Here’s a little something I’ve been working on for the last week (occasionally).
The primary purpose behind this project is to fully come to grips with buffer lamps and scanline render. There is no ray tracing at all in this scene. There are currently about 26 lamps in use.
The most challenging part of the project has been using a sun to light the scene with a companion “shadow only” spot to provide the necessary shadows. I’ve used a number of negative lamps inside the shed to generate dark corners, however, the shadow-only spot lamp’s energy has had to be ramped quite high (3-4) to keep the whole inside of the shed dark due to the penetrating illumination from all the other lamps (sun, sky, bounce, etc).
The whole scene is pure Blender except:
1: Sky > Photo texture
2: Large Tree > Photo texture
3: Some hand-made textures on shed walls
4: Alpha texture mapped to lamp for tree shadows
While I’m not really going for photo-realism (more like ultra-realism), there is still a lot to do with textures and I’ll be adding colour, texture and curve guides to the grass particles and I’ll look at using composite nodes to add a little aerial perspective. I also need to add some “incidental junk” - stuff like wire, steel poles, rocks and rope, etc.
looks very relaxing, just a few crits to consider:
-You say you aren’t going for photo realism, so this is merely an observation, but where I live broken down sheds are never so ‘clean’. there is rotting wood, trash, rubble and debris everywhere, it would add to realism but may not be the effect you’re going for.
-Need some grime! The walls are so clean it looks brand new (someone need to go to building school in that case )
-One small thing that catches my eye, the tree is ever so slightly blurred, like it a normal photo, while the grass has none of that. Its incredibly minor however, and this is not focused crit, so i’ll shut up
where I live broken down sheds are never so ‘clean’. there is rotting wood, trash, rubble and debris everywhere, it would add to realism but may not be the effect you’re going for.
You’re on exactly the right track. Like I said, lots of junk to add and lots of work to do on textures (all the wood is one simple material currently) - and I need to add either a nor-map or displacement to the rusted sheet metal to give it some shape (it should be corrugated). I figure I’m less than half way there in terms of time. The tree does bother me but it was just an image I cut out of a photo (of the real shed in fact) and stuck there for contrast. What I’d really like to do is model the tree, but it would have to be believable.
there’s a couple of realistic fractal based tree generators, arbor something or other, good textures is the key. search this forum/google it. That way you wouldnt be “cheating” - after all, pure art for art’s sake.
Here’s a minor update. A few more textures and a bit more junk. Same old tree Still plenty to do.
I have a problem where the pole sits in front of the tree. It’s giving a fringe but I do have “premul” selected in the scene buttons (I’m not using nodes). Nothing else “appears” to be having this problem (the tree and sky are two different image textures). Have I missed another premul somewhere?
Render time: usually less than 2 minutes with 768MB RAM on a 1.25GHz G4 ppc Mac OSX.3.9.
Wow andyD (can I call you andy ), that’s pretty nmad nice… Looks like a worn-out shed to me! And rendered in 2 minutes, that’s even better … The grass’ colour is really amazing, as well as the contrasts of the whole picture. The pole in front is awesome too, it’s a great addition…
And now for the crits :ba: … I’m not sure whether the slightly illuminated content of the shed gathers its light from the gaps between the walls and the roof, but at least it would be really interesting to see the effect of light shining through the gaps (like the touch of light at the other end of the shed (which rocks btw)). And maybe the grass in the front can use some shadowy depth at the sides of the picture - the grass seems to be a bit flat there. But don’t change the lighting cause it’s perfect :p… Anywayz, real nice job (much better than your arty Black Cube in a Black Room work :spin:) and I’m looking forward to your hand-modelled tree.
p.s. I’m about all the :), but they’re just so :D…
Wow, great job with the lighting :D!
The only thing is, the telephone pole in the background is outlined with a white line, whats up with that ?
Great work though so far :)!
Can’t help with the question, but I did want to say it’s coming along nicely. What happens if you move the pole slightly? BTW, this is a whole new slant on “architectural rendering.”
Thanks for the compliments and suggestions, especially the compliments
ChevyVanDudeG20: If you mean what I think you mean then the blurriness is caused by two things. 1: The tree image is not a great resolution but is only a temporary prop and 2: There’s a bit of grass behind the shed that maybe makes the bottom of the tree look even fuzzier. Until I sort out what I’m doing with the tree, it’s going to be hard to resolve that area. But well spotted!
