Strange Magic In Odd Places - A Finalized Image

It is now finished. And at just over a month in the shop, this is probably the fastest I’ve ever completed a single project. It’s rendered in Cycles, 700 samples.

The eyeball was the very last thing added to the scene. I literally did it just half an hour ago, and decided that it, among everything, was what made the scene.

Click Here For The Original Work In Progress Thread.

The base render, straight from Blender.

And the clay.

For acknowledgement, the mud and vine textures came from Poly Haven.

Oh, I almost forgot. I watched this tutorial for making the eye.

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Turned out absolutely awesome :grin: Amazing work!

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Oh comeon, I just discovered the wip thread!
Oh well. Good luck next time.
Very nice work indeed! Your solutions to creating that stuff is always interesting to read when I eventually get to it, so I really appreciate the wip.
Although I always read it after completion somehow, and it feels like reading the newspaper, which is another way to enjoy it I guess.
Edit: btw, I think your wip thread deserves a link over here.

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Like a newspaper that goes off track, and the author forgets what he’s talking about halfway through. All my threads go off topic. :stuck_out_tongue:

Good idea. I’ll do just that.

Also, I FORGOT THE DAMN MUSHROOMS!

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Well there’s different articles so why not? And you get back to the project anyway.

Oh no! A critical role hasn’t come on stage in time!

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Yeah, it’s sad. Mushrooms would’ve been perfect for this.

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Love it! The atmosphere is super creepy in a super awesome way. Looks like this once abandoned place is being put to good use.

Oh well. I suppose you’ll have to save them for your next project. How about “Perfectly Normal Magic in Even Places”?

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It’ll just be mushrooms in a box. All the mushrooms will be the same. The box? Untextured.

Also, there’s one thing I wanted to mention that I believe adds a lot of flavor to my renders. I like the way having some subtle outlines along all my objects makes them stand out, but I hate having to mess around with the freestyle settings in Blender.

So I found a shortcut. It’s a G’mic filter called Pencil that, thus far at least, hasn’t let me down. It produces this as an output…

…which I’ll multiply over the base image, then lower the opacity a bit. It gives everything a nice outline, and the only thing I have to do is wait 3 seconds for it to process the image.

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I was envisioning a bunch of identical office cubicles inhabited by with your everyday magical flora, fauna, and fungi.

Thanks for sharing this technique! G’mic has really cool effects if you know where to find them. I really like this one in particular because it adds some interesting pencil textures in addition to the edge detection.

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That’s not a bad idea, actually.

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Hello, friend. Very nice project. I have a doubt though. Where does the light that’s projected on the ceiling come from?

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It’s due to the way I have my lighting setup. The bulb has an emission shader on it, just enough to light up the inside of the fixture, then I placed a pointlight underneath it to produce light throughout the scene.

The end result is that it lights up the surroundings how I want, with the only downside being that light spilling on the ceiling.

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Have you tried a disk area light with an 180 º spread?

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Nope, though I probably should. I’m still sticking around with what I know, which are sun lamps, point lights, and some emission planes.

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I don’t know how it would look on the lamp grid, but it would solve the ceiling problem.

I kind of consider it something of a happy accident (I have a lot of those), because, if you think about it, having the ceiling more realistically diffused would make the scene too dark.

Or to put it another way, it’s NPR. :stuck_out_tongue:

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I have no idea what NPR is supposed to mean. :joy:

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Non-Photorealistic Rendering. In this case, it’s what you tell everyone when something in your render doesn’t look right.

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Really cool and it was great and refreshing to follow the WIP thread !

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I featured you on BlenderNation, have a great weekend!

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