My long-term goal is to create a 3D animation movie set. The anchor location is based on a traditional Chinese tea house. This first image is my render of the model so far.
The tea pot to the right of the door will have a flame underneath and steam out of the kettle. I had issues making that happen using quick effects so I moved on to the sculpture on the other side of the door. It is the focus of my effort right now. It is a cartoony stack of dishes.
The artwork, flying cranes etc are Public Domain images from artwork made 100 or more years ago. I love to browse through online sites such as the British Library and Wikimedia Commons. How I added them into the image was importing them as a plane and then placing the plane just in front of the wall or window shutter they are ostensibly painted on. Is there a better way to do that?
Hallo Ryan, it is a unusual way to import pictures you wonna use as textures, as a plane, as far as i know. I apply such pictures as texture via UV editing. On this way you can position the part of the texture pic exactly whre you want to have them, regards Lutz
Normally the UV map would be my first thought. As it is the greenish blue background for the flying crane is a procedural shader node. The Background does not show through the UV map like it does for the image as plane with alpha enabled. I could of course be missing something about the UV map. Ryan.
Hallo Ryan in such cases i use .png files, because they can deliver transparents or semi transparents parts in a file. And i can control there transparens with the Alpha Channel and transmission. But of course in your case your work flow might be best, i never thought about it greetings
I had a reason for my approach using image planes. About a month ago I came across online a breakdown of a picture done in Blender. It was a near future science fictionesque industrial sea port. If I remember correctly there was a tug passing by and there was a workers type 3-4 person canteen etc. Unfortunately I cannot remember where I saw it. At any rate someone was critiquing how it was constructed. The image was incredibly nuanced and atmospheric, sea fog et al. What stood out to me was how many image planes were used to handle each element of the picture. For myself, my art in the physical world has strong collagist use. It was like a light bulb turning on. This technique works really well in making a still image. How it works for an animation, that I do not know. Ryan.
Hallo Ryan, thank you for the answer. Yes, i can think that this technique works well. I will try it for myself on my next project. Until now i used png files in such situations, because these files do transport the alpha canal in several opaque steps from opaque to transparent. But your way is very interesting - thank you for your explanation, Lutz
I actually use pngs. I realize that I uploaded the image I used before I altered it to remove the background of the image. I did set the image plane to use the alpha channel transparency. The greenish procedural background shows through.
I created a traditional Chinese lantern to hang outside my tea house. Using references from China I created a six sided lantern. Each side panel has a different image or text . This allows me to have six different lanterns visually simply by rotating the lantern. I lit the panels using shading nodes, emission etc on each image. The images are all public domain or my own work.
The Traditional Chinese Lantern, I created as a separate .blend file from my tea house. I rendered the lantern views as six separate lantern and imported each image on a plane. The Lantern blend file I uploaded to blendswap as a Creative Commons Zero file so anyone can download it and use it however they want to. The link is https://blendswap.com/blend/26978
These are a couple of views:
This is the stage I have reached at present in creating my Teahouse. I added two stories, apartments, the one directly above being the proprietor’s abode and the top floor being that of the cook. These additions are in 3D mode. The apartment building one can see to the right of the image is the backend of my Cul de Sac. The image is imported as a plane to flesh out the look.
This is not simply a place holder image but is the concept art for this part of the overall ‘story location’ . When I find it appropriate to build it in 3D mode I will use this image as my blueprint. This image is a collage. As an artist a good bit of my expression is as a collagist. The base image is a painting by the Austrian painter Egon Shiele. He died at 28 years of age in 1918. His paintings are in the Public Domain as enough time has passed since he died.
Though the old fashioned look belies my premise, this block is a modern science fiction setting. In the middle of this building I have installed an elevator and there is an old Chinese gentleman riding up the elevator.
I have started to populate my scene. To the left foreground is a Public Domain robot offered up on Blendswap.com called ‘Golden Bot Bunny’. To its’ right in the foreground is a ‘spacer man/woman’ also Public Domain on Blendswap. The character in the foreground right in his Tee and shorts is a PD offering also. Thanks to the great folks who made them. For me as the creator of this scene, these elements mean I can introduce a variety of expression into my work. I actually want the sense of characters not all being created by the same artist. I also am hoping to create a ‘world’ that is real enough that other creatives will want to use it for their own stories. By importing some of the public domain characters I want to demonstrate how Port deVille can be used as a story setting.
