La Ducasse

Artwork Finished Projects
, , ,
1

La Ducasse - Blender 3.6.0 - Cycles - 6000 samples

Hello everyone,
Here is a piece I spent my time on in the past two years (with ons and offs).
It depicts a ‘Ducasse’ - which means County Fair in french slang - in an Alsacian town, typical architecture of the far eastern France.

Ducasse_Post_Process_Thumbnail
Ducasse_Post_Process_Thumbnail2160×2160 1.37 MB

La Ducasse Thumbnail

Ducasse_Post_Process_Full_Quality_8bits
Ducasse_Post_Process_Full_Quality_8bits4320×2160 2.76 MB

La Ducasse - Full 4320x2160 render

Everything in the artwork was done by myself, apart from a few plants coming from Botaniq, some tileable texture from PolyHaven, and the human basemeshes and textures - however, I did the rigging, posing, and clothes of every person.
I also used photogrammetry techniques for plushies.

A little build-up of the scene, render after render. A higher quality video can be found here https://youtu.be/rSLgYONBoBI

Working on this artwork was very challenging, especially in the modeling aspect ; chunks of the carousel are curved surfaces, which complicates a lot of the modeling. The Curve Modifier was extremely useful for that, along with linked objects duplicates, enabling me to work on relatively flat surfaces independently and then bending them for a circular render. The composition of the image was difficult to nail down, as all those lights tend to draw the viewer’s eye everywhere. It was a work of fine-tuning to make the important areas stand out, while not putting everything else in the dark.

Also, this artwork had me spent a big amount of time on small assets, which I can’t resolve myself to do fast and cheap - I always spend more time detailing assets that won’t even be noticeable in the final render. On top of that, this piece is the most detailed I’ve done so far.

As I work on new images, I tend to challenge myself. Here, I wanted to explore my ability to create relatively coherent persons to fill the scene. I learned a lot in re-using assets while altering them slightly to make them look different (For instance, there are only 5 different types of humans, I only changed their haircuts and clothes to make them look unique). I improved my rigging and posing knowledge, and learned a ton on Marvelous Designer.

Overall, even though I grew very tired of this scene once in a while and that it lasted way too long, I’m very happy of the result and I had tons of fun building the scene - while putting jokes almost everywhere on the render, that I guess only me will ever notice hehe.

Thanks to my partner I often asked for advice, and my brother and parents for giving me feedbacks.

Here are some more renders I did to shine light on a few assets I’m fond of.

Inverted_C_4k
Inverted_C_4k3840×2160 1.85 MB

One of the many rides I did for the carousel. This one was the heaviest - polygon-wise.

Mailloche_4k
Mailloche_4k3840×2160 2.48 MB

“Mailloche” - Strongman game. It was very fun to put different pop-culture symbols and memes.

Montgolfiere_4k
Montgolfiere_4k3840×2160 1.81 MB

One of the many rides I did for the carousel.

Horses_4k
Horses_4k3840×2160 2.59 MB

One of the many rides I did for the carousel. Rigged, to be able to have a lot of different positions and make them look unique. They all share the same mesh, but two different texture sets.

Stand_Carabine_4k
Stand_Carabine_4k3840×2160 3.24 MB

“Tir à la carabine” - basically rifle shooting on balloons. While working on this scene, Olympic Games were happening in France in 2024. I allowed myself to put the famous turkish guy who was competing at that time in the design, along with popular memes.

Cabins_4k
Cabins_4k3840×2160 2.58 MB

One of the many rides I did for the carousel, this one was the last I did.

Peluches_4k
Peluches_4k3840×2160 2.12 MB

Those are the plushies I photoscanned

If you want to take a look at the Artstation project, feel free to click on this link ; https://www.artstation.com/artwork/2LBaPe

Have a great day, and thank you for reading ! :slight_smile:
Théo

100 Likes
2

Amazing work ! Congrats !

3 Likes
3

Very impressive! The attention to detail is remarkable, there is so much going on in every little part of the image.

2 Likes
4

I love how much life and activity there is in it, even getting a glimpse of people going about their day inside their houses and shops. Great amount of work creating the models too. The fine art gallery near me sells CGI work like this, that the artist has printed onto a large framed canvas. This would fit in nicely.

1 Like
5

Wow, that’s a great accomplishment! Love the detail!

1 Like
6

Hello sidp, Michael_Campbell and Scazzino,

Thanks for your comments, I’m glad the amount of effort I put in the details is being noticed ! The idea was indeed to let the viewer explore the render and find little scenes by themselves ; friends gathering, people with their kids, kids being kids and messing with water puddles, people watching the carousel from their window… A little like a Finding Waldo, but on a smaller scale.

