I’ve been working on this for some time now, thought I should post it up
This will be the 2nd short film project i have started (and hopefully the second one that i will complete). Since this will be an animation postpro work will all be done in blender and there wont be any baked shadows or radiosity
subway with texture:
blueprints i used for the subway from the-blueprints.com (image resized to avoid any angry lawyers :))
^ ^ ^ ^ still needs lotsa work:)
render:
5AA samples .05 energy
lotsa texture layers, including diffuse, spec, bump, and pattern
“non baked” radiosity
postpro done in blender
area and spot lamps used will hardly affect surroundings; interior is mostly lit with radiosity.
no reflection was used except on the subway windows (it takes too much render time for an animation)
I have to constantly remind myself not to overdo the postpro:).
comments? crits? suggestions? tutorials? I would appreciate anything, especially help on the problems highlighted above.
need help with radiosity, shadows are barely showing on my subway
Also confused as to whether i should have brighter happy colors or darker colors.
With the second shot - hurts the eyes a little. Maybe if that scene is from a clip where the scene shakes a bit with fast light moving through, then it might be pretty cool. As for the lighting, I would brighten up area’s here and there, as the average monitor brightness doesn’t see much.
If you see this test here: http://www.drycreekphoto.com/Learn/Calibration/monitor_black.htm
it mentions that on step 11 and 12 that your monitor needs to be adjusted if you don’t see anything in the picture till then. Truthfully looking at peoples workstations and other businesses, I see this happening a lot. As much as we would love everyone’s monitors to be bright, the average monitor is usually not set right.
EDIT: The main part I’m talking about is the light around the tram itself - if was lit up more it would make for a much nicer animation.
IMO lights are technically perfect but the scene in overall is too dark, with no “filler” light. I mean- such a bright, shiny lamp and floor is almost not lit. If it is to be a public space it should be (theoretically) lit well enough to prevent people from hitting the bench because of darkness. One can hardly see anything else then lamps themselves.
I don’t think you are going to get what you want out of the internal renderer. Your scene looks too “cooked” like you are trying to fixup a poor render with some post processing. You should fix all those hard edges on the columns, floor meets wall and bench. In real life, there are no hard plane-meets-plane edges.
You may want to consider rendering it in Lux or Yafaray to get better lighting.
atom i see what you mean, its annoying when artists cover up their glitches with post processing. ill try to work on the corners, and the postpro will most likely be less intense than illustrated above. i am also working in the wall meets floor problem, i forgot to mention that. as you can see, the pillars don’t really meet the floor and the ceiling is different on the outsides.
still working on this in my free time, more renders to come
I have vastly improved my subway station. I took away the AA because it made my renders slower and worse looking; now I have a good enough render time for animation!! some work still needs to be done though.
^ ^ ^ ^ radiosity is the only lighting other than area lamps to give the lights a glowing effect. the area lamps did not affect any of the room lighting.
I had a problem with the telephone booth though. there were strange white dots that showed up on the glossy texture. Anyone know how to fix these?
Any help on how to fix those white dots would be greatly appreciated
It’s looking much better. The modling is pretty good, mosltly lighting and texturing problems. Is this going to be Anaglyph 3D? I thought you might be going for that judging by the post-pro on the first image. I don’t have the glasses to check though…
See attached for crits
EDIT: Also, you might want to brighten up the scene a little more.
Well personally I think that looks fine and impressive but it doesn’t look realistic, though the phone with its white dots does, the reason being that though cg creators can and do make things look perfect and often with a surprising amount of ease, but in real life nothing is perfect. So my advice is to look at everything separately, the grouting, that has to be more uneven. The paving slabs, bricks and lights all need to look like they’ve been fitted individually so tweak them without thinking, vary the shading, and break a few. Life isn’t perfect so neither can render be perfect if it wants to be realistic.
Edit:
Oh and since you’re making a blender animation on windows xp I’ll be following your progress very closely.
BTW could you help me create a wooden shed in blender, you seem like you might know?
@ asano, thank you for the suggestions, i’ll look into most of them, though i’m not really going for a realistic look here. the pipes have a texture though, and so does the ceiling. i am going to brighten everything up though.
@ farshnuke, like i said above, i’m not really going for a realistic look here. though i can probably help you create a wooden shed in blender. pm me or something, i usually don’t have a lot of time on my hands but i’ll try to help you anyways
For the most part, I like what you’re doing with this scene, but I can’t help but to wonder if it would look a bit better if you used bump maps for many of the textures in the scene. Namely, on the walls and floor tile.
As for the lighting, I keep thinking that if you want a better illuminated scene, you could using something like Yafray or Luxrender to better light the scene so that everything gets the appropriate amount of light and still have shadows cast from the ceiling lights.
here’s my 2 cents–
the lighting–it’s a bit flat, but that’s reasonable, since it’s a subway.
not sure why you need radiosity. you can easily do this with point or area lamps, hemi lamps, and AAO.
which would get you a decent render time. also, if you’re doing a significant amount of raytracing, use 2.50, cause it’s way faster at that. or you could use yafaray, it’s fast also.
textures, um, not to put you down or anything, but they need work. you might try mapzone, it doesn’t take long to learn the basics, it’s free, and it comes with a decent number of nice presets.
the overall lighting, you’d want to make it fairly mid-range, and spice it up in the compositer, especially rgb curves.
@Ayane Matrix: actually, i am using bumpmaps for the walls, ceiling, floors, and pillars. Also currently improving the lighting
@spacetug: i’m using radiosity because i tried lamps combined w/AAO and it was a lot slower and harder to do. the AAO kept on going shish-kebab and got really slow (which isn’t good for an animation), and it didn’t give me all the effects that I wanted.
yeah i also heard a lot about 2.50 and how much improved the render times are. i’ll try using it maybe for future scenes.
also thanks for the mapzone suggestion. i was looking for a good texture creator since I dont have a tablet. all my textures were done in gimp or with texture nodes.
I’m goig to play around with composite nodes to fix up the lighting, but that will be after all the modeling
okay, I have begun animation. it will be in 720p (since my computer cant handle 1080p). I fixed up a bunch of glitches, added some more details and added my characters. I shall reveal them later
through the power of google I run a searched for ‘subway station’ to see how the are lit. I live in a country with no subway stations so have no concept as to how the look inside. I turned up an image for the subway station that you modeled and it is suprisingly well lit, there is much more light than your image suggests.
adding in some bounce lights should give you a much better lit enviroment.
some work still needs to be done though.
