'Consummate Match' WIP for BWC 2008

Well, I saw the announcement of the Blender World Cup 2008 last night and I wanted to get right to work on my entry because I am a total noob when it comes to Blender and a total poser when it comes to art. That being said, I had a funny idea in the shower this morning for a picture that I might be able to pull off.

Here’s my idea: I want to do a shot of a wedding of socks. Yes, an entire church packed with socks. Each one of them would be bent over kind of like a sock looks when you make a sock puppet. They will all have buttons stitched on them for eyes and there will be a large variety of different kinds of socks. There will be a whole wedding party of socks, including bridesmaids as matching gaudy socks (and the one token fat bridesmaid sock), groomsmen socks (all black), a minister sock, etc. The happy couple will be rolled into a ball (the consummate match) and heading out the door at high speed while nearby socks throw motion-blurred birdseed at them. I’m also thinking about tears that are staining wet spots onto some of the more feminine socks. A couple of the guests will look wild (the five-toed socks will look like wild hair, plus some piercings or whatnot).

I thought maybe that you might be able to see a parking lot full of shoes out one of the windows. A variation on the whole theme might be to have the rolled pair of socks getting into a fancy dress-shoe (limo) outside the front doors of the church, but I think I like the inside idea better.

Anyway, here’s my extremely amateur pencil sketch of the layout:

I intend to get right to work on this project, so I will be posting regular updates as I progress.

Interesting…

Actually this is a really good idea and will look awesome if pulled off correctly. DON’T SCREW IT UP! lol

Good luck!

yeah, that could be awesome if made right :slight_smile: looking forward to see more!!

Funny concept.
That will be really interesting to watch unfold.
Waiting for more … :slight_smile:

Well, I have been playing around with getting at least one sock person modelled and textured, and this is what I have so far. I took a picture of the sock I am wearing today to use as the normal map. I thought about using vertex paint to make the toe gray like my sock, but it ended up looking messy, so I scrapped it for now. Is there a way to vertex paint without it looking airbrushed?

http://i208.photobucket.com/albums/bb309/PneumaPilot/MrSock.jpg

If you have a very high vertex count in your mesh, you would get a less blurry effect. But the way to go is to uv unwarp your sock and use a texture derived from your real sock’s picture.

Would that look better than my whole normal map thing? I mean, won’t you have a seam because your texture doesn’t tessellate? Well, I suppose the best way to answer that question is to try it. I’ve never done a UV unwrap before, so I’ve been a little hesitant to try.

You could make the texture tileable. I don’t know what image manipulation sw you are using, but with the gimp you have a plugin, which make a tileable texture out of any image. The results are not always great but in your case it should work ok.

uv unwrapping is a important technique if you want to have full control of your materials. This contest should be a good opportunity to learn this.

Thanks, I do use the Gimp, so I’ll give that a try ASAP. Also, I have been wanting to demystify UV unwrapping, so you’re right, this is the perfect time.

I personally was afraid of uv-unwrapping all the time, but found it quite easy once you understood it really. There are very good tuts out there :slight_smile:

Here’s an updated picture of Mr. Sock with a UV texture from my sock (tilealbe from the GIMP) added to my original normal map. I think that the combination of the two (even though they are not aligned) makes a more believable sock material.

http://i208.photobucket.com/albums/bb309/PneumaPilot/MrSockUVBright.jpg

BTW - I have had a hard time keeping all of the polys quads. I’m sure that I botched something early on in the subdivide and I really need to pay attention to that from now on, but I was just looking over at loramel’s snake model and thinking, “How in the heck did he keep all those quads?”

You seem to have some stretching at the edges of your sock. As the stretching is also visible in the first image you posted, I suspect it has nothing to do with the uv unwrapping. I suppose you are using a flat mapping mode for your texture. Try cylindrical or even spherical to see if the stretching disappears.

Hey, thanks a ton, loramel. Believe it or not, I had never seen those buttons there before. Cube worked the best out of the four choices. I think Mr. Sock is almost ready to go! I’ve been working on a pew this morning. I will build a simple church interior and post it soon.

http://i208.photobucket.com/albums/bb309/PneumaPilot/MrSockUVBrightBumpCorrect.jpg

Well, here is the pew design I have been working on. I am having trouble getting it to look realish. It may be my poor light setup, but I think that it’s probably the textures. The fabric texture especially looks low-res no matter what I do. The actual picture is not that low res. Is this another example of something I should UV unwrap? I guess what I’m asking is, should you always UV unwrap to apply image textures? I had to do that to get my sock looking better. It just seems like applying an image texture layer ought to work better than it does.

http://i208.photobucket.com/albums/bb309/PneumaPilot/Pew.jpg

Try the particle system on your sock and see if you can make some fuzz for them. They look like paper or something similar now.

I’ve only played with the particle system once, but wouldn’t that add a lot of time to rendering for a large number of these sock people?

I UV mapped the pew cushions and played around with a bunch of different normal maps, but they all ended up looking pretty bad. I’m also having a very hard time with the “Set Smooth” command on my seat cushion. It gets all black on the top. I’ve tried recalculating normals to no effect. I even edited the geometry to make sure there were no triangles, just quads. I just want to lose the faceted look of the edge of the cushion.

Here’s my amateur attempt at Mr. Sock with particle hair. It didn’t quite turn out like I’d like it to. Plus, I had to use 100,000 particles. Is there a better way to do this?

http://i208.photobucket.com/albums/bb309/PneumaPilot/MrSockParticleHair.jpg

Okay, I think I finally found how to control the way the strands render. It was an odd choice to put the modal strand render settings dialog where they did. At any rate, this is the more muted fuzzy look for Mr. Sock…

http://i208.photobucket.com/albums/bb309/PneumaPilot/MrSockParticleHairFade.jpg

looks pretty good to me

keep it up :slight_smile:

this reminds me i need to post my stuff soon…

I like it better :slight_smile:

and yes, blndr08, I agree, I need to post some stuff, too…
my problem is, that a bug in blender/OpenGL-Driver is keeping
me from using blender since month, and they don’t seem to get
to the bottom of it, so I am stuck without blender :frowning: