BlenderGuru contest WIP - "The Fourth Visitor to the King" (Cycles)

Artwork Works in Progress
1

For BlenderGuru.com’s latest contest, the theme is Christmas, and after some thought, I decided it would be cool to illustrate a scene where Santa Claus is the fourth visitor (after the three wisemen) to visit the Christ-child. (I’m just now realizing how sacrilegious this all sounds! :o)

After first starting with Blender internal, I’ve now switched to using Cycles, which has solved some problems, but caused others…

Here’s a current render (at half size of what the final render will be):

upload.png800×600 597 KB

I’m experiencing a few problems, and I have some questions:

  • I feel right now that one has to know the title for the picture to make any sense. However, it’s difficult to evoke Bethlehem specifically without including a sign saying “Welcome to Bethlehem.” Also, my Blender skills limit my ability to create complex objects, such as barn animals. (Note the present lack of reindeer attached to the sleigh.)
  • I feel the scene is too dark and too light at the same time. Overall it seems too bright, yet there are dark areas of the image, particularly around the sleigh, which feel too dark. I’ve tried to add other lights to the scene (the running lights on the sleigh), but I’m not sure where else I can get artificial lighting in ancient Bethlehem.
  • Does the town need more buildings? It’s supposed to be a rinkum-dinkum town, but I feel like maybe a couple more houses, at the end of the little street, rotated so they’re facing the viewer, would be good.
  • When I was using Blender internal, I had a brick texture for the buildings both as a color map and a normal map. However, Cycles isn’t doing it. Is there a way that I can do that using Cycles?
  • I’ve cranked the render passes in Cycles up to 200, yet I’m still getting a bunch of noise. How can I eliminate the noise?
  • Is there any way to use stars in Cycles? Or, should I find a starry night image and composite over that in the nodes editor?
  • I think the palm tree on the immediate left fits in alright with the image, but the one in the middle looks kind of hidden, and there are just a few shadows on the ground. Should I get rid of it?
  • In Blender internal, I could add a spotlight on the house with a halo so that it was like the star shining down on the house, however, the light from the spotlight lamp penetrated the roof and was inside the house. In Cycles, there’s no spotlight lamp at all. Is there any way I can do this?

Thanks for all your help!

samcan

2

Well I found out why the image was too noisy—I hadn’t kicked up the number of passes high enough. If I set it to 1000, the noise goes away sufficiently.

3
  1. the shape of the palm trees make them look very fake (look at some reference photos)
  2. houses look brand new(sculpt and texture it)
  3. add a couple stars or moon
4

Is there some kind of tutorial for texturing with Cycles? I had some textures with the internal engine, but bringing it into Cycles appears to have disregarded that.

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Thank you so much!

7

For the life of me, I cannot get the textures to work. Erg. However, to help make the buildings look older, I did use the sculpt tool to try and destroy the first house a bit. However, I’m not sure I did enough, and I want to get an assessment before I do it to all the others (I’m adding a bajillion faces to do it).

I’ve also added some reindeer, but I still need to add their reins. I need to fix the palm tree still as well.

Here’s a current render:

render2.png800×600 551 KB

samcan

8

Here’s a new progress render, at 1000 passes. I added in the night sky using The GIMP, as I’m having problems with this whole Cycles thing. I found a tutorial for adding stars in Cycles, but it wasn’t working properly. Grrr. I used a gradient layer mask to get the stars to fade slightly closer to the horizon.

To flesh out the town, I added a well to the right. I think I may shift the camera slightly to the right as well. I still need to add reins to the reindeer. I tried to sculpt the buildings to make them look rougher, but I may need to do some more of it.

I still wish I could figure out how to tell the viewer that this is Bethlehem without needing the title. Double grrr.

render4.png800×600 528 KB

samcan