Michael, your input on a printed version is very valuable and interesting, I had my relatives tell me the same thing. On another hand, I work in a place where there is a photographic lab with large printing equipments. That confirms it could be a thing.

3 Likes
7

Love those lights.

1 Like
8

There are no words to adequately describe it: the wealth of detail, the amazing light, all the many scenes you can discover in the picture. Like a Where’s Waldo? picture – only really good :slight_smile: Fantastic!

1 Like
9

Wow a labour of love.

The lighting is totally amazing here, and really sells the carnival at night look, warm and inviting with a slightly dreamy look of nostalgia past.

I suggest printing and selling them too, there is a gallery near me that these would shine in.

Look forward to seeing anything else you do.

1 Like
10

This looks really awesome and high-quality! I love all of the the lights in the render, too.:heart_eyes:

1 Like
11

This is the artist whose work gets sold in the local gallery. It reminded me a bit of yours Mark Davies Art | Available Online at Aura Fine Art

The gallery owner told me he uses a 3d software, but wasn’t sure if it was Blender.

Stuck it to my wall in VR :smiley:

3840×2160 638 KB

3 Likes
12

Théo,
First of all: congratulations on your work! It is a superb piece of art, and I would love to have it hanging on one of my walls!
The atmosphere you’ve created makes me want to be there. A delightful contrast of light… And everything is so well done that I’m left speechless…
It’s the kind of image I could spend hours admiring, always discovering something new I hadn’t noticed before.
Excellent work! :clap:

2 Likes
13

Hello Michael,
Thanks for the link ; I browsed through Mark Davies’s artworks. His work is very peculiar ! I wonder what is his process. It feels like there is a foundation of 3D work, and photoshop elements are added on top.

This VR simulation is crazy, though !

1 Like
14

Hello Kyrie,

Wa thanks for this wonderful comment, I’m really happy you like the work I did :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

1 Like
15

Lovely scene and lighting, great work. I’d say it’s a kind of wimmelbilder : a large scene with a lot going on. I love the blue moonlight pairing with the streetlights on the roofs, and the reflections in the canal.

You never upgraded your Blender version? I know it can be problematic for the more complex projects, I stayed on 3.6 until recently for a short film because upgrading caused issues that I didn’t care for fixing. Was that also the case for you?

Fitting the scene in memory must have been a bitch. I assume this was rendered on CPU ?

1 Like
16

Hello Hadriscus,

Thank you for your feedback. I’m glad you asked regarding the version and the optimization of the scene.
I stayed on 3.6.0 because I started the project two years ago, and this was the version I worked on at that time. For compatibility reasons, I didn’t want to migrate the scene to a more recent version of Blender. Later, I tried, for add-on testing regarding performances of the scene (Render Profiler, in this case, a very useful add-on for tracking the most memory-consuming assets and textures of a scene), to use Blender 5.2 with the scene. Even though I didn’t notice any big issue in the scene after a render (apart from a few missing textures), I prefered to stay on 3.6.0, to avoid discovering, days or weeks later, that the version broke something on the scene, not noticeable at first.
Also, staying on Blender 3.6.0 was a choice of mine because I use add-ons that could have not worked on a most recent version.

Regarding the memory, I had to work on optimization.
The graphics card I had when I started the project was a Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB (If I recall correctly). It was very long to render the scene, and at some point I couldn’t even launch a render, because the scene was overloading in memory. I had to work with smaller scale textures that I manually converted in Photoshop, typically from 4k or 2k down to 1024 or lower.
At some point, after letting the scene rot in my files when I was a bit burnt out by the scene, I changed my graphics card to a Nvidia RTX 4060 TI 16GB for video-games mostly, and it was a game changer.
I managed to add more and more details, assets to the scene, more texture sets, more subdivision surface everywhere, and I could even revert the sizes of texture sets from 1024 back to 4k.

All in all, the scene was render on GPU, with a peak memory at around 11GB. With a size of 4320x2160, 6000 samples, the scene rendered in a little less than an hour.

It is also very interesting to have your input on the reason why you also stayed on 3.6, and why you also upgraded your version, thanks for that.

6 Likes
17

I featured you on BlenderNation, have a great weekend!

2 Likes
18

Hello bartv, many thanks for the recognition of my work, it really means a lot to me. :grinning_face:

19

Absolutely fantastic!!! The atmosphere is so great and joyful!

1 Like
20

Amazing/inspiring piece of work. So much in it!!

1 Like