I used a two of my photos for the background. This involved using both images as sky textures, with the second image set to influence the horizon by only 50%. Then I scaled the images a bit so that I could move them slightly through the animation. This was really easy with Blender 2.5’s key frame insertion.
I did all of the compositing in blender, including the black and white conversion, and the black and white toning. I attached a screen cap of the node tree.
I do a lot of black and white photography, so I thought I’d try doing something monochrome in blender. Also I’m always interested in doing something architectural.
Black and white is awesome. Makes you see the shapes and lines, instead of being distracted by the colors. Anyway, great job on that animation, looks awesome!
I can’t pinpoint what’s wrong with the specularity on the bell, whether it’s too large/small/intense/flat. But something is off. The flickering on the tiles need fixing.
I’m not sure why the roof tiles are flickering, but I did have the influence of the normal map very high. I’ve changed the specularity on the bell, so that it isn’t as strong, and also the hardness is increased.
I’ve attached the un-composited render layer for you to see. I made the inside of the bell tower well lit in the original render just so that I had more image data to work with in the compositor.
The clouds are not as bright as they could be, because I didn’t want them to distract from the focal point of the image; the bell tower. I shot my two photos of clouds in raw format and dragged the highlights back from overexposure.
I’m currently rendering the whole animation again with the new settings shown in the attachments below.
(But good idea anyway)