Here’s the latest update. Been working on the sail, shields and crew. I think things are looking not too bad now and I am also thinking about adding some motion blur as it might help with the realism.
I tried clockmender’s suggest for adding the crew, and it would work fine but there is a serious lack of copyright free images that are suitable. So I decided to try out Manuel Bastionil’s humanoid models. It does bump the vertex count up, currently at 750,000, but it does work well. Not sure if my computer can take adding many more crew members though.
Render the humanoid characters on a null background - click “Transparent” Checkbox under the Film panel - then add these renders as image planes like I did with the Copyright Images. Hey Presto! seriously reduced vertex count…
Oh yes - the shields are poking through the gunwales… I think you need to move them out a bit.
Looking good sir!
Cheers, Clock.
EDIT:
Or to stick with the models and buy a Mac - I am up to 8 million verts on my train now and render times are about 25mins for 256 samples at 1600 x 1080 full res…
Making great progress. Really like the additions of the vessel crew. Only thing that bugs me and it doesn’t stick out when looking at it in the post but when you click it and go full screen the water seems a bit too creased looking and the water breaking at the bow seems a bit flat too. Kind of hard to explain, but it seems almost like a noise texture instead of a fluid.
@ Clockmender. Thanks for the idea on rendering the crew out on a null background. I plan to do another render of the ship with a full crew manning the oars so I will try out that method then. For now I’m interested to see how far I can push my PC, hopefully I won’t break it.
What it is with the shields and the gunwale is, I noticed on some images of longboats there appears to be an extra rail in front of the gunwale that allows for the shields to be slotted into it, but then on other images it’s not there. Not that sure which version in historically correct or which looks the best.
@ FlyingBanana Thanks, much appreciated.
I’m not that happy with the water myself, it’s just the ocean modifier with some noise textures. Not really that sure which way to go to improve it but I will see if I can come up with something.
Yeah I liked it when I saw the lightning showing through the sail. It’s great to experiment, I just never know what I will find.
Some of the best results are sometimes found through experimentation. And yeah I know how frustrating the ocean modifier can be, it’s a finicky thing. I know I spent forever getting the ocean to look somewhat right in my one animation I did. Either it was too flat, too fast, too choppy, too anything. Then I put a little fog over the top of the water and it seemed to sell the look a little better.
Still trying out some new ideas but it doesn’t seem like it’s going to work too well. I set up a 300,000 fluid particle system and used a dummy of the hull as a collision object, and it does work okay, but for me it just not looking that real.
The ocean itself looks a lot better, less crease like. I do think a bit of motion blur on the particles might help a bit and not look so “in your face” But all in all progress is looking good.
@ thorst. Thank you, motion blur on the particles is a good idea, I will have a look at that and see what I can do. Will also have a look at the sky again. There are lots of settings on the Free Sky and I found that if I go into the node setup it’s possible to change a lot of the colours.
@ FlyingBanana. Yes that’s exactly what’s wrong with the particles, they really are too “in your face.” I couldn’t put my finger on it before but that’s the answer, I need to tone them down and add motion blur.
I did drop the scale of the noise texture on the ocean down a bit, so cheers for letting me know it looks better.
