Hunting wolf spider rend/anim (last render pg.2)

Artwork Works in Progress
1

http://i.1asphost.com/decaart/elysiun/spider60406.jpg

This is what i have so far, there is some motion blur, but very subtle.
What i’m having a bit of trouble (besides the plain background with only grass and non-unique flowers) with is the focus of the scene, it feels a bit off center.

Since it’s hard to tell, it’s supposed to be a cricket jumping away from a wolf spider and seems out of place to me.

Any comments or feedback would be appreciated still needs quite a bit of work.
(Blender internal, 16 samples of .2 motion blur. I plan on using yafray in which I currently have rendering to see how the GI will work)

2

A picture might be helpful… If their is one… I cant see it.

3

a few things, that grass reaaaaally kills it… what did you use for it?

also, the material on all the plants is waaaaaay too green… very little in nature is that vibrant…

the lighting could use a little bit too… it feels kind of unnatural

4

yeah, thats what i was thinking way2lazy2ca about the lighting. I haven’t had much experience with lighting, right now its two sun lamps, one stronger one with a yellowish hue and a slight one with an orange hue.

As far as the “grass” its particles, tryin to be laxy i guess. However, how should i go about handcrafting it or even improved particles, for the scale of how wide the grass should be with this zoom.

Katsuro, there should be an image, at http://i.1asphost.com/decaart/elysiun/spider60406.jpg .

5

The ground texture isn’t so good, it seems unnatural, you have to work a little bit on the scene(flowers, grass…), but I liked the spider.

6

Thanks about the spider, it’s what I started the scene with, I wanted it to be the focal point.
As far as the sand goes, do you know any good 3d examples, preferably from blender, for ideas on texturing. I know it looks smooth and shiny, any ideas for texturing it? Right now I have noise to add a grain look, but it’s not too noticable.

With the rest of the scene I plan to add more ground objects too, like sticks or rocks…something to break the pattern up.

7

Heres an update so far:
http://i.1asphost.com/decaart/elysiun/spider60506.jpg

I tried to fix up from shinny mud to more of a mossy/pitted dirt look for the ground, although very low detail. I would like to model out more crispness but for now I need the right color and texture.

Got rid of the blocky grass and put in some replacement meshes.
Added two sticks, yay.

Please let me know how well I fixed some problems, still lost on getting a warm sunny day feel in the lighting.

8

the grass is EXPONENTIALLY better… still, materials need a little work… (still too green… plant life is usually darker and not so much just one color… usually has a more yellow tone…) one thing you might want to do is use a blend texture as a stencil for a cloud texture so that u can simulate a little dirt on the grass near the base… this would help cover up the seam between the two

now for the ground… waaaaay too yellow… sand is very brown and suprisingly has a fair ammount of blue mixed in with the red and green… if red and green were about equal, blue would be up around 2/3s i think… it shouldn’t be too far off from the dead flower’s color… why is there green in the ground? if it were from above the grass I can see why there would be, but dirt isn’t really green… I don’t really like the texture on there with all the spots, it makes it look just kind of bad… I’m guessing it’s a stucci set to normal? if so, turn down the nor effect a tad, and make the stucci a little bit smaller so it doesn’t look so much like random spots…

Last, there is very little stuff on the ground, if you go outside you’d be suprised how much stuff can be at that level, especially when plant life is thin enough for stuff to fall through… one easy thing to add is little groups of pebbles, just make little low poly mis-shapen spheres with a similar texture to the ground and just place them around, maybe around the closer grass’s bases (again hiding the seam between ground and grass)… also I like the dead flower that you have there… I’d say add maybe a twig or two too and maybe a leaf here or there…

Sorry if all my crits seem like you have bad work, but I’m just trying to make the picture better… one thing you might want to try for materials is google images, just lookup whatever you need like “grass” or “sand” or “dirt” save the picture, put it in gimp, and have gimp figure out the exact ratio of red green and blue…

The spider is great, the only thing I find odd about him are the hairs on his leg, but otherwise it’s grrrrrrrrreat…

For lighting, use only one sun lamp, and use that one sun lamp as the only shadow caster, everything else should be defuse only… usually you want a few lamps around the centerpiece (spider) to accent it… if you go to the www.blender3d.org site, in their tutorial section there should be a tutorial on lighting…

good luck :smiley:

PS: now that I look at it a little bit more, the grass might be find in color and it just seems brighter because of the ground, so fix the ground first and make sure :slight_smile:

9

Thanks for the incredible help, 2lazy2ca, your critique is great, I came here for the hard critism anyways.
Now, Heres an update on the ground texture…with tree in background
http://i.1asphost.com/decaart/elysiun/spider605062.jpg

And a change in the lighting…Not much difference, just harsher shadows and wider angle.
http://i.1asphost.com/decaart/elysiun/spider605063.jpg

Just posting as an update of what I’ve been working on, any comments still appreciated. More ground objects to come, and better lighting yet. Then i still need to work on the grass, so that there’s dirt at the bottom and clean up some seams, as you said 2lazy.

