canal factory


Still render of a industrial canal.
Modelled in Blender 2.5 , textures in Blender and Gimp , rendered in VrayBlender.

Personal project mostly focused on textures :
Blending and stacking in VB : lots of tileable photo textures mixed using dirtmaps and stencil maps.
For key objects i hand painted a base diffuse map in blender (simple blurry brushstrokes) then added dirt and tileables for details .

This was interesting because the generic/procedural part (dirt,stencil,tileables) gave great results …but handpaint was still necessary to give realism and variation and make the texture really “specific” to an object … But handpaint didn’t need to be insanely detailed because of the generic/procedural part.
This viewport pic shows only custom/ handpainted textures :


Compositing in blender nodes , color correction , sharpening and bloom.
Some of the small objects are recycled pieces from previous tests of game env props.
(with normal and spec maps , blender + gimp)
Wire-clay render :



More details on my sketchbook blog : http://nizuvault.wordpress.com/

Thanks for watching,
Comments and critique always welcome!

Well…
5*

'nuff said.

absolutely brilliant!! keep it up.

Looks great!

Very good.

Awesome!!! love it!

Wow, this is BIG!

  • atmosphere
  • modeling
  • texturing
  • composition
  • Vray
  • too much try to ,C.G." look /but its looks great :eyebrowlift:
  • background clouds havent cartoon look like scene…too much realism on sky

INCOMMENSURABLE!!!what else i can say…looks like an halo 3 level(the storm),but…even better graphics!NICE,NICE,NICE!

Thanks ! :slight_smile:

Hangar , i get your points …for the cg look i think it’s that i always get a bit lost in nodes : it’s good to have all sorts of effects to enhance the look and style … but when you go for the final adjustments you have a mess of nodes and it’s hard to fine tune the fundamental compositing stuff like exposure and color .
I hope the new nodes group patch will help (finally making clear blocks of nodes to organize the comp, and to reuse quickly)

Good point about the sky … i often used heavy unsharp mask on skies …for an painterly effect , but often burns the color and creates some banding .
So i didn’t use any unsharp on sky here …but that doesn’t match well the rest , which has a lot of unsharp .

I understand.
It will be good to test some ,down" effect /and lens rings/ in central or little bit of left position … orange clouds with red - orange - yellow - pink wide with small reflections on water smooth… some different colour …but on second side, if you want to have very cold industrial look, this colour settings are good…this scene want to have sky done ,and after that this will be great result… /my opinion

and one critic for more…Try to repair texture of concrete plain /close to camera/, because this texture is really mayhem…cool down details…

Wow! That is gorgeous. Did it take long to render?

Modron : thanks!, It took 40 minutes on a q6600 with 8gb ram . 2400x1350px .

It’s not a very heavy scene , except for the materials:
Standard vray gi (irmap+light cache) No dof or volume light , diplacement on water only.
But has glossy reflections on almost everything , tons of vraydirt ao textures and an ao pass, about 20-30 tileable textures at 2k2k res. and 4 handpainted 1k1k maps.

Policount is 1 million (a lot for this scene… a few objects are lowpoly , game style with normalmaps … but some parts like the bridge sides and the pebbles are subdivided a lot and not optimized at all…)

Hangar : i wanted the concrete on the bridge to be very rough and detailed , or it would leave the foreground empty … But something went wrong with shading , it looks a bit too plasticky : maybe because it’s bump and being so strong it should be proper displacement… I’ll have to experiment on that in next personal project…

very nice :slight_smile: lovely composition throughout and definitely gives the gritty sort of feel you would expect from somewhere like that :slight_smile: 5*

Terrific job. Nice “feel” to the finished work.

woah! it reminds me of half-life 2. awesome work dude!

it looks like it’s between being really busy and really serene and relaxing, kind of making a conflict in my tired brain. amazing render but could you plz pick one or the other? (preferrably busy cuz thts what it looks more like it should be)

wooo !!

well done! awesome texturing man! This image can prove that blender need a power up in the render/material branch :smiley:

5 bucks for me!

Hi,
MmAaXx , thanks , doing this image made me think a lot about texturing and material tools …

What’s already great in Blender is the texture paint being integrated with the modelling / rendering app , to iterate and test changes between paint and resulting shading.

One small thing i miss a lot in BI is ao/dirt as a texture, which doesn’t require preparation as in BI (good uvs and bake for each object…).
Dirt texture is inefficient as it’s recalculated each frame , but speeds up the human work soo much…

Also, doing this image i realized that maybe it’s not a big deal having the full range of PS or gimp tools in Blender or not.
Rather the texpaint can be used to create simple masks and control maps and the material texture stack as layers.
i’m currently doing some experiments on that , VrayBlender script is opensource and in python so i’ve been able to play with the fancy texture types of vray/vrscene format (mostly blending and masking stuff) I hope some of the ideas that come up and work well can be applied to BI too , like more ways of blending textures than the stencil button…

Hi,
bojo600 : sorry i don’t fully understand your question , “picking one” ?
You mean the the image is not coherent ? objects and moods contrasting?

Indeed I didn’t decide exactly if this place is supposed to be abandoned or not … it’s in between , i didn’t want to make a proper ruin …but then yes , i could have used people around.

I considered putting someone on the boat , like it’s the only living/moving thing in a deserted scene… but simply i do envs and not often characters , so i skipped that :).