I have been working on modeling an ukiyoe (Japanese wood print) scene of Kameido’s Half-Moon bridge. I have been using Blender for one month, though, and my laptop is not robust enough, so I need to make a stop for now and recoup strenght and knowledge. In order for these model to not go quietly into oblivion, I decided to post the results here and kindly ask for comments (please note that the last two images attached are renderings of an earlier model). The first image is the original ukiyoe.
Nice, very nice. You should make a gradient for the sky like in the print. Make softer shadows (soft valude), use procedural textures with bump mapping on everything.
I’m uploading a wood texture.
Hi! Thanks for your comments! I have a 1.6 Ghz Centrino with 262Kb RAM. Render times with Blender internal are 30 minutes aprox. With Yafray, 13 hours (I’m attaching the latest two done with that, but I haven’t figured it out how to light the scene correctly with it). Render times really increased when I included the tiled roofs, and the shrubs and tree. The roofs were assembled using single tiles from real japanese tile specifications (tried to bake and use a normal map, but the results were not noticeable from far away, so I discarded it); the plants were done with ngPlant and Trees from Curves.
I tried to use a gradient similar to the original for the sky, but felt that the images ended up too “painted”, instead of 3D. As for textures, well, I am still trying to understand the whole concept (mapping, maps, nodes, etc.). I will focus on all that now, because I really wanted this scene to be perfect. And focus also on getting a decent computer.
The sky in the ukiyoe is pale and clean (it looks like it’s pale orange to me), and I guess this factor adds to the atmosphere of the picture. You might want to try to recreate it - it will look different in 3d than in the painting, yet I guess it will retain the feel
