping. It was definitely not funny but it had to be done.

It was also the first time I used makeHuman (the old script for Blender!) to make human figures and include them into my image - it was fun to play around with all the settings! And it was also fun to make clothes later on - of course they suck but I guess noone will notice…
In general, the modeling was a great experience since I took a lot of time for it and experimented with architectural details and styles. A lot of reference was necessary for that and especially churches were a great source of inspiration.

Modeling and Rendering were both done in Blender 2.44, by the way. Lighting was done with low energy AO and several spots / omnis / arelights.

Overall, I do hope you enjoy this piece as much as I do.

Wonderful piece of work! You may want to add a decent sized image into your first post as I’m sure this should be in the gallery.

kewl stuff!
5 stars

Very nice, I love the lighting, and the modeling is nicely done :yes:.
5*'s

dang. well done.

Uhhh… I hate to say this again… but either we’re going to have to get really picky about what ends up in the gallery, or this needs to go in NOW! :smiley:

actually tho, now that I stare at it for a while, it occurs to me that a slight DOF and maybe a dirt filter type thing would help the mood of this alot. It’s really squeaky clean right now, and some grime would help.

Very nice work. If you would permit a little constructive criticim though. Here’s mine:

  1. With masternave, some very slight DOF would help.
  2. Again, with masternave, grime/dirt would be a wonderful addition.
  3. It is a bit too perfect. Even if it was built by hand, the roof tiles wouldn’t be that perfectly straight and exactly the same. Same with the wall stones.

Other than that, great job!

this is amazeing. all of your work on deviant is amazeing way to go! by the way is any of it for books novels or some sort of movie?

nice. thats an awesome model. i do agree that when going for photorealism your gonna mess up the perfection of the building but im not sure if you should.

Im kinda liking the fantasy of perfection created. Other aspects lead me towards seeing this as part of a fantasy world and why shouldn’t they have a perfect pristine castle. as for the angle of the render. meh it kinda makes me feel like its gonna collapse on me/ is all ready starting to fall.

really great work, amazingly done.

btw just wondering how much ram u got since it was freezing u up.

Hehe, thanks for bringing this up again - I’ve been busy the last few days and couldn’t check for replies nor reply to them…so, I’ll do it now:

First off, thanks to you all for these kind words and the appreciation of my work. That is definitely great to hear after the hard work on this :slight_smile:
I have added a small preview image, as Dan suggested…and will do so in the future. Thanks for the suggestion!

@masternave & Tango: I do know what you mean but I’m with guitarplay here, I’m not sure if I want to add dirt and grime. I had planned it when it all started but in the end I decided against it - this is fantasy, an imaginary castle and I didn’t want to add something like dirt which is so…much like reality. But you’re right, this takes away the realistic feeling yet in my eyes, this doesn’t hurt much. I also thought about the DOF, this might have been a good idea!

@CommanderFluffy: Thanks for also checking out my other stuff! And no, nothing is for movies or books although I do agree - some of my works look like they would be movie ads or something :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

@guitarplay: I do agree with you here - I left the castle as it is, without adding dirt since I did not feel that it needs to be realistic - only good looking (which it hopefully is) and “fantastic”.
About the RAM thing: I have 1 GB RAM, which is not really enough…psotpro in PS was also a pain while working on the full resolution renders. I really want to upgrade and get 2 GB RAM yet I don’t think that this would have been enough for this either :wink:

Again, thanks for all the comments!

Nice work! 5 stars!

Great modelling, very nice job.

Awesome. The only thing I don’t like is the stars; since the shot is angled downwards you would have to be really really really high to get them that low down on the background.