Critique of any kind is appreciated. Anything that you see that you think needs work, please let me know. Volunteers are needed, if you see an opportunity to help, you can message me, post here, or email at [email protected].
With that said, I am kind of running low on time for this.
The scene above is going to be of British sappers in a bog during WW1. We will add volumetric clouds and another plane, fog, more people, and a bunch of dead trees.
Volunteers (past and present) include D3w0, Jdover, M_squared, DorienVincent, TonyC3D, Mnphmnmn, Kidus, MosesAndruart, Cerfribar, and Eternal3lade. (sorry if I missed anyone) Together, these volunteers created about 30% of the models in the project.
The terrain layout looks good, and so do the image textures used on the bits of dead wood and tree. What are your material settings though? Everything seems very flat, which means there are either issues with lightning, materials, or both. What time of day is it supposed to be?
Thanks for the comments on the terrain, I worked hard on it.
-_- I forgot to set up the lighting lol. Its still on environment/sky lighting. Would you suggest using the 3 point lighting for outdoor scenes? I also want a lot of indirect lighting, but that depends on the quality of the shadows I can achieve.
Honestly, I haven’t worked much with outdoor or terrain setups myself, so I can’t really advise you on how to light it, only on how to setup materials. Do you have proper setups for gloss/specular, diffuse roughness amounts, fresnel, etc? Are you using textures baked into maps?
All of my textures have UV maps and diffuse roughness is at or near zero for most. I’m not sure what the proper set up is for gloss and specular, I went with default for most of my glossiness. I think the main problem is the lack of shadows, and the environment texture makes it impossible to have shadows. I’ll have to go to the lighting forums for that I think.
You are going to need the following for each of your materials:
A diffuse with the right roughness values (wood has different roughness from cloth, for example) and possibly a map for different amounts of roughness across the object.
A gloss, also with the proper roughness for that type of material. Possibly a specular map if you want to vary the gloss.
A fresnel node to mix them, with the proper Index of Refraction value (you can google these, there are lists.)
Some sort of bump map, normal, or displacement map to give a little more life to your textures.
(Note that this is for diffuse materials. Metal ones need different setups.)
Having these correct is the difference between your wood posts looking like rectangles with wood painted on them, or them actually looking like wood. There are programs that let you make specular and bump maps from your image textures, so you’ll want to look into those.
Of coures, all this is if you’re going for realism. If you aren’t too concerned, then just continue as you are. But if you find that later, the objects are a bit flat, then this is what you need.
Hmm. I was going without gloss and Fresnel for each material, and just guessing the Index of Refraction values for the ones that did have it. I will look into this. I have crazybump, I’m sure that covers all kind of mapping. I wasn’t origionally going for realism, but now my goal is to recreate some historical photos, so I suppose they need some realism. Problem is, it wasn’t allowed of anyone to take pictures of combat in WW1, so I have no real reference photos to go on.
You’re going to want to use fresnel in pretty much anything, even if not doing realism. I used it even when doing toon shading. It plays a large role in making things seem less flat, and keeping things like metal or plastic different from eachother. It’s also easier to just google the real index of refraction of a given material than to try to guess a proper mix factor.
First I need to find a proper wood texture, and I can’t find any suitable, not even on cgtextures. I’m trying to remake those wooden posts there, but its not worth making new textures if the diffuse isn’t good enough in the first place. This almost killed my project a couple months ago.
Large quantities of barbed wire, torn and fragmented by shell explosions, is pretty much de rigeur I would think. You might look into ‘knife rests’ obstacles. Some of the wood should be splintered, and an unexploded shell might be good for verisimilitude.
Well, my lighting is badly messed up. I’ll have to find someone willing to help with that lol. Despite the lighting, I found a wood texture (finally) and applied the things you said, to create this:
These are posts used to hold up barbed wire - not quality enough to build something important with. How do they look? Is there anywhere I can find tutorials or explanations on anything I’ve been doing? I can’t find any good tutorials on youtube about wood in cycles, nor any of the other things I have been using. Andrew Price’s tutorials are nice though.
lol thanks for the idea, but this is the only project based on the Great War right now, and I am probably below average at blender.
Most people think of weather during WW1 as stormy, and they would be right. However, the weather varied as it would any time. I’m going to make a couple of scenes (hence why I spent so long making assets) and each one will probably have different weather.
Also, do you have any suggestions for the wood at all? I’m going to remap the green stuff at the bottom and neutral out some of the shadows, anything else? It must be PERFECT considering posts like these will be put every couple feet.
