I’m posting this here because I’m not sure I’ll get any more time this weekend to work on it. It’s a fountain for the weekend challenge:
Click the thumbnail or here to see it.
The center fountain including the figure on top is all one mesh and is the product of numerous extrusions. Other fountains and figures were derived from the main mesh. The shrubs are all fractal subdivided extruded cubes.
Hope someone likes it.
robert
Hi Robert,
This is very interesting, and I like the idea of what you have done:
Some Crits:
Please don’t take these crits too harshly, If I didn’t feel that there was potential in this scene, I probably wouldn’t have bothered to post a reply at all.
Great fountain. Miss the water! As I see, everybody fantasizes about fontains at the same place. Some sort of mystical labyrinth made from hedges. And like you, I didn’t have enough time to really create the hedges. Mine look even worse. Like your picture. I hope I have any chances this time.
Tips:
Thanks for the dumb, pointless commentary 
Maybe you should find some crits of your own instead making pretty obvious suggestions based around my crits.
Oh, and I clearly said that I didn’t think it was that bad 
Thanks for the feedback. The thing that got me was the “a” word 
so I went back and spent a LOT more time on this. I made grass using dupliverts, added water in the fountain, and wasted a lot of time messing with particle effects and not getting the results I wanted so I did a turned a bunch of extruded cubes into flowing water. Since this was a fairly elaborate fountain, the water had to fall from the top into the lower parts of the fountain, so there are multiple water flows coming down. I made a streaky texture in paint shop pro (basically a bunch of black and gray twisting vertical lines and used that as a nor map for the water which is ray traced. I spent a lot of time trying to get the look of the water. I used motion blur on the main water pouring down, and the result I thought looked more lifelike although this made for a VERY long render. In between all of this I made a more interesting background, some lion statues which are also fountains in the back. I didn’t wind up adding motion blur to the water coming out of them because it didn’t blur well for some reason. I was also going to use Zblur but then I wanted to keep the clarity for the whole scene. I redid the textures and greenery. Some grass is poking up through the fountain stand but I thought it kind of worked, as if someone hadn’t been there to take care of things for a while
Well, here it is:
Hope you like it. Thanks again for your interest!
RobertT
wow, only thing I have to say is that maybey there is too much water coming out of the round part, almost makes it so you can’t see the fountain.
Well, you do some water magic here. The water that comes out of that “flower” multiplies and than falls down the top basin. But it looks great. How long did this render. I am still waiting for mine to finish… I need a faster computer (did I mention this allready?)
For such a quick work that’s quite amazing…
The texture on the lions and their base needs to be toned down, though, and I would be more ready to believe that is ice, not water, you definitely need alot of splashes and stuff on the lion-fountains. But I simply adore the way the water looks on the front… It needs to be very transparent to be realistic, but I think it works better this way.
You won! Unless of course someone turns up a better one, so I can go down to earth’s core to pick my jaws up (I heard it’s very hot there, so don’t make me do that).
It’s amazing, now people create images for the weekend challenge which are way better than the average images that were posted here even half a year ago.
Jerri, don’t worry, I can’t render mine, hangs all the time:)
Jerri: Thanks 
This took just under three hours to render on a 2.4ghz xp system. I wanted to use more raytracing lamps and subsurf the grass but when I tried doing the former the system did nothing for a half hour straight and when I tried subsurfing Blender crashed and said something like “octree nodes full” or something like that. There are over 3 million vertices in the thing (mostly because of the hedges), but even without raytracing lamps this still takes over 2 hours to render – and that was with an OSA value of 8. I would have liked to go higher, but windows xp was popping up messages of its page file needing to be expanded. I have it preset to 2 gigs and that still wasn’t enough. I know there are likely more efficient ways to get the results I needed, but since this is the weekend challenge and because of the complexity of the modelling and length of rendering I didn’t get a chance to try many other options out. The water falling effect was a huge step for me, although it was a stronger flow than what I wanted.
Here’s the streamy texture I made in case anyone can use it:
It was used with alpha and nor.
TJKeranen: Thank you! I agree about the lion and base textures and the splashes. I faked the bubbly rush of water on the front by extruding up from the cylindrical (actually subsurfed cube) shape and then extruding down again. The motion blur really helped pull it off.
Erufailon: Thanks! I’ve seen at least one other amazing entry (the ancient fountain) so who knows. I agree about the quality of work generally going up here. I think it’s partly attributable to Blender users maturing and partly attributable to the new options available to us. The renders in this forum are getting closer to what’s regularly seen in the 3D area of cgtalk.com, so it’s very exciting to be a part of all this and to grow with the community and this increasingly powerful program. The experience I gained over the weekend doing this was awesome, so it’s one of those projects which in the end helps you get to another level. I spent almost every minute of my free time these past few months doing nothing but blending. I want to be good, so I’m not going to slow down. I even had a dream of blender recently :o You know you’ve reached a turning point when you’re blending in your dreams 
Thank you all again for the encouraging feedback. I appreciate it so much, you have no idea. Enjoy the rest of your weekend!
RobertT
OO new and iproved, lookes great
the water on the front fountan is truely cool 8)
Robertt:
So much better. the grass could be a bit better but overall very nice work
I have one crit’ Robert, though it looks like you have already posted in WC,…The streams of water coming from the lions mouth appear to have faces inside them. I don’t know if this was intentional, but ordinarily, it is always a good idea to hit ‘X’>>‘delete’>>‘faces’ before extruding. Overall it is a really nice piece. Good luck! :Z
drago451: Thank you! After such a long render I’m glad it turned out to be worth the wait
M@dcow: Thank you very much. The grass looked MUCH better when subsurfed, but that caused Blender to crash. For a weekend’s work I’m not too disappointed in the results
Modron: The streamy texture I used on the main fountain was also used in the back water flows from the lions, although I don’t think the texture worked as well back there. I also have reflection/refraction turned on so it’s picking up something, maybe the lack of an extended environment in the distance. I wonder how far the raytracer looks before it stop trying to reflect stuff. If there were a distance constraint, like for the camera, mist, and lamps, that might help avoid unintended reflections.
Thank you all again for your insightful and encouraging feedback. I appreciate your time and interest
RobertT