Quick Sunday render
Structure is a Menger Sponge, textured with a few noise nodes. Atmosphere is a cube with a volume scatter & absorption controlled by a noise texture graph. Lighting is Nishita Sky Texture. Composited in Blender.
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Looking at it again, after a few hours, I think I was probably a bit heavy handed in the compositor :).
How about this one, toned down a bit?
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Muuurph !!!
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This is very well done for mindless eyecandy (ie. not only does it invite you to get lost in its dizzying network of light and shadow, it doesnât appear as a tech. demo either).
Good work.
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Thank you, @bartv!
@Ace_Dragon, Thanks. That is exactly what I was going for. Something pleasing to look at and interesting enough to hold attention for a few seconds. There is certainly nothing technically challenging going on here :).
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Now, I surmise that this thing is mathematical, and I really donât know this math, but itâs the lighting that keeps distracting me: blobs of fuzzy light (all white âŚ) on the right, some of it probably âblown out,â opaque black on the left. Hard to get a sense of depth.
Thanks for your comment, @sundialsvc4.
The only solid object is a Menger Sponge, available in the Mesh->extras menu. So yes, it is âmathematicalâ. But the phrase âthis thingâ illustrates the disconnect. For pieces like this the objects in the scene serve only to shape the light as you direct. The surface is shaded almost entirely reflective, so we really arenât seeing the object itself at all! I added fog to scatter the light; without it there is very little going on indeed. I added noise to the fog density to break it up and provide variance and interest. Similarly, bump noise was added to the surfaces to distort the reflections (perhaps a bit too much). I added a bevel to catch the light and create highlights, without which the scene was sorely lacking.
My point is that the object itself is not the subject, merely the tool.
As for depth, youâre quite right. Many of the choices I made reduce a sense of depth that you might be expecting and accustomed to from a 3D software. You could certainly take this simple scene and make very different decisions to accentuate the feeling of depth, perhaps even to the point of inducing vertigo!
On the lighting side, specifically the contrast you mention, there are an infinite number of choices one could explore when setting up the lighting and compositing the final image. As you saw above, I felt the same as you after revisiting the image I first posted. In the final image, there is more detail retained in the highlights and the shadows. Every pixel has detail available, and showing it all does not result in an interesting image, so these choices must be made else it will remain flat and lifeless. Is there a better representation than Iâve settled on? Quite possibly. But we all have to decide when weâve tweaked it as much as we care to so that we can move on to the next project :).
I featured you on BlenderNation, have a great weekend!
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