On the Tea House balcony is Quong Ma, proprietor of said establishment. ‘Quong Ma’ is my adaptation of Guy Boothby’s Dr. Nikola character. Guy Boothby wrote novels in the 1890s. They were precursors to characters such as Fu Manchu. I created Quong Ma from this illustration.
I slightly changed the position and simplified some of the lines and planes.
Here is where the quiz comes in. Yes there is a test. In the drawing adaptation I did, there is a line with a shorter parallel line that acts as a pilot fish. Ostensibly it is serving no function. My feeling is this line with its’ pilot fish actually serves to give the character an organic hand-drawn feel. Can you tell me which two lines I am referring too?
The next character entering the scene is ‘Slick’. She is developed from an old doodle on a scrap of paper. I archived the doodle by slipping it into my active paper sketchbook of the time.
Eventually she would be needed and ‘lo and behold’ it turns out she shares the top floor apartment (apartment above Quong Ma) with the Teahouse cook in my imaginary Spirit of Resistance Cul de Sac, Port deVille, Trojan L5, Jupiter.
I am in the midst of packing one apartment to move to our new one a block away. Anyway, short and hopefully sweet. The Little Green Man is a character I have developed totally in Grease Pencil. Like Slick, I have made an animated film, Little Green Man Drawing of. (22 seconds long) It is on youtube the link being: https://youtu.be/rX_iIyu38mc
– this is the image I am using as a starting point for the next element in my Tea House image. It is an idea for a helicopter that Leonardo daVinci sketched out.
Based on these two sketches, I drew this drone in grease Pencil.
To paraphrase the Newton remark about standing on the shoulders of giants, it feels good to make something modern of daVinci’s helicopter sketch. This of course is predicated on the tenuous concept of a Renaissance helicopter being somehow ‘modern’.
I created this drone to be useful in more than one instance so I inserted it into another image, this one being a medieval sea port partly to showcase the drone’s versatility.
I have been a long time getting the next bit done on this image. The space where I have put the blue robot sitting down in front of the tea house took me a long time to arrive at esthetically as I thought carefully about who/what to put there to give the feeling I wanted. The blue robot is a Public Domain asset made by 5th Element and offered on Blendswap. Thank you he is perfect for this piece.
Partly what took me so long was that this character was not rigged. I did basic rigging and then spent much time trying to figure out constraints and drivers and such. I only understood a certain amount of that aspect of rigging. I finally thought I would use what I had so far and learn the rest of rigging later.
I then added a Public Domain character created by seqw0 on blendswap. Thank you, I think he makes a great minor character for this story.
Note: I am using work from other creatives as well as my own because I am hoping that when I have the story well developed, others will use it as an environment and general story line also. If I am successful in this it may develop a life of it’s own. I am hoping so.
I have finished up this image adding the fire under the teapot and the steam in a bit of post-production using GIMP. Onwards and upwards with the next image in my story.
Oooh… I am actually getting to the next image in this story. I am in the process of migrating to Grease Pencil. The blue robot by 5th Element, I rigged with a basic rig and posed it for this new image. Using this as a basis I drew it in Grease Pencil. I added a mouth and added a manufacturing model number as well. The number 613 is how many seeds there are supposedly in every pomegranate fruit. The number varies in reality but it is an idea with Zen. There, are though, apparently 613 commandments in the Jewish religious text, the Torah. Think of this as an Easter Egg of meaning buried there for someone to find if they are so inclined.
The new character I have introduced into my story is Jian-Lee, the manager/cook of Quong Ma’s tea house. I created her in Blender Grease Pencil. Her body type is based on the piece of sculpture called Standing Woman by the French sculptor, Gaston Lachaise (early 20th Century). Jian-Lee’s dress design is made using the flowers from an antique Chinese floral print. My effort to be authentic
The robot was in the first picture. What I did for this second picture is I have redrawn it completely in Grease Pencil. I added a mouth as this will be a character with dialogue as my story moves forward. In this picture Quong Ma standing on the terrace above Jian-Lee has said good morning and she has offered to make him some breakfast when she makes hers.
