Another part of my “2001 A Short Odyssey” project, and my first decent use of Blender’s raytracer !
I can’t be a proper blender user though, I’ve felt no inclination to make chequered planes and reflective spheres at all…
If you’re interested in what the scene actually IS, please read the associated SFS post.
Here is the picture : http://www.solarflarestudios.com/forum/download.php?id=286
Ideas / crits welcome as always !
EDIT : I’m sure most of this could be done equally well, and much faster, with environment maps and spotlights. But raytracing is much easier to set up, and I couldn’t resist playing with it.
EDIT 2 : A thought occurs, that I should say that the title refers to a chapter/section in the 2001 novel. As I said, slightly more explanation in the SFS post.
nice. the rock surface is really good. only, make it chequered please, and LOTS of chrome objects. yess more chrome! :o must,…make,…reflective sphereee…
Nice scene. The second image is a strong improvement over the first. The added atmosphere makes it a lot more believable.
The only possible improvement I can suggest is to add some more transparency to the water in the scene. Right now it looks like totally reflective mercury (maybe that’s the look you were going for). If you look at the bottom right of the image where the water with white reflection of the moon meets the landscape/rock - it doesnt look quite right. If we could see the rock continuing into the water (with transparency), it would look less like the rock was floating. Give it a try.
Try as I might, I can’t get decent looking transparancy. Apparently there is a bug with transparent objects (so I read in the main raytracing thread in Finished Projects). As it is now, making the water transparent has little effect when using raytracing and shadows. I experimented with using only shadow lamps with some success, but the mist particles show up much too strongly through the water. I’m trying the unified renderer right now, but it’s waaay too slow for animation.
Hmmm, just thought of an idea…must test…
In 5 days I’ll have been working on this project for 9 months, and it’s less than 50% done ! :o
After much tweaking, I got fairly decent water transparency, but at the expense of the mist. I’ll wait to see how the raytracing progresses before animating, but I might stick with the mercury-like appearance (would prefer more realistic water though).
Hmm… too transparent. Try adding a checkerboard texture. And a shiny teapot! CHROME BALLS!!! THOUSANDS OF LITTLE CHROME BALLS!!!
/me goes crazy, overloads his computers ram by adding 10 billion chrome balls to a landscape scene, goes and drinks some klatchian coffe (remote book refrence klatchian coffe is the opposite of whiskey multiplied by 1,000,000,000,000. It makes you TOOO sober.)
Sorry, I’m not knurd enough to try your chrome balls idea, maybe when I’ve had some Klatchian tea ? I don’t like coffee… But Mr Pratchett doesn’t ever mention Klatchian tea…I’ll have to make my own !!
That’s probably the last image of this I’ll post, need to wait for bugfixes of transparent raytraced objects (or better yet…REFRACTION !!! ) before I can go any further (i.e. make mist and specularity better).
I’ve been playing around with the refraction, and though it is an absolutely FANTASTIC new feature, I can’t get it to work for the water. I’ve tried using just a plane for the water - no luck. So then I tried using booleans to get an actual model of the water in the river channel. This gives terrible black artifacts with or without raytracing. I figured these were due to the faces of the water at the bottom intersecting with the landscape so I moved the water up. Problem is I have this means the water no longer fills the channel properly. Anyone have any ideas how to solve this ?
you could try selecting the vertices of the channel, where the water wil be, duplicate them, seperate with ‘P’, change the material to the water material, and ‘alt-S’ to scale down along the normals. Hope this works.
The alt+s was a good idea, but it makes the faces at the shoreline protrude above the water level, which makes them appear solid white from the specularity. I think I’ll keep it as it the last update (although I’ll alter the mist). Refraction shouldn’t be too important here since the camera angle won’t be changing much and there aren’t any objects in the water.
the ship looks cool, but more reflection would look better, if you could see the enviroment around it, and maybe some alpha to see through a bit… Looks good though
Okay, another update…better mist and a much more reflective ship. This looks much closer to how I intended it to look originally. Lousy OSA on the ship though. Tried some transparency/refraction on the ship, but I didn’t like it. Anyway here’s the update : http://www.solarflarestudios.com/forum/download.php?id=298
) before I can go any further (i.e. make mist and specularity better).