10

that color is a lot better… the texture just doesn’t seem right… it looks a little bit more like hmm… i don’t know… but not dirtish… color is really good (maybe a lil darker but w/e u want is good)… the debris on the ground looks really good :D… the grass looks a lot better with some of the seams covered… idk wat else to say… looks good otherwise… the background thing is a nice touch :-p…

Summary:

Good, better ground texture but overall good :smiley:

11

Do you think is needs more of a pitted look or grain, 2lazy?

12

I’d say more grain… it wud b nice to have a little more contrast in it…

I made a quick dirt test, prolly cuda done better this was just like a 5 min thingy… but here’s what i got…

http://img118.imageshack.us/img118/8121/dirt16rb.th.jpg

just a render of a flat plane with one lamp set to 1

http://img127.imageshack.us/img127/3239/dirtdarl1rw.th.jpg

image with a fractal subdivided plane with 9 lamps (the plane was larger than I anticipated lol) set to .2…

[img=http://img118.imageshack.us/img118/4827/dirtlight4qi.th.jpg]

image with the same plane but the lamps are each set to 1… it was originally an accident, but I was suprised at how it showed the diversity of the material…

here’s wat it is, it’s pretty much all textures… first texture is a cloud texture with noise depth all the way up… you can mess with hard or soft noise and noise size to fit your needs, usually bigger is better than really small… the texture has a colorband shading from a light brown to a dark brown (these can be shifted lighter or darker depending on what type of soil you want)… this is the whole color map…

next is the bump map for the grainyness, this one is pretty easy actually, add a stucci texture, set it to minimum size and set that to nor in the texture window… if the bump map is too large and the texture is at minimum size, you can change the size x/y/z variables in the map input window… this changes the number of times a procedural texture is repeated across a mesh… ex. the value of one means that the map is 1 texture by 1 texture… a value of 2 means the map is 2X2, which means the texture is repeated 4 times on the mesh… etc.
edit: bigger values means the texture gets smaller if that was confusing^^^… for now keep the values the same, but you can experiment however u like…

pretty easy and speedy… like I said I made it in 5 minutes, of course tweaking it to look right could take a while :-p…

13

I just noticed something… does ur ground have specularity?.. if it does, hardness should be WAY down, but I’d go so far as to say remove the specularity completely… that’s one thing I did with mine that I think i forgot to say…

14

I’d hate to bump this thread just for this, but just to let you know I’ve been running blender off of a virtual machine…a windows xp within a windows xp… so I couldn’t use my dual threads or ram…but anyways I’ve made a faster virtual xp and hope to develope this much quicker.

I did notice the spec. on my dirt earlier, and now that I think of it I still have some left on in conjunction with hardness. I’ll check it and get back with you soon.

15

This scene’s coming along nicely, and it’s a good subject. The DOF gives it a great close-up feel.

Comments:
The great details on your spider get lost in the shadows from the strong backlight. Try adding a weak fill light close to the camera’s axis, maybe with a slightly orange tint.

I know you’re trying to get in all kinds of stuff on the ground, but the gray-brown objects between the spider and cricket distract from the explosive action. If they aren’t essential to the scene, move or remove them.

Keep it up!

16

Okay here were the settings of my last render, which I may have or may not have posted:

http://i.1asphost.com/decaart/elysiun/dirt-material.jpg

And the result, no OSA:
http://i.1asphost.com/decaart/elysiun/dirt-noaa.jpg

And With OSA (no dist. blur either):
http://i.1asphost.com/decaart/elysiun/dirt-aa.jpg

Also, what’s an easy way to make those thumbnails, like you did, so I don’t fill up the thread with all these pictures?

17

hmmmm…wolf spider, wolf spider.???Searching???..okay this is from a site:
Wolf spiders are found throughout Australia. They are robust, agile hunters that live on the ground in leaf litter or burrows. They are often found in lawns and gardens. …i say what you should add in the background is the lower structures of a house or maybe some tomato plants or something so it seems the spider is in a lawn or garden…

18

Yes, while that is known about the wolf spiders, the species Lycosidae are a very broad spieces, to the point where even I can find them in my yard or the woods…hence this picture I’ve taken…

http://i.1asphost.com/decaart/elysiun/wolfspider.jpg

I will take your recommendation into consideration, since my background is empty though. Thanks for the crit.

19

I use www.imageshack.us for my pictures and it gives you the code for the thumbnail when it hosts it…

for the dirt, I like the one without the OSA a little bit better… how high is ur OSA set? do you think you could render your scene with the new ground?

the non-OSAed one has more of a grainy feel that get’s really lost with the OSA… the OSA one looks kinda wierd and loses a lot of detail… if ur OSA is maxed I’d say just turn it down a little and that might make it look better… another thing you could try is turn OSA off and render it HUGE then scale it down in a different program :-p

20

My OSA was at 16…aft 5 it looses the grain look completely.

Here’s it shrunk down by 25%:

http://i.1asphost.com/decaart/elysiun/very-large2.jpg

It’s pretty close to about 65/35 in comparison of with OSA and no OSA…maybe if I go up one more time in render size it’ll be pretty smooth.