Orinoco: Architectural rendering?! Funnily enough, I’d be happy if someone could build me a viable shed (or art studio/gallery) that actually looked like that (This image is based on a real shed not far from here).
otto riis: Yep, that white line is the fringe I referred to when I posted it. More on this below.
scraze: Sure, Andy will do just fine. I’ve been called worse things :):eyebrowlift2::evilgrin::eek: <They’re for you ;). Thanks for the observations. I figure the warm light inside the shed is largely reflected from the ground and other surfaces. It’s not entirely real but does mimic an effect we get around here during the best sunsets. I tweak those warm lamps constantly. Some glints of light is a good idea and the next update will have a very small bit of light that’s come through a gap in the sheets on the sunlit side of the shed. Nothing major because a large part of the intrigue, I think, is that darkness in the main shed. What’s in there???
I’ve “discovered” that the fringing artifact is related to the background image (sky). If I turn that layer off, the pole has no fringe but with the tree and sky both on, I get the fringe. It’s actually a transparent fringe so for now, I’m going to “fix” it by putting a coloured panel behind the tree where the pole is.
Is your pole on a seperate renderlayer from the tree. The sky is the only alpha channel that I’ve seen treated in that manner and man it can cause some problems when you don’t know how to deal with it. The premultipliaction always takes it’s color from the sky if there are no solid objects in the render layer to multiply against (sky is a colored zero-alpha channel but you already know that). When you try to layer that image with it’s colored, premultiplied alpha over top of another you get the result that you had. Nice fix, but it isn’t always so easy to accomplish if you have two alpha’s to deal with and no solid objects over which to myultiply the alpha. Sometimes, but not always, you can use a seperate renderlayer for Only the sky in order to get what you want. I almost went mad in a similar case trying to figure it out. See this post and you’ll see what I mean:
andyd your house is coming along very nice. the only thing i would say about your house that would change the whole scene are the textures. your house is lite fine i think. but the textures on your house if they were made more realistic would make this scene of your house totally realistic.
i would focus more on the somehow makeing the textures more real on your house. meaning that i dont know if you made the textures of your house in photoshop. or if you actually photographed the textures of your house. if they were in photoshop i think if you took real photos of your house and used them to texture your house it would look photoreal.
for me lighting and modeling are 50% of the finshed scene on your house. and you did those really good on your house. but if you were to use really detailed textures on your house then you would really have a great render of your house…:spin:
modeling and lighting is only 50% or less of a good finished render, 50% or more comes from good texture work…keep rocking and maybe your wife will actually be happy with the castle you built her with your own hands and minmal IQ
Wow very nice, you make other applications look bad when you can do such good works on free software.
Thanks for the pdf tutorials, still trying to learn blender, this serves as great motivation.
Super Wu: House??!! Ha! I wish I could live in something as nice as this. Luxury! But yeah, textures - did you read anything I wrote at all? I know things haven’t been the same since the goose attack but come on, at least try to appear normal. But yeah, textures, on my “house”, - the tree and sky are photo textures, the side of the shed plus the “red” panel plus the white panel stuck on the front are all painted in Photoshop. The timber is still all procedural mapped to colour, nor and/or displacement modifier. I know, it’s a bit of a let down but since my black rectangle came third in the recent weekend challenge, I’ve found it difficult to concentrate of useful art. I promise to rethink the timber textures soon.
RamboBaby: I will look at your linked thread tonight. but there’s no render layers and no nodes. Just a one-pass, scanline render. Picture this if you can (if not I’ll transfer this question to the comp forum with more detail) the pole is mesh - in front of the tree which is a transparent (alpha) image-textured plane - in front of the sky which is an opaque (no alpha) image-textured plane. No world sky is visible. To “solve” the multiply problem, I slipped a plane with simple material between the tree and sky planes. In theory, the sky panel should be treated as a solid texture (unless I have unwittingly set an alpha value for it). But, even more interestingly, maybe, is that the fringing doesn’t occur if the sky plane layer is turned off which means the world sky is visible.
I know that in nodes, when you combine multiple alpha passes with premul set in the first combination, you have to not set premul in the final combination node (or something like that) but there should only be one alpha material (the tree) being computed in the setup for this scene.
This looks great, remindss me of home too much. Crit: Foreground post needs most texture attention and I don’t remember much fencing wire being that clean, just add some more procedural for variation there. And a hint of corrogation would be nice on the roofing sheets.
And where is the rusting stump jump plough? Gotta have some stinking old bit of junk laying around to skin yourself on or tear the radiator out of the ute!
Funny thing just lately I was gunna do one of these shed shots, now you’ve done it way better than I ever could. Love the internal slivers of light, hey a timelapse of the setting sun across the shed would be cool.
Great! I would thicken the foreground grass near its base. You shouldn’t be able to see green grass underneath it like that. Google Images “field grass”.
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Still plenty to do.
), that’s pretty nmad nice… Looks like a worn-out shed to me! And rendered in 2 minutes, that’s even better 
about all the :), but they’re just so :D…