So, I’ve dabbled in blender for a year or two now, but have only just started dedicating myself to it in the past few months.
Here’s my most recent project. Took me a while to get the ocean and grass how I liked it. Still a bunch of things I want to add, so it’s far from finished. But I think I may even give the compositor a shot!
Things I want to add:
What I really need is the atmospheric glow around earth, and I have no idea how to do this. It may be something I have to do in the compositor, but I don’t even know where to get started on that. Any ideas?
I also want to add some people over looking the coast. If anyone knows some good human modeling tutorials and how to do the rigging for the body parts, It would be greatly appreciated! I could use the make-human program, but the pose mode is not fully implemented and it’s kinda cheating anyways.
Any other constructive criticism would be appreciated. It’s a little hard getting good feedback from people in your college dorm who don’t really take me (or anything for that matter) too seriously.
For some improvment I suggest looking at the way the fence is lit, it looks very bright, as though it is studio lit. It dosen’t seem to fit with the rest of the scene.
Also, the compositor is a great thing to learn if you plan on doing scenes a lot, and I can tell you now that it definately is possible to add atmospheric glow to the earth with it, and it isn’t too difficult either.
But yeah, very good image, I like it. Ill be watching, keep it up!
I’m working on the fence. Might be a few things I can do to make it look right. I darkened it a bit, which seemed to help.
Any guides or tips on how to do that atmospheric grow would be great! I found a few things, but nothing that really made sense to me.
Well, for this scene, I think the classic blur technique applied to a slightly smaller sphere behind the planet would probably do the job. However, it depends on what you plan on doing with the scene, Is it going to be a simple render? Because this method would work for you if it is. If you plan on animating though, sorry, can’t help. Im not an animator.
Part of what you need to get going in this scene is a sense of depth and atmosphere. For depth you can use color and lighting. Perhaps the mist function can help. This random image I found off the net is one example of using color and other things to show depth:
Sorry if you are doing this already but - some lighting tips are to set up your lights so that they only illuminate things on one layer. Then separate your scene elements into layers so that you can light them specifically to the effect you want. If you need to have the fence cast a shadow on an object in another layer, set up a light to cast shadow only and have set to affect any layer.
You can then light things to appear further away, or even trail off. And in general have the ultimate control on your scene.
Seems like there needs to be some atmosphere between the grass/ocean and the large planet Earth. I don’t know if the Mist setting will give you want you want but you can play with it. It is usually the thing I try first because it is quick and easy. But maybe there are better ways using composting, not sure off the bat. One other low tech solution is a polygon with a color ramp mapped to transparency so you can make a fade from the sky to the ground. The closer to the ground the more opaque. Put that in front of the ocean see what effect you can get going.
To do this, add a sphere the same size as your planet. Set the desired atmosphere color, and then set Halo, .01 alpha (ztransp), halo size larger than normal (until you can’t see the individual bits of the halo-it’s one big blur). Scale down your atmosphere it by bit until only a little bit is showing (the rest is inside the planet).
Thanks for the suggestions guys! Much appreciated.
For a sense of depth, I think I will use DOF in the compositor. I know how to do that… kinda…
I’ve already done the lighting on a single layer thing for the ocean. I fiddled around with the water for hours before I thought to put another light in. I will try the same with the fence and grass, though I really want it to seem like the only light source is the sun over your left shoulder.
geek113377, I will give the halo effect around earth a shot! Sounds great! Wish I had thought of that. Very smart!
I actually do not want any atmosphere/mist over the water because I want it to seem like this is a piece of land suspended in an ocean of space… if that makes any sense. So, I kinda just wanted the ocean to fade to nothing as it got further away to reveal the emptiness of space. Any suggestions to better convey THAT feeling would be cool, but I kinda like what I got for that.
I’m learning how to model humans now, so I hope to have a couple people in there sooner or later.
Glad people like it! Guess I have to keep going!
Thanks
Erik
EDIT: @iliketosayblah: Using Blender 2.55. I worked out some of the issues I was having (just had to turn AA off). I love it, and am never going back!
Alright, college finals are giving me a little less time to work, but…
Here’s an update, working in a slightly different direction. I learned some basic topology over the weekend from blender cookie, or at least enough to do this:
Obviously, she’s lacking a head, but that will come at some point. I have modeled (or attempted to model) my own head, but being male, this would hardly be appropriate, though I think I could modify it. There are a few triangles in there (GASP!) but I’m working on getting rid of them.
When she and another (male) figure are finished, I hope to put them in over-looking the ocean.
Note, some things are not really in proportion, but I’m not exactly going for perfect realism on the people.
What do you think? Please note this is my first organic model ever, and I’m not the greatest at taking criticism, so be kind
I am also having trouble with that atmosphere, geek113377. Seems it’s stronger on the dark side of the planet rather than the light side, which is the opposite of what I want. Are there any specific settings/methods you can suggest?
I thought I would just put my two cents in about the atmosphere too. I find that you can get really good results by:
Duplicate the sphere
Put in separate render layer
Duplicate whatever light source you’re using to light the earth and put it in that render layer also
Add a blue texture
if you want to get really advanced you can give it subsurface scattering (you’ll be using pretty extreme settings)
Blur that layer a little bit in the compositor
use the mix node to “screen” that layer over the earth
sometimes I find that the screen node can make the earth a little bit too blue, just add an RGB curve node to the earth render layer (before you mix it with the atmosphere render layer) and preemptively make the earth a little bit redder.
This is the result I got with a similar method (no sss and slightly more render layers). Not my best earth model, because I unfortunately don’t have that picture with me.
My other advice would be to really utilize the compositor nodes. They can turn any image into something much better.
EDIT: I looked at your picture a little closer up and I have a few more critiques.
The foreground looks really good. The only minor thing I think you could consider would be to extend the ocean a little farther into the background. But that’s completely up to you.
But for the earth model you should definitely use a higher resolution texture. You can find some on NASA. If you want I can upload some really good textures (and/or a .blend if you want to reverse engineer my node setup).
Thanks very much for the advice, I’ll give it a shot tomorrow. I think I may consider extending the ocean, though I’ve found it really difficult to do as blender likes to clip things off in the distance.
I’m also going to take you up on your offer for high-res textures. The textures I have are actually pretty good, and may only appear bad due to the low quality of the image as a whole. Even so, more textures can’t hurt!
Looks like I’m going to have to really learn the compositor pretty quick! Blender guru covers it pretty well though.
I’ll upload the pictures tonight and add the link here. Is 10800x5400 good enough. I can upload some 21600x10800’s, but thats too big for most computers to handle and is kind of a HUGE overkill.
In any case, I gave your atmosphere a shot, and with some composting, I’d say it came out quite good. Still room for some tweaks, but I’m pretty happy.
The fence looks even more out of place now. That’s really odd. Don’t understand why. There’s this thin dark line above the lower board, but there’s no reason a shadow should be there. Still trying to figure it out.
Here’s the link. To get the higher resolution picture just click on the picture and look for the download button somewhere above it. I wasn’t able to upload the 10800’s with my horrible internet so I uploaded 5400x2700’s instead.
Also for your problem with the camera cutting out the background… If you select the camera and look for the camera settings tab where the material,texture, world, render settings, etc are. You can adjust the clipping distance. By default it is to 100 meters.
I can’t really tell what’s wrong with the railing. To me it looks likes it’s improved over the original one.
Ooh, one more thing. You might want to add a very weak light to the dark side of the earth. To simulate the light reflecting off the